Articles/Interviews

In Britain in the mid nineties, a reaction against political correctness - which, often in its most naive, fundamental and humourless form, had been dominating a great deal of popular culture for ten years or more - had its mainstream beginnings in a new type of men's magazine, led by Loaded. Loaded and its imitators were successful in swiftly ushering into the nation's psyche a new, iconic brand of male irresponsibility, championing as they did the delights of boozing, football and pornography. And by challenging the prescriptive manacles of political correctness, Loaded effectively kick-started the redefinition of young male culture in Britain. Before long, a new term for all this was coined: 'lad culture.'

In those early months, with its tongue firmly in its cheek, 'laddism' was a healthy and much needed attack on the 'right-on' generation of graduates who were dominating the UK media. But soon lad culture itself began to get out of hand. As it seeped into television programming and commercials, and wove its way through offices, colleges and sports clubs, its irony was somehow lost, and it soon began to be tainted by the antiquated misogyny and homophobia that political correctness and sought to combat in the first place.

In the atmosphere of this misdirected machismo, Oliver Reed, who had made perhaps one decent film in twenty years, began to emerge as an anti-hero for a new generation of men. Despite ongoing press disapproval and middle-England harrumphing over his lager-driven off-set antics, shameless misogyny and chaotic brawling, Reed was now someone to be viewed with a smirking affection, someone to be forgiven almost anything, someone to emulate on a 'weekend bender with the boys'. And although none of this helped his film career, there is no doubt that Oliver Reed was as famous in Britain in the last years of his life as he had been in his acting heyday. The tragic thing about all of it was this fame rested on a handful of drunken TV appearances, and not on any worthwhile film roles.

On the ITV chat show Aspel and Company in 1986, Reed had staggered on, drunk and dishevelled, clutching a jug of what could have been vodka and orange. After a brief conversation that made no sense at all, he took to the stage and proceeded to growl the chorus of I'm A Wild One - complete with spastic gyrations - as the bemused backing band tried to keep up with him.

Several weeks later, in the US, Reed was in turn menacing, incomprehensible and downright surreal on Late Night with David Letterman. Asked about his drinking, the actor veered manically into a gibberish soliloquy about his diet: "I'm taking a high quantity, high porcelain diet. I drink a lot of cups, coffee cups. And I eat a lot of plates." By the time the show broke for a commercial break, Reed was shouting like a man possessed and Letterman looked scared for his life.

Notoriously, on the late night show, After Dark, in 1991, in what was clearly a recipe for disaster, Reed was invited to discuss 'Do men have to be violent?' with a group that included an American feminist, a military historian, a noted anthropologist and the daughter of a high profile mob boss. Broadcast live around midnight, After Dark's premise was to assemble a disparate group of social commentators, sit them in armchairs in a comfy, darkened studio - access to a bar included - and have them talk freely about their chosen subject until the early hours of the morning.

Reed kicked off the proceedings by announcing that "a woman's role in society depends on whether she wants to get shafted", and things got worse from there. As the actor's language, general offensiveness and intimidation of the other guests intensified, the show's broadcaster, Channel 4, decided to pull it from the air midway through, and presented in its place an unscheduled showing of a 1950s documentary on coal mining. The programme did come back on air twenty or so minutes later, however, just in time to see the now paralytic Reed planting a sloppy kiss on the cheek of the deeply unimpressed feminist. Reed ended the intellectual discussion by shouting at the show's extremely anxious crew: "Look, I'll put my plonker on the table if you don't give me a plate of mushy peas!"

Unsurprisingly, these increasingly absurd episodes were to strike a chord with the new generation of lads. Lad culture was essentially about wanting to conform, to be liked by mates, to be recognised and appreciated as a 'lager lout,' despite wearing a suit and holding down a responsible job, and despite having been brought up, more often than not, in safe suburban comfort by middle class parents. New lads would, in truth, would have run a mile from true subversiveness. And deep down, Reed shared these exact sentiments. His behaviour was fuelled by an insecure desire to impress 'the boys', to be accepted as a genuine hellraiser. But by his late forties the drinking and the brawling had got the better of him. Both Reed and his public seemed to have forgotten what he'd actually been good at in the first place.

An icon to pub culture he may have become, but Reed actually began life well-spoken and well-connected. Despite his parents' marriage break down as a child, young Oliver was brought up cocooned by various female relatives and a succession of holiday nannies. Acting was in the child's blood. Reed's grandfather had been the actor-manager Sir Henry Beerbohm Tree, a high profile Victorian performer who had gone on to found the world-renowned Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA). And little Oliver was also fortunate enough to call 'Uncle' one of Britain's greatest post-war filmmakers, Sir Carol Reed.

