Articles/Interviews

In between writing Flashman novels, George MacDonald Fraser spent thirty years as an "incurably star struck" screenwriter, working with the likes of Steve McQueen, Arnold Schwarzeneggar, Cubby Broccoli, Burt Lancaster, Federico Fellini and Oliver Reed. Now he shares his recollections of those encounters, providing a fascinating glimpse behind the scenes.

With the Tudors in Hungary

(excerpts from reminiscences of filming The Prince and the Pauper)

Back to Budapest, with Kathy, to see some shooting and do possible rewrites. Fleischer tells us over lunch that they have had considerable trouble with Olly Reed. It seems he got into a fight and finished up in a police cell; talk of deportation, but he was released on a promise of good behaviour. Then he had annoyed Fleischer by making a nuisance of himself at Mark Lester's eighteenth birthday party, and had provoked a new crisis by breaking the nose of a rugby-playing friend. The Gellert Hotel, on the Buda side of the Danube, refused to have him back, so he is now in our hotel, the Intercontinental, which is on the Pest bank. Apparently he changed hotels not by taking a taxi across one of the bridges, but by wading and swimming the river in the middle of the night, arriving in the Intercontinental lobby clad only in mud and waterweed. It says much for his persuasive powers that the management allowed him to stay instead of throwing him back. Possibly they were impressed by his line that his behaviour was nothing out of the way, and in England no one would have thought twice about it.

The Salkinds throw a big party for the unit in the Intercontinental ballroom. Kathy looks smashing in green silk, and I feel terribly conventional in my best suit among all these glamorous bohemians, but feel better when Oliver arrives in what is plainly his best suit, blue serge with waistcoat and club tie (black with thin orange stripes; who's that?) He is only slightly canned, accompanied by his wife and daughter, and carrying a bunch of bulrushes - possibly a souvenir of his Danube crossing - which he distributes ("reeds", get it?) Raquel Welch receives one graciously (so much for the tales that she and Oliver don't get on; mind you, I can't see them as close friends). As before, she struck me as being a nice, sensible woman, by no means a sex goddess. She is tired, after a day of interviews, and demands wearily: what do the press want of her? She doesn't like being photographed or questioned on set, which is hardly surprising, and obviously believes (not without justice, I dare say) that the newspapers hope to be able to report her as difficult and temperamental.

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Car to Sopron, where Olly sits smoking in the stocks waiting to be flogged, while Raquel Welch and David Hemmings, on horseback, rehearse with Olly cueing them. All do well, although she doesn't look at her best; I gather her father died recently and she has had distressing problems with hospital authorities.

Lunch with Kathy, Fleischer and Jack Cardiff. Chicken, caviare, cheese, grapes, peaches, vacuum flask of coffee which comes out stone cold, and wasps everywhere. Jack and Dick laugh at the tailpieces and approve the new Abbey fight scene; Pierre objects that they can't re-dress the warehouse as Westminster because the owners have got 70 tons of cotton and 56 tons of beetroot which must be stored. Well, that's show business.

Back to the stocks, where Hungarian extras dressed as Tudor peasants stand sipping from Coke bottles while Nigel Wooll, ever the optimist, shouts: "Quiet, please! Okay, everyone, here we go! Start pelting!" A technician translates for the benefit of the mob, who hurl eggs, vegetables, etc. enthusiastically at the stocks-bound Olly. He bears it patiently, wincing nicely when they rehearse the flogging with a velvet whip, while Mark, protesting violently, is dragged away by constables. Small crisis when flogger hits Olly before Fleischer has given the signal, and is severely rebuked. Meanwhile Mark is being pursued by wasps, and vanishes, flapping and cursing.

To burn the witch or not? Much debate. I'm all for dropping it - if we want a U certificate and a Royal Command we'll have to. Fleischer happy to ditch it, fair enough.

B. H. Barry, the fight arranger, suggests a Mel Brooksish touch for the Abbey fight: Olly seizing Raquel, menacing her with dagger to hold guards at bay. I shoot it down gently, and cheer him up by telling him that two-handed swords are to be used in the scene, which delights him, and he is soon lost in two-handed sword dreams.

