Articles/Interviews

Travellers from Victoria to Dorking recently witnessed an astonishing tightening up of security. A burly uniformed officer, carrying postcards of the Royal Family and Union Jacks, strode officially through the compartments asking passengers to identify their bags an briefcases saying, "That's not a bomb in there, is it?" Everyone enjoyed themselves hugely, pocketed the postcards which the officer had handed out and continued their journey secure in the knowledge that British Rail was taking no chances.

The officer, who had just collected his uniform from Bremans, the theatrical costumiers, tells the story with enormous relish. Ladies and gentleman, Oliver Reed is back in town. Today he sits in his local pub drinking pink vodka (the joys of beer have been discarded reluctantly because of the effect on his waistline), eating toasted cheese and onion sandwiches, telling outrageous stories and generally proving the conclusion I reached some time ago: that he is a rare life-force refreshing, exhausting and unique.

He has just returned from Hollywood where he made Burnt Offering for Dan Curtis with Bette Davis and Karen Black. It was his first working visit and one which appears to have gone well, except for minor disturbances which provided entertainment for television audiences (when Shelly Winters poured a whisky over his head following a discussion on Women's Lib), headaches for hotel managers (the nightly game of rugby conducted in the corridors), panic for Richard Harris (the challenge of a meeting with his arch-rival) and heartache for Miss Davis (who complained to "Newsweek").

"The Americans were amazing and super," says Oliver. "They used to call me a bear with a sore head but I decided to ignore that kind of remark." Years ago when Oliver's career began to accelerate he was advised to go to America. It was advice he chose not to take. "I regret most things in my life but the projects I was offered at that time were not the right vehicles for me. I was offered alternative work here which was more interesting. In fact I wasn't offered all that amount of work, one's got to be perfectly honest about that. Anyway the Americans were getting their house tidy and they had their own anti-heroes, they didn't need to import British anti-heroes."

The situation is now reversed. To Oliver's lasting sadness the British film industry is unable to offer him work so he must gravitate to places where the work is: America, Mexico, wherever. Before Christmas he goes to Mexico to work with Lee Marvin on a film called Great Scout and Cathouse Thursday. A confrontation? "Oh no, I think it will be a love affair. I think we'll get on very well." He was to have made The New Spartans for Jack Starrett before he went but, after nine days of shooting, the film now looks as though it has collapsed. "I had a moustache for the film and, when my instinct told me it wasn't going to go, I shaved off half the moustache." Today the whole moustache has disappeared.

In common with every actor, Oliver has experienced before the disappointment of projects which never reach fruition, but it is his first experience of a film closing while in production. "It's sad, of course it's sad. Death is always sad. But that's show business, I'm very philosophical. That's something that's come over the years because, when I first started acting in the 50's films always used to go and the industry was quite healthy. You were told the money you would get, and you knew the money you would get, and you knew the money would be there. I grew up through a tough school, as an extra, I've made good films and bad films and a film closing is a sadness, but one I can live with. Life is good, life is always good."

He would happily work in England, if there was work. "Unfortunately the situation is that the work is abroad. It has always been my lament that the film industry in this country is in dire straits. We can't really talk about it because there is no film industry. I wouldn't ever leave for tax reasons, although because of the amount of tax I have to pay to continue living in this country, I have very little left to finance films myself. I'm left with very little - that's why I'm wearing American boots, American trousers, an American jacket and an English shirt. That's all I've got left - my shirt. And they'll want that soon."

"I was driving through the countryside looking at the trees. A sunny day, an English autumn. If I decided to move away from England I could give myself and immediate 37 per cent rise, but I looked at the trees and said, 'My God, that's worth more than 37 per cent.'" You believe him because you know his concern about conservation. What irks him now is the prevalent attitude of knocking success.

"I remember that day when people used to applaud a chap because he well, but these days people spit on enthusiasm and success. I'm not really into that: I'm still one of those people who will applaud the success of anybody. In the same way I will applaud Jaws or any film that causes a cinematic revolution. I applaud every film that is a success and deplore every cinema that closes. I would only leave this country if I felt that people were attacking me because I have horses and a large house which I'm trying to renovate. My interests are trees and flowers and horses and pubs and staying in this country. If that were threatened, I think it would be incorrect of me not to notice what was happening."

His work output is prodigious: since I saw him last year Tommy has swept out on an enthusiastic tide, Royal Flash has been made and released, and he has made The Sell Out in Israel, Burnt Offering in America and found a spare five minutes for a walk-on part in Lisztomania. Filming in Israel delighted him: for one thing it gave him the chance of working with Richard Widmark, for another he got on well with the director, Peter Collinson. "The first time I worked for him was on a film the title of which I chose to forget, and we didn't get on very well. Hopefully The Sell Out will be interesting and it was and extraordinary experience filming in Jerusalem. I adored the country; we used to visit the bazaars and it was like living with Christ, or Orson Welles."