Although Oliver did go off the rails in his late teens, getting into fights in pubs and spending time in menial jobs, the call of the acting profession was inevitable. And although he spent a good few years hawking himself around the industry as an extra, success came pretty early. At twenty-three, Reed had secured his first major role - in Hammer's Curse of the Werewolf (1961).

Reed's apprenticeship with Hammer was just one of a number of shrewd and fortuitous partnerships that the actor forged. Hammer kept Reed largely on the sidelines, but the half a dozen B-movies they gave him helped him to hone his screen craft. After Hammer, Reed teamed with the up-and-coming Michael Winner and began to show versatility, star quality and fashionably flawed heroism in a sequence of films that probably represent the best work of Winner's career: The System (1964), The Jokers (1966), I'll Never Forget What's'isname (1967) and Hannibal Brooks (1968). The actor then became an 'overnight' international star when his Uncle Carol, satisfied that his nephew had gained enough experience, cast him in the lavish Oliver! (1968), the last of the great Oscar-winning musicals of the sixties.

But it was with Ken Russell that Reed broke real ground as a leading man. On television, he brought a Byronic sensuality and an impetuous magnetism to his role of the composer in Russell's The Debussy Film (BBC 1966). In Women in Love (1969), he famously wrestled naked with Alan Bates in a scene that was unprecedented in mainstream cinema in its full-frontal frankness and audacious homo-eroticism, and which helped to further break down the walls of film censorship in Britain. And in the remarkable, hysterical and demonically decadent The Devils (1971), Reed held together a riotous feast of shrieking pyrotechnics with a performance of such control, emotion, pain and sensitivity that the scenes of his torture are still difficult to watch thirty years on.

As much as he liked to be one of the boys, Reed's errant socialising did not affect the trajectory of his first decade as a film star, and it is during this time that he proved himself to be Britain's most exhilarating box office draw. At his peak, regardless of nepotism or good connections, Reed had a screen presence that surpassed that of his British contemporaries and placed him in a class of his own. Exuding quiet danger, or a winning charm, he could portray malevolent villainy, heroic integrity, lower class boorishness, high class refinement, worthy disillusionment, cockiness, charisma and churlishness with equal aplomb.

As the seventies started, Reed was Britain's most highly paid actor. He held onto this pole position with hard, uncompromising films such as Douglas Hickox's Sitting Target (1972) and popular fodder with a fashionable edge: The Three Musketeers (1973), The Four Musketeers (1974), Tommy (1975).

He could have been more famous still. In 1969, Reed was considered for James Bond after Sean Connery had departed, somewhat acrimoniously, from the franchise. It may be difficult to equate the later rambling, grizzled chat show figure with Fleming's suave killing machine, but there is no doubt that at the time Reed could have both looked and played the part. And he could have deepened Connery's dark appeal, matched his virility, and infused Bond with more of the ruthless danger of the original novels. But it never transpired. Reed, it was reported, lost out on Bond for the reason that he was too famous already; his screen persona was too well known.

The real reason for Reed losing out on Bond, it has been speculated, has more to do with the actor's increasingly public bad behaviour, not least his highly visible extra-marital affair with a ballet dancer, Jacqui Daryl (for whom he eventually left his wife.). It seems that, as soon as his career really began, Reed's damaging reputation for off-screen mischief had already taken a foothold in the nation's consciousness. Nevertheless, it is likely that Reed would have soon grown tired of the role of Bond (although not as quickly as Lazenby did), and would have felt constrained by any long-term commitment to the character.

By 1975, Reed's level of fame could not be sustained by living and working in Britain. The declining film industry and Draconian income tax levy were making it impossible for a star of his magnitude to remain in the country and prosper. Unsurprisingly, this was a time of A-list movie star exodus. Michael Caine, Peter Sellers, Sean Connery - all left UK shores for Spain or Switzerland or on the Continent. Reed, however, fearful of losing his drinking mates and afternoon sessions in the pub, and distrustful of the Hollywood hierarchy, refused to budge.

It wasn't as if he hadn't had offers. According to his biographer, Reed turned down both The Sting (1973) and Jaws (1975) - both roles going to Robert Shaw and consolidating Shaw's international stardom. (Shaw's biographer's version, not surprisingly, differs from this, claiming that Shaw was first choice for both parts.) But, as Reed and his close friends would have known themselves, Oliver would not have been able to play the Hollywood game. The etiquette pervading Hollywood stardom is far more conservative than the scandal sheets would have us believe. Reed would never have toed the studio line, or showed the correct level of deference to the right people.

