Articles/Interviews

Look out - OLIVER REED, Britain's Favourite Thug, is on the booze and the big screen again, returning to stardom in Nic Roeg's new CASTAWAY. Reedophile DAVID CHEAL talked to the granddaddy of Lads.

EVERYTHING you've ever read about Oliver Reed is true. The gossip column tales of boozing, brawling and horseplay are, he insists, one hundred percent accurate. For once, the public image is consistent with the reality, and he doesn't deny the stories of his rampages: 'Why should I deny something that's true?'

And Ollie can always be relied on to misbehave himself.

Who could forget his recent performance on The Des O'Connor Show? Good old Des was midway through interviewing Ollie and popped a question which no chat-show host in his right mind would ask Oliver Reed during family viewing time.

'I hear,' said Des, 'that you've got a tattoo on a particular part of your anatomy.'

Ollie nodded, grinning wickedly.

Now it's pretty common knowledge that Oliver Reed has a tattoo on a particular part of his anatomy, but just in case some his audience weren't in the know, Des pressed on with this suicidal line of questioning.

'Where is it?', he asked, presumably expecting some coy, carefully-worded reply.

'It's on my cock,' said Ollie, to the amusement of the audience and the white-faced horror of Des.

And Ollie's capacity for booze seems limitless. Ask him what he drinks, and he'll say 'anything that anyone's got the best of' - he's not always so discriminating, and one of his favourite tipples is an ice-bucket full of everything behind the bar.

There've been unnerving rumours that Ollie's carrying a grudge against all journalists, after one hack insulted his young wife Josephine (Fleet Street calls her his 'child bride'). The journalist in question ended up in hospital.

But when I met Ollie in his Surrey hotel to discuss his role in Nic Roeg's new film Castaway, this giant of a man was going through a quiet patch, reclining comfortably in a corner of the bar, smiling benignly, dressed in jeans and a brightly-coloured pullover, wearing an intellectual pair of spectacles. He looked wrinkled, grey, a little overweight, but happy.

He shook my hand, almost suffocating me under a cloud of gin fumes which emerged from his mouth along with a breathy 'How do you do?'

He sent his brother/minder/manager David to the bar for 'drinkies' (G&T), and we settled down. Ollie, 48, speaks in a quiet, husky voice which at times becomes a hoarse whisper; when he cracks a joke he bares his teeth and his eyes twinkle with glee.

Eighteen months ago Oliver Reed had reached a time in his life when, he says, he no longer needed to work for a living, provided he lived moderately and for not too long. He'd just moved into a house in Guernsey and was, he admits, enjoying the quiet country life and losing his enthusiasm for films.

'I decided I wouldn't work any more, that I would live on my capital and do sod all. But that didn't make me happy. So I considered buying a restaurant; then when someone uninteresting or undesirable came in I could just say 'I'm sorry but we're fully booked tonight' or 'The chef's got the vapours'. But then all my restaurateur friends were horrified at the prospect and started getting the vapours. Then I thought I'd become a publican, but all my publican friends were horrified and said 'you'll kill yourself'. Then I decided to work again, but I wasn't getting the parts I wanted. And that didn't make me happy.

So Ollie began to think seriously about early retirement. He could spend more time on the children's adventures he's writing; he could walk the cliffs and country lanes of Guernsey; he could do nothing. 'I'm very good at doing nothing,' he says. 'I could have a great time, taking the dogs for a walk, bullshitting my friends, getting drunk, listening to Radio Four.'

Then two things happened. First, he became involved in a plan to film Castaway, Lucy Irvine's true account of the adventures and tribulations she experienced with Gerald Kingsland on a tiny tropical island off the north coast of Australia.

Lucy and Kingsland met through an ad which he placed in a London listings magazine, asking for a 'wife' to accompany him for a year on a desert island. Lucy, a demure but confused young woman, gave up her job with the Inland Revenue to be alone with Kingsland on the island - and when they got there, she refused, for a long time, to have sex.

Few blame her; Kingsland, as Lucy paints him, was a likeable but insensitive sort of bloke who only wanted to slump under a coconut tree with a cup of tea and a roll-up. But the no-sex rule was bad news for him, and he reacted with understandable bewilderment and frustration.

If ever a part was made for Oliver Reed, this was it.

There were several abortive attempts to get the project off the ground, and then something else happened: Reed was offered a part in Paul Mayersberg's film Captive. It was scriptwriter Mayersberg's first film as a director, and Reed was grabbed by his innocent enthusiasm.

'He was squirming with excitement at some of the things that were happening on the set, maybe a little bit of light, or a view, or the way somebody moved. So I started looking at things through a baby's eyes again.'

The critical consensus was that Reed's performance in Captive was the highlight of an otherwise dreary thriller. And when Castaway finally got off the ground, Oliver Reed was back.

Reed gives one of the great performances of his career as Gerald Kingsland in Castaway, a part for which he had to suffer the humiliation of having his pubic hair dyed ginger. He's never met Kingsland, but regards him with enormous respect and affection.

'What have I got in common with him? Everything. I love everything about him. I think it's a jolly good idea to go off to a desert island with a very pretty girl who's going to take her clothes off, and live on coconuts and sweetmeats and fish. The whole ideology of his way of life is one that I can clutch to my bosom.'

And he did meet Lucy Irvine briefly when Castaway was showing at last year's London Film Festival.

'I demanded to sit next to her and nobody else. I held her hand throughout the show. I think I fell in love with her; I wanted to write to her to tell her how pleasant it was to hold her hand and how tolerant she was to have held on to what must have become a rather sticky hand.'

But Ollie didn't read her book, or Kingsland's version of events, The Islander - just the script.

'I feel very strongly that an actor is only as good as his script. I don't know what makes that character; all I could do was to follow the script. I can't read into the script that which is not written. I did read Runaway (Lucy's autobiography) after the film, and had I read that before then my attitude toward Lucy would have been different, because I would have understood frigidity more.'

'Society screwed her up. To go off with a bunch of bikers when you're underage like that, going off and getting balled, I don't think you can have a great deal of trust in people.' One of the great mysteries of Castaway is what went wrong with this strange relationship and why Lucy 'welshed on the sex', as Ollie puts it. He's as puzzled as anyone.

'I'm as much an adventurer, an explorer in this script as the audience are. Amanda Donohoe, who plays Lucy, and I were at an Italian press conference and they asked su what we would have done differently. I said I wouldn't have said 'please' as often, and Amanda said she wouldn't have said 'no' as often. As to why she said 'no' as often as she did, maybe Gerald wasn't what she expected him to be.'

'She wanted this great homemaker, and all he wanted to do was to jump on a desert island and get his shag out and roll his own sitting under a coconut palm, make love to a young girl with no clothes on, and she wanted this great condominium-apartment hut. And then of course they both got very ill.

Castaway was, by his own reckoning, Oliver Reed's 65th film ('I haven't seen all of them'); it's been a long career, with highlights like Ken Russell's Women In Love and The Devils and his brilliant Bill Sikes in Oliver!. Not bad for a man who's never had an acting lesson in his life, who learned how to act in the Army, 'lying to the sergeant'.

But there's been a lot of dross, too, especially during his early Hammer days. His worst film, he says, was a 1965 Hammer production, The Brigand Of Kandahar.

'It used and awful lot of library stock! But on the other hand, Hammer films taught me my craft. It was like training in rep - I made four films a year, back to back, for three years. They were very happy, formative times.'

Castaway was Reed's first film under director Nicolas Roeg; the experience was, he whispers over the top of his G&T glass, 'marvellous'.

'I met him to talk about the film in a restaurant over these black, shiny tables. I hadn't seen him in donkey's years, since he'd lit a film I was in for Michael Winner back in the sixties. We started talking about Bye Bye Blackbird, which was a song we used to hum to each other while trying to persuade young ladies to take their clothes off. We sniggered over that like a couple of schoolchildren till the coffee came and I though, 'If it does get off the ground I'd like to be involved'.

'Roeg is a great observer. He does a great deal of research on location; he knows exactly where he's going to shoot. He doesn't know how he's going to shoot though. He'll arrive at the location and say. 'Well, this is the stage'. And you'll do a scene and he'll say, 'Do you think he'd be as aggressive about that line?', whereas Ken Russell would say 'We'll go again', and he won't say why. Roeg is not a director who's hard and fast.'

Roeg's Castaway could give a boost to Oliver Reed's flagging career ('very few interesting films come my way,' he admits). But though it's one of his more 'serious' movies, he'll continue to take roles other actors wouldn't touch with a boom mike. Ollie's playing a slave-driver in Dragonard, now shooting in the West Indies; ask him what he looks for in a part, and he replies, smirking, 'money'.

David Reed gets another round of drinkies in, and Ollie tells me about a wicked little prank he wanted to play on Josephine, who'd followed him over from Guernsey.

'Just before she arrived I was going to buy some knickers and perfume, and leave the tights and knickers lying around the hotel room and spray the perfume everywhere, you know. But the kicker shop wasn't quite open.'

Then he tells me something to confirm his reputation as a full-blown lad, about how the previous night he and his brother had got drunk (albeit on G&Ts and Chablais...) and ended up going out and having a curry, and how they rounded off the night with several rounds of Indian Angels - sickly sounding mixtures of Tia Maria and cream.

And he didn't even get a hangover.