For playing Antonius Proximo, the old, gruff gladiator trainer in Ridley Scott's Gladiator (2000) in what was his final film, Reed was posthumously nominated for the BAFTA Award for Best Actor in a Supporting Role. At the peak of his career, in 1971, British exhibitors voted Reed 5th most popular star at the box office.[1] An alcoholic, Reed's issues with drink were well publicised, from appearances on chat shows to a high-profile friendship with drinking partner, the Who drummer Keith Moon, with the two meeting while working on Tommy.
Early life
Reed was born at 9 Durrington Park Road,[2]Wimbledon, to Peter Reed, a sports journalist and Marcia (née Napier-Andrews).[3]
He was the nephew of film director Sir Carol Reed, and grandson of the actor-managerSir Herbert Beerbohm Tree and his mistress, Beatrice May Pinney (who later assumed the name 'Reed'),[4] she being "the only person who understood, listened to, encouraged and kissed Oliver".[5] Reed claimed to have been a descendant (through an illegitimate step) of Peter the Great, Tsar of Russia.[6] Reed attended 14 schools,[7] including Ewell Castle School in Surrey. Oliver's brother Simon Reed, a sports journalist, works for British Eurosport.[8][9]
"My father thought I was just lazy," Reed later said. "He thought I was a dunce."[10]
Reed worked as a boxer, a bouncer, a cabdriver and a hospital porter. He then did his compulsory army service in the Royal Army Medical Corps.[11] "The army helped," he said later. "I recognized that most other people were actors as well. I was in the peacetime army and they were all telling us youngsters about the war."[10]
During this time he appeared in some ITV Playhouse productions, "Murder in Shorthand" (1962) and "The Second Chef " (1962), and guest starred on episodes of The Saint.
