Articles/Interviews

Back in 1987, Oliver Reed is told by doctors to stop drinking or die. "I'd like to think I would be brave enough to drink myself into the grave," is his response. Twelve years later, he's arm-wrestling with sailors in a Maltese pub, having drunk £450 worth of spirits in just three hours. His powerful arms and chest begin to hurt. Thinking it's just the pain of too much wrestling, he sits breathless on the floor, still gulping from his tumbler of whiskey and cracking jokes. After a while, he drops his chin to his broad, sunburnt chest as if snoozing. His breath rasps. Underneath the white beard, his lips are turning blue. The heart attack takes almost an hour to kill him. Oliver Reed has drunk himself into the grave. It just took 12 years longer than he expected.

Robert Oliver Reed was born on 13 February 1938 in Wimbledon. His grandfather was the founder of RADA, Herbert Beerbohm Tree, and his uncle was the film director Sir Carol Reed. At boarding school he was considered a dunce, his dyslexia undiscovered until later, and was expelled 13 times. The only thing he was good at was sports, his huge stamina winning him trophies for rugby, boxing and cross-country running.

"He was so competitive," said Reed's younger brother Simon, "that even when my father asked him not to compete in more than four sports day events he came home carrying a bag with eight silver trophies and the police stopped him, thinking he was a burglar." Reed's father, a horse-racing journalist, ridiculed his son's sporting accomplishments, saying he was no better than a gorilla. Friends later suggested that anger at his father would be the dominant emotion of Reed's life.

He parted company from his parents when he was 17 and took jobs as a mortuary attendant, fairground boxer and bouncer at a Soho strip club. The long, twisted scar down the left side of his face was the result of a 1963 nightclub fracas in which he was hit with a broken beer bottle.

Perversely, it was the scars that gave Reed his break in movies. In the early 1960s he'd been scraping a living as a film extra, and even had a short-lived pop career, releasing ballads with titles like Lonely For A Girl. The nightclub fight put an end to such whimsy. "When I woke up with my nose and mouth all swollen, stitched and purple, I looked at myself and thought, 'That's the end of your hopes of playing romantic screen roles - it's horror films or nothing.'"

Playing to his strengths as the only actor in England with a face like a dustbin (as he put it), he was given his first starring role, in Hammer's The Curse Of The Werewolf. After playing dozens of monsters, brutes and pirates, people began to notice his resonant voice and consummate professionalism. (He'd never had acting lessons, preferring to learn from watching Laurence Olivier films over and over.) And by the late 1960s, the rugged, surly look had come into fashion, and he was considered extremely good-looking.

Reed's biggest champion was Ken Russell, who gave him his breakthrough role in 1969's Women In Love. This featured the first ever on-screen full-frontal male nudity when Reed and Alan Bates wrestled naked. "Come the day when I had to show my mighty mallet to millions of ladies around the world, I got cold feet," Reed remembered. "We both did. I said I had tennis elbow and Alan said he'd hurt his knee playing rugby. Ken Russell said, 'That's nonsense. You're obviously worried about who's got the biggest plonker, so go into the lavatory and have a look at each other's.' We both decided we had tiny plonkers, so we said we'd do the scene."

Women In Love made headlines around the world, and was followed by the scandalous The Devils and the more traditional Oliver! (directed by Reed's uncle Carol). For several years, Reed was one of the highest-paid actors in the world, and in 1972 he was the leading contender to replace Sean Connery as James Bond. Cubby Broccoli thought his brooding looks and boxer's physique a good match for ex-Mr Universe Connery, but a series of alcohol-related fights, fiascos and arrests during that year cost him the part. Reed was beginning to revel in his bad-boy image.

In 1970 Reed divorced Kathleen Byrne, his wife of ten years, and bought the gigantic Broome Hall, with its 46 bedrooms, for �100,000. "I wanted a field for my horse," explained Reed. "They were selling the estate off in three parts: field, house and garden. I came down here for the field, got sloshed and bought the lot. It was the horse's fault." Broome Hall was to be the setting for some of the 1970s most debauched behaviour, as Reed's newfound wealth fuelled his already titanic booze habit.