But by opting to say in Britain, Reed effectively threw away the level of movie stardom he had been enjoying. From 1976, the quality of the films he appeared in plunged dramatically, and his roles within them quickly fell from leading man to character support: Burnt Offerings (1976), The Prince and the Pauper (1977), The Class of Miss McMichael (1978), Venom (1981), Condorman (1981). That he remained busy is arguable, but not one of these films was worth five minutes of The Devils or Women in Love. In the space of a few years, Reed turned from Britain's biggest film star to little more than a jobbing actor.

It was also during this time that Reed's reputation as an untamed, insatiable hellraiser began to run riot. He wasn't the first, and he won't be the last, but Reed raised hell so consistently, so predictably and so destructively that people started to recoil from him. All this may have become cheerful anecdotal fodder if Reed had been an amusing drunk - but, in essence, he wasn't. There is something of a raucous charm to the debauched exploits of George Best or Peter Cook or Keith Moon; there is something gently affecting about the tipsy misadventures of Dean Martin or David Niven. But Reed's drunkenness unleashed a cold-eyed, vicious, paranoid animal. Shy, quiet and unassuming when sober, Reed when drunk became a volatile, unpredictable, intimidating monster. Even his friend Michael Winner commented: "There was no greater pendulum swing in any human being that I've ever met than Oliver Reed sober to Oliver Reed drunk."

Of course, there is a wealth of funny stories arising from Reed's inebriation. There is the time he arrived at Galway airport lying on the baggage conveyor; the time he punched out the lights in his kitchen because he couldn't find the switch; the time he shed his clothes at a swanky Madrid hotel, climbed into the giant aquarium and started swallowing goldfish whole; the time he dived out of a first-floor window into the swimming pool; the time he welcomed his daughter's German boyfriend into his house, having especially festooned it Union Jacks ...

Entertaining journalist Jane Parsons and her fianc� over Sunday lunch in a busy pub, Reed turned from exquisite charmer to enraged monster over the course of a few drinks, starting with offensive potshots at Parsons' 'crap' engagement ring and steel-eyed taunts of "you're just common fucking rubbish... you're a nobody", leaving his guests embarrassed, humiliated and not a little scared. Reed's sister-in-law later confirmed that Oliver "didn't like women to contradict him. If they did he would get very abusive and very nasty. In that situation he was a very frightening man."

Such schizophrenic turnabouts in Reed's behaviour may have been more tolerable if they hadn't been reinforced by the actor's powerful physical presence. For when the danger, the menace and the sneering paranoia took hold after a few bottles, Reed could become, by all accounts, a terrifying force.

After his friend Stephen Ford had told him a few home truths one time, Reed hurled him into a bed of thorns. Ford was wearing only swimming trunks. Reed then continued to chase him almost off a cliff. After they made up, Ford had his cuts attended to in the bathroom by Reed's then partner, only to set the actor off again with accusations of "What are you doing with my woman? Fuck you, Ford! Come on out!"

More damagingly, a drinking bout with his long-time minder, Reg Prince, got out of hand when, according to Prince, Reed threw him off a restaurant balcony, severely damaging his spine. Prince, however, was not exactly the shy retiring type himself, and the subsequent litigation failed to prove what had actually happened that night. Nevertheless, the incident saw a close, decade-long friendship come to an end.

What is most dismaying about Reed's 'dark side' is that it was so totally at odds with the professional and conscientiously polite persona he projected when sober. As with Dr Jekyll and his evil potion, the demon drink had the same effect on Reed. The journalist Denis Meikle described this revealingly after a 1992 trip to Reed's then home, in Guernsey, to interview the actor about his Hammer days.

During the afternoon, Reed was courtesy itself, generously furnishing the visiting interviewer with comprehensive and expansive recollections of his early days as a film actor. Meikle commented that the actor was "complimentary, eager to please, and respondent to questions with patience and in that soft mellifluous tone of voice that was as famous as his face."

So impressed was the interviewer that he offered to meet up with Reed and his wife later to buy them a drink. As soon as they reconvened, however, Meikle sensed he was in the presence of a different man. With them "came a disturbing air," the writer commented, "as though all of us had inadvertently woken to find ourselves in the middle of a film by David Lynch." Reed had been drinking all afternoon, and Meikle noted, was now in the process of transforming from courteous Oliver into hellraising 'Ollie'.