Kathy and I take Fleischer and Cardiff to dinner, meeting Olly on the way. He is fresh after his ordeal, and when someone remarks that a scene which took me a moment's typing gave him several long hours in the sun, trussed up, belaboured, and plastered with filth, he says happily: "Bing sings."*

* For those who may wonder what this means, in Bing Crosby musicals the scripts simply noted "Bing sings" - two words representing several minutes of screen time.

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To Pinewood with Fleischer to see the rough-cut. It seems that Olly took to turning up legless during the last two weeks in Budapest; once he had roared at Fleischer, explaining how he was going to do a fight scene, stabbing the air, flinging himself on the ground, and simply failing to register when Dick said: "But, Olly, we've shot that fight, remember?" Olly didn't, no doubt because he had been entirely gassed when he did it, plunging about and trying to kill everybody. Barry had had to scrap his carefully choreographed fight and ad-lib the whole thing, which looked suitably shambolic on screen.

Plainly booze is going to be the ruin of a fine but undisciplined actor. What makes it so painful is that Dick had golden opinions of Olly the actor before he saw Olly the drunk.

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"Not a Bad Bismarck, Was I?"

I worked on five films with Oliver Reed, but I didn't get to know him well. We weren't just of different generations, but of different worlds, and had little in common beyond our work. Yet with the possible exceptions of George C. Scott and Edward Fox, he was the most rewarding actor I ever wrote for, and one of the best. He is remembered chiefly as what is called, usually with admiration, a hell-raiser - though why anyone should admire a loud-mouthed, violent, drunken nuisance (which is all a hell-raiser is) I can't imagine. Oliver may have been all of that; I have seen him make an immortal ass of himself on television, and had well-documented accounts of his excesses from mutual acquaintances, but of his legendary aggression I had no personal experience. Eccentric behaviour, yes, but violence, no. And he could be, and often was, a perfect gentleman.

I can't recall my first sight of him on film, but I know he struck me as one of the ugliest men I'd ever seen, and when he was cast as Athos, with top billing in that astoundingly starry Musketeer cast, I was disappointed, especially as Heston had been mentioned for the part, before his inspired casting as Richelieu. My disappointment turned to alarm when I heard that during shooting in Spain Oliver had been arrested after a hotel brawl and dragged to the slammer by five policemen, roaring: "Leave me alone! I'm Athos of The Three Musketeers! I don't want any problems!" He escaped prosecution, but it was a worrying beginning.

However, doubt and disappointment didn't last five seconds after I had heard his first lines when the showing of the rough-cut took place at Twickenham. He had to say, with facetious sarcasm, that the gash on his arm was not a wound, but small-pox, and when the sycophantic surgeon agreed, to retort: "Don't pretend you would know one from the other, or that it would make any difference to your treatment if you did."

Not the easiest line for an actor to manage, as I'd known when I wrote it; Oliver rasped it out at speed with splendid throwaway contempt, and I felt that surge of delight that comes when you hear your words spoken far better than you thought they could be. (Good actors can send a writer out of the cinema convinced that he's a genius.)

I knew then that Lester had found the perfect Athos, and when I met Reed for the first time I thanked him for the way he'd handled those opening lines. Roy Kinnear, typically, couldn't resist adding: "He means the rest of your lines weren't so hot," but Oliver just smiled and said: "Thanks for the opportunity."

I did my best to give him the opportunity again in later films because it was such a pleasure to hear and watch him at work. He could always be relied on to give lines full value (and often more than they were worth), and he was blessed with that rare quality that is beyond mere acting: style. He had it by the bucket; Flynn and Fairbanks never swept a cloak or threw out a challenge with greater panache. On the Parkinson show he got his interviewer to deliver a "Musketeer line", and very well Parkinson did it; he had the best exemplar in the business.

When you know whom you're writing for, you obviously try to play to his strength. Olly had remarkable breath control, and frequently I deliberately gave him quite long passages rising to a crescendo, because he did them so well. He didn't always care for this; on one occasion, faced with a tirade, he complained to Dick Fleischer about "George adjective Fraser's adjective dialogue" being "too adjective much."