Reed challenged everyone he drank with to feats of strength, which he always won. If the pub was too small for his games, he would drag everyone back home. Guests would be invited to play ice hockey on a kitchen floor made slippery with smashed eggs, to dance on the dining table, or to knock each other across a nearby stream with one punch. People in monk's habits would jump out of cupboards to 'amuse' unwary visitors. He invited all diners to carve their names on his huge antique dining table with nails. But no-one inflicted as much damage on Broome Hall as Reed himself. He kept a double-barrelled shotgun by his bedside, and would pace the corridors of his home at 2am, blasting away randomly at his own furniture.

Destructive Reed certainly was, but he could also be generous. One night at the Cricketer's Arms, Reed's local, a stranger got too drunk to drive home, and Reed offered to put him up. The stranger refused. Reed insisted, wrestling him to the ground in a patch of stinging nettles and barbed wire and kneeling on his neck until he accepted the offer.

Throughout the early 1970s, the most frequent guest at Broome Hall was Keith Moon. They met when cast together in Ken Russell's 1973 adaptation of Tommy. Moon was so excited to be working with Reed, he flew to Broome Hall to introduce himself. His unannounced arrival in a badly piloted helicopter startled Reed's horses, which bolted. Enraged, Reed leapt from the bath and ran out to meet him brandishing a broadsword, clad only in a towel. They battled for the best part of an hour, ending up on the roof. "We just fell for each other directly," Reed said. "I was taking life a little bit too seriously. Keith showed me the way to Insanity."

Having destroyed a large part of Sussex, Reed broadened his horizons, leaving a trail of destruction across four continents. He was filming in Tucson in 1975 when co-star Lee Marvin called to say he was coming over for a drink. The hotel manager was so terrified at the prospect that he posted armed guards outside the hotel to keep the boozers apart. It was a temporary measure: after shooting their first scene together on location in Mexico, Reed challenged Marvin to a drinking contest. Ten hours later, Marvin was so drunk he could not be woken, even when the Mexican proprietor fired a gun next to his ear. Reed looked on, glassy-eyed but triumphant.

While filming 1975's The Prince And The Pauper in Budapest, he enlivened his co-star Mark Lester's 18th birthday party by bounding onto the table, pouring chocolate mousse over fellow diners, and presenting Lester with a prostitute. At a press conference, he was asked whether he would ever do a nude centrespread, as Burt Reynolds had just done. By way of response, he leapt onto the table and began pulling out his penis. "When an elderly lady asked why I'd stopped," Reed remarked, "I said, 'Madam, if I'd pulled it to in its entirety, I'd have knocked your hat off.'"

In 1977 Reed decided he was Scottish (previously having claimed to be descended from Peter The Great). Turning up drunk and in full Highland regalia at a West End gambling club, he threw the proprietor over a gaming table, slurred "give me a kiss", and was asked to leave. Reed drew a short sword from his stocking, but was punched full in the face by a security guard and staggered off. Later that year he took up fishing. This involved striding fully clothed into mountain streams to catch trout by hand.

Despite all this, no-one ever saw Reed with a hangover, no matter how extreme the excesses of the night before. What's more, he never slurred a single line when the cameras rolled. This led many friends to believe that he wasn't as out of it as he seemed while smashing up pubs, that his drunken persona was an attention-grabbing act. Indeed, at some of his most notoriously drunken TV appearances, he was observed stone cold sober immediately before and afterwards.

None of this changes the fact that he drank some 200 pints a week. As the 1970s wore on, Reed would take any old role as long as it kept him in beer money. In 1979, he sold Broome Hall (this involved waving a gun at an estate agent) and moved to tax exile in Guernsey. At the same time his girlfriend of nine years, Jackie, left him, fed up with his alcoholism. His brother Simon, previously his manager, vowed never to speak to him again.

In 1980, Reed began what would be the last relationship of his life with 16-year-old schoolgirl Josephine Burge - three years younger than his son - whom he met while doing handstands in his local bar. He was banned from the bar soon afterwards after climbing onto the roof and re-entering via the chimney. Josephine soon learnt what to expect of Reed when, waking up one morning, she found the bedroom full of empty beer cans and Reed on the end of the bed, naked but for a policeman's helmet, swapping jokes with a man neither of them knew.