The interviewer put up his guard and prepared to spend the rest of the evening on tenterhooks. He noticed that Reed's young second wife, Josephine, sat passively at her husband's side. "In his present mood, Oliver required to be appeased, pandered to and obeyed. The consequences of failure to do so risked a wrath that was more than capable of sweeping all that was before it..." he wrote.

Reed's mood continued to swing from buoyant to aggressive, and the interviewer and his wife found themselves going back, with an entourage of hangers-on, to Reed's own custom-built 'English pub'. It was here that Meikle noticed that "the metamorphosis from man to animal was now complete." Reed kicked off the proceedings by stabbing a hunting knife into the bar, inches away from the interviewers forearm, and then staring him out like a possessed predator stalking his prey. The evening descended from there. Some time later, when Reed noticed Meikle's pregnant wife inadvertently yawn, he was outraged, and had the couple forcefully ejected from the house.

Meikle summed up his meeting with the star thus: "The man I met in 1992 was no jovial, fun-loving, one-of-the-boys, as his contemporaries would like to have it. He was an alcoholic, pure and simple... [He] was not a figure of fun... He was a tragic figure, who destroyed himself utterly."

Indeed, in the last years of his life, Reed seemed to have alienated the rest of the film industry with his behaviour. His Oliver! co-star Mark Lester noticed that, after a recording of the TV show This is Your Life, on which Lester and Reed were among the guests celebrating Ron Moody's career, Reed stood alone in the bar, clearly aware but not at all fazed that nobody wanted anything to do with him. Lee Evans noticed the same thing when working with Reed on Funny Bones (1995). More damagingly, producers and directors were becoming less prepared to take a risk on Reed's destructive off-set behaviour.

The actor's reputation wasn't helped when he was fired from the multi-million dollar Renny Harlin/Geena Davis romp, Cutthroat Island (1995), before filming had even begun. Reportedly, during an introductory dinner with the film's executives and cast members, Reed managed to offend a number of key people - Geena Davis included - by dropping his pants to show off the eagle's talons he had tattooed on his penis. The next day, unable to remember what he had actually done, Reed was flown home from the set as quickly as he had arrived, knowing only that he had been fired for 'inappropriate behaviour relating to alcohol'.

Reed's career stumbled on with some obscure German movies and one more collaboration with Michael Winner - the execrable Parting Shots (1998) - and it looked set to collapse in on itself when he was offered a redemptive, and rather lucrative, role in Ridley Scott's Gladiator. However, Scott did not cast Reed without interviewing the star three times and making him read - such was the risk of employing and unpredictable personality.

But Reed did get the role and, in March 1999, set off for Valletta, Malta, to shoot his scenes for the $120 million movie. True to form, he immediately sought out the most inviting bars, and rarely spent less that �150 a time in them.

The Malta shoot went without too much incident, until May 2, when Reed and his wife Josephine stopped of at an English-style pub for a lunchtime tipple. Starting on strong German beer, Reed was excited by the arrival of a part of sailors, whereupon he stood up and announced: "Black rum all round!" By 2,30pm, according to Reed's biographer, Oliver had downed twelve doubles measures of Jamaican rum on top of the eight bottles of German beer he had had before the sailors arrived. Shortly after ordering a whisky, the actor fell forward and began breathing erratically. An ambulance arrived and rushed him to St Luke's Hospital, where, after fifteen minutes of trying to revive his arrested heart, Oliver Reed was pronounced dead. He was sixty-one.

Nobody was particularly surprised that Reed died this way. In fact, that he had reached sixty-one seemed something of an achievement. But what did emerge in the newspaper reports and obituaries in the weeks that followed his death was as sense of sadness over a career sacrificed to hellraising, a lament for the wasted years. Ridley Scott paid the actor a great tribute by redeeming his Gladiator character's role (formerly a 'baddie') and shooting extra scenes utilising a body double, out-take footage and computer-generated imagery, at a reported cost of $2 million. Had Reed lived, however, his character might not have needed redeeming to kick-start his career again, as Gladiator became, of course, a huge hit. But Reed's touched-up performance became his most significant screen appearance since Castaway in 1986 - it even landed him a posthumous Oscar nomination.

Whether Reed, had he lived, would have successfully harnessed this career revival or not is arguable. He may have slipped back into the all-night drinking sessions at his local pub and continued to finance them with the kind of garbage he had been walking through for the last twenty years. He may have seized the moment and begun to make the big important films he had eschewed in the mid seventies. But whatever direction his life might otherwise have taken, with a drink at hand, Oliver Reed's Mr Hyde would never have been too far away.