"Then don't say it," said cunning Fleischer, knowing that such a remark is about the most deflating thing an actor can hear, especially an actor without formal training. Oliver snarled - and once in front of the camera, said the speech perfectly.

He had the most menacing whisper in the business, and, unlike many whispers, it was always audible; he would vary it with sudden, unexpected roars, and took a special delight in pejoratives and insults which he could spit out - I recall him on location in Spain, bellowing with laughter as he rehearsed, with immense gusto, a line which he had to fling at Bob Todd (he of Benny Hill fame): "Take your damned summons and soak it in wine and choke on it, you time-serving pimp!" He brought the same energy to his action sequences, and I often felt a pang for the extras and stuntmen who got in his way when he was really motoring. He met his match on Royal Flash, in which he had to trade punches with Henry Cooper, who was playing John Gully, a champion of the Napoleonic era,* to Oliver's Bismarck. I wasn't present, but I understand that Oliver got ambitious until Cooper gave him what is technically known as "a sweetener", to calm him down.

* There had been a minor crisis when Equity had objected to Henry Cooper playing an acting rote, since he wasn't a member, but it was smoothed over and he gave an excellent performance.

That movie was the only film made from one of my Flashman books. Dick Lester directed my script, with Malcolm McDowell in the lead, Britt Ekland as the heroine, and Alan Bates as Oliver's assistant villain - the first time they had appeared together, I believe, since their notorious nude fight in Ken Russell's Women in Love. The supporting case included Alastair Sim in his penultimate film, and a number of minor players who have since become very big names, among them David Jason and, in a lovely two-minute cameo as a London policeman, Bob Hoskins.

It wasn't a box-office success, but Oliver was one of the best things in it, and was, as I discovered later, unusually proud of his performance - when we met again in Budapest he hailed me with a cry of "Not a bad Bismarck, was I?" and I still have a card bearing his sketch of a rapier and plumed hat labelled "Ath" and a top hat and moustache captioned "Bis", signed "Olly Reed". He sent it to me in Hollywood when he was working on Sting II and I on Octopussy, and it's a remarkably neat piece of work, considering that he did it, according to the messenger who brought it to me, in an advanced state of inebriation.

As I have already recounted, Hungary, where much of Prince and Pauper was shot, saw Oliver at his spectacular worst, brawling, boozing, being ejected from hotels and threatened with deportation, and wading the Danube by night. I have to say that it also saw him at his best, patient and cheerful during long and difficult days on set, a model diner in the hotel restaurant, at his most charming when I introduced him to Kathy, and showing no more than mild suspicion as he sat in the corner of the bar watching Fleischer and me conferring - the sight of writer and director together seems to unsettle actors, who probably think no good can come of it.

He was also on his best behaviour at the big party in Budapest, moderately elevated as the evening wore on, but not unpleasantly so, merely inviting passers-by to feel his biceps, airing what sounded like fluent French to a female hotel guest, reminding me again what a splendidly square-headed Bismarck he had been, that he was thirty-eight and fighting fit, and suddenly waxing confidential with dark hints that they (the press, the public, the gremlins?) seemed to think that he was over the hill and would be lucky to get the part of bloody Santa Claus next Christmas outside bloody Harrods.

"Just you wait - let 'em go to bloody Harrods next Christmas, get hold of bleeding Santa and whip off his beard, and what'll they find?" Explosive shout of laughter. "Bloody Steve McQueen!"

I gathered then that there was no love lost between him and McQueen, and this was confirmed by McQueen when I worked with him some months later on Taipan. There was a part which I thought Oliver would be right for, but Steve frowned and wrinkled his nose. "Ferdinand the Bull," he said. "You know why they call him that? Because he's always being put on his ass." Pause. "Matter of fact, I almost put him on his ass once myself."

The idea of McQueen, who was fairly slight in build and of no more than middle height, putting that hulking mass of muscle* on any part of its anatomy, was not worthy of comment, so I didn't. I have since been told that the reason for their mutual dislike was that Oliver had thrown up over Steve during a meeting in London, which might account for it, but I suspect that even if Oliver's internal economy had been under control they would still have been poles apart, the quiet, plain-spoken, pretty egotistical American, and the ebullient, beautifully accented Englishman. Thinking of them together, I have no difficulty understanding the events of 1776.