Wherever Oliver works his entourage goes with him. "I have the advantage of going to interesting places and living in interesting environments and it seems to me incorrect if I didn't share that with some of my friends. I'm fortunate enough to earn a little bread and I believe I should share that with my friends. They have the same sense of humour I have and that is important because it reminds me of home. Otherwise you'd be a foreigner in someone else's country."

The walk-on in Lisztomania was all part of his plan to appear in every Ken Russell film (he also had a walk-on in Mahler). "He's writing a part for me in Valentino and he was heard to say in Los Angeles, 'I don't know what to do - Oliver Reed is too old.'" It now looks as though Russell will direct The Offering, a property Oliver has owned for many years, which tells the story of the knights who murdered Thomas Becket. The film goes into production in the autumn of 1976. "Ken has re-written the script," Oliver says. "He likes to rewrite - if you asked him to make the like of Jesus, he'd re-write The Bible. He's put in a few nuns and monks because he didn't like the fact that a goose's head was chopped off, so he's gone for a bit of flagellation..." Roars of laughter all round.

Between now and The Offering Oliver will make the film in Mexico with Lee Marvin and another in Hungary with either Peter O'Toole or Richard Burton. "I like to have a few projects on the go. If you do that and two of them fall down that's quite good. At least I work."

He mulls over the limitations of being an English actor. "We're not in vogue." He says. "I'm confined a lot because I'm an Englishman: people abroad expect Englishmen to talk like me and look like my elder brother, or Anthony Eden or David Niven. That's something my generation of actors has had to live down. People accept the pop world - half naked with long hair, but nobody at the moment really want to see how Englishmen behave. I'm not sure than in Japan or America people will understand the character I played in Tommy, for instance. It was fun, but it was a caricature. I hope it comes across, but I'm certain that in some places it's going to be missed."

Always unexpected in his performances, he countered the general camping-up in Royal Flash by playing Bismarck straight. "Nobody really knew what I was doing, thank God, otherwise they might have tried to get in the know. In The New Spartans I was to have played a colonel and everybody else was taking themselves quite seriously while I was playing the colonel very comic and slapstick. Even the director didn't quite understand what I was doing..."

Praise for his recent performances brings a sunny self-mocking retort: "I'm a very good actor. I told Roderick Mann years ago that I was Mr England and that when they start kicking me, they kill the British Film Industry. Who else is left here?" he asks, suddenly serious. "Where are they? They're all off abroad. And here I am, still in the old pub."

He's a man of contrast, a man's man who is always utterly courteous and charming to women. Something of a swinger himself, but when I mention a new actress who is herself a swinger, he becomes reflective. "Oh, I don't really like swingers," he says. "I like quiet, gentle girls who haven't had many affairs." Notoriety attaches to him wherever he goes and whatever he does. His extravagant behaviour has stimulated newspaper headlines, but it could be an unintentioned strategy: his is the name you are the most likely to remember. In the final analysis the excesses may blunt the fact that he is a very fine actor, a professional.

At the time when Burt Reynolds did his nude centrefold for Cosmopolitan Oliver turned down a similar opportunity. "I love the thought of a lot of girls masturbating over a nude picture of me. I find that fairly sexy, but having done it in Women In Love I didn't think it was right for me at the time. I was in Italy, going through my Italian stage and there was a press conference during which they asked me why I didn't pose. At one point I dropped my trousers and underpants although I covered up, and a woman in the front row asked me why, so I told here, 'Madam, I don't want to knock you out.' Later a picture appeared in a paper with the caption: 'Oliver Reed says this is my little jewel.' So you see, I'm always misquoted."

His ling running semi-serious feud with Richard Harris almost resulted in a meeting in America. "It's about time I came out in the open about that and say that I do admire very much some of his earlier films," he says gravely. "But I will never forgive him for not showing the talent he has. I think that most people destroy their talent in this business. You go round the world being treated like a parrot. The other day I walked up and enormous hill near my home because I thought I might be able to sweat out 'flu. There were a lot of people there and they started running towards me, shouting, 'It is, isn't it>' In order to recover privacy you wander around in some extraordinary places, behaving in an extraordinary manner simply to forget the reality of the rigorous discipline of having to know your lines, do a certain thing, wear a certain uniform, adhere to certain rules. I've never really left school."

But it is a rarified school allowing him the greatest luxury of all - being able never to open any post which arrives in brown envelopes. "For me that's the best thing. I know I'll have to pay for it eventually, but I can have somebody else to open the envelope. Of course, sometimes it might be a love letter, but usually it's the other kind..."