OLLIE VS THE INTELLECTUALS

In 1991 Reed was invited onto Channel Four's open-ended programme After Dark to discuss the subject of male violence with American feminist Kate Millett and assorted academics. Arriving drunk he roared, "Where's the bull dyke?" and retired to his dressing room to wash his face in the toilet. Pausing only to accuse fellow guest Neil Lyndon of being in the SAS and challenge him to a fight with coathangers, he went on set, despite the producer's reservations. Collapsing onto the sofa next to Kate Millett, he patted her hand during her first speech and told her to relax. Minutes later, he was calling her "big tits" and wailing, "I'll put my plonker on the table if you don't give me my mushy peas." He was persuaded to calm down and wandered off to the toilet. On returning, he fell over the back of the sofa clutching a bottle of wine, seized Millet's face in his hands and forced a kiss on her horrified face. Realising he had overstepped the mark, he sheepishly asked, "Do you want me to leave?" Answered in the affirmative, he mustered some dignity and crept away. "It was very British," said Neil Lyndon.

After a year of calm with Josephine, the madness began anew. In 1981, Reed was arrested for seizing customers in a Vermont bar and waving them in the air. When the police arrived, he pranced around them throwing karate moves, bellowing, "Come on, let's have a go," before lifting up the back of their squad car with one hand and threatening to throw it at them. "The next minute he waved his arms in the air wildly, fell over backwards and lay flapping on the ground," said arresting officer Eben Merrill.

In 1984 Reed was arrested again for wrestling naked in the streets of Guernsey. In 1985 he married Josephine. Raising a glass of champagne to the congregation, he claimed his boozing days were behind him. His stag night had lasted three days, during which time he sank 104 pints.

In February 1987 he got drunk, buried his wife's jewellery in the garden, and was unable to remember where he put it. The same week, he appeared on Michael Aspel's TV chat show with his shirt hanging out, and performed an impromptu air guitar version of I'm A Wild One. A month later, he was told by doctors to stop drinking or die. In November of that year, he enraged the patrons of a working men's club by slapping £50 on the bar and shouting, "This is for the working-class pigs, get them all a beer." They retaliated by holding him down and cutting off his beard. Later that month he tried to show Des O'Connor the tattoo on his penis live on air. This he had received without anaesthetic in a brothel in the Caribbean after a drunken bet.

Reed was so proud of his penis he would wave it at almost anyone, despite its unimpressive size. "It's an eternal source of regret," he admitted, "that my todger is so small. If I had 15 inches I'd whip it out every five minutes and hose down the surroundings like a heroic fireman. As it goes, I've got to use an eyebrow-plucker just to find the bloody thing."

The mid-1980s were not a good time for Reed. In 1985 he had become estranged from his son Mark after saying in an interview he should do some real work. A year later, his friendship with stuntman Reg Prince ended when, during a scuffle in the Seychelles, Prince was tipped over a jetty rail and seriously injured his back on the rocks below. Prince sued Reed for �100,000 but lost. In 1987; Reed announced that years of boozing had left him impotent. "I'm too old," he said. "I've run out of sperm."

Increasingly out of favour in Britain, he moved to Cork in 1994. That year he was fired from the cast of Cutthroat Island for threatening to show Geena Davis his testicles. It was the final disgrace. In 1998 he announced his retirement from films. And, at a party in Scotland, hit himself repeatedly in the face with his own shoe until he bled.

Although he was to make one more film, Gladiator, he would never see the finished product. During a break in filming he entered that Maltese pub and bought his final round. A year earlier he was interviewed on Channel Four and gave what may as well have been his epitaph: "I regret not making love to every woman and not going into every bar on earth." He was buried in a small cemetery across the road from O'Briens, his local pub in Churchtown, County Cork.

The sad decline of Ollie Reed can perhaps be explained as a reaction to having been adored in the late 1960s and then having that love withdrawn. He was, after all, a very competitive boy.