* Oliver certainly had an impressive physique, but I was told that when he managed to get hold of the shirt worn by Errol Flynn in the 1937 version of The Prince and the Pauper, he found to his astonishment that it was too big for him.

I had left Budapest before Oliver's final fall from grace, when he arrived on the set in a highly alcoholic condition, falling down and rolling on the floor. Fleischer was adamant that he would never work with him again, but knowing Dick I rather think he would have relented if the occasion had ever arisen.

Olly was not the only actor on Prince and Pauper with a drink problem. George C. Scott's appetite for the sauce was well known, and when he was cast as the Ruffler I received a hurried instruction to rewrite one of his scenes - this, I discovered later, was to ensure that he and Oliver would not be called on to perform together; some risks are just too great to run.

Ten years passed before I saw Oliver again - in the flesh, anyway. I watched him falling off couches and performing an ape-like dance on TV chat shows, and felt anger at the creeps who plainly had invited him to appear in the hope that he would make an idiot of himself. And then The Return of the Musketeers brought us together again, and on the Spanish locations he was back in his old uproariously good-natured form, bellowing with laughter as he was yanked up to dizzy heights and down again on a mobile platform, enacting a brawl in which he hurled stuntmen about with rare abandon, and giving his lines all the force and energy of old. Off the set he was quieter and more placid than I had known him; perhaps a happy marriage and middle age were having their effect.

We had dinner one night at Pierre Spengler's house, with Billy Connolly and Pamela Stephenson (and their new baby in a cot hard by), and afterwards Oliver and I talked away in a corner -about Max Beerbohm's Zuleika Dobson, of which apparently he owned the rights (and supposed gloomily that I would be too expensive to write him a screenplay; I assured him that for friends I gave a discount), and Alf Gover's cricket school, which he had attended, and what might have been if Jack Cardiff had succeeded in getting Farnol's Jade of Destiny off the ground, and what was it like living on the Isle of Man - he was then on Guernsey, and feeling restless - and much else that I've forgotten; he was on his best behaviour again, entirely on the wagon, he assured me.

He declined a cigarette, saying he didn't smoke, and when I reminded him that he'd smoked between takes while seated in the stocks at Sopron, he said: "Sure it wasn't a joint?" That I couldn't tell him, but somehow our talk veered from the fatal potential of tobacco to the subject of death, on which we had a spirited argument, he taking exception to my fatalistic attitude. "Rage, rage against the fading of the light" was Olly's style - but then, it would be, wouldn't it?

Our conversation came back to me when I heard the news of his sudden death in Malta; it reached me in hospital, where I was recovering from a heart attack of my own. At such times one naturally conjures up memories: I saw him again, sweeping his Musketeer cloak round his shoulders and telling Frank Finlay to "kill the fellow and come after us"; sitting, sad and heavy, with Michael York, intoning in that beautiful voice "There was a man once ..."; pronouncing sentence of death on Faye Dunaway with a sudden catch in his throat; bellowing a welcome with that gleaming grin through his beard when we met again in Spain - and our final meeting, at the Return of the Musketeers premiere, when he told me he was making Treasure Island with Charlton Heston: "I'm playing Billy Bones, playing him as a Jock, what d'you think?" I said I was sure Stevenson would have had no objection.

And for some reason his last words to me after the premiere have stuck in my memory: "Right, George, you know where the sausage rolls are?" before the photographers hauled him away to pose, bearded and beaming and slightly dishevelled.

I was lucky to get the chance to write parts for him; very lucky indeed. He was a remarkable screen presence, and among those for whom I've been privileged to write, he ranks with any, Heston, Harrison, Scott, Lee, Brando, and the rest.

Last thought: if he had been born twenty years earlier, what a war he might have had, for he was the very marrow of those mad, outrageous, insubordinate subalterns one encountered now and then in the forties, wild men frequently in trouble, admired almost to worship by their platoons who thought them hell of a fellows, bull-at-a-gate reckless in the hour of battle, tolerated by an Army that knew when it was well off and when to turn a blind eye, and all too often ending up as names carved in marble. I think Oliver might have been such a one; in his own words, he was true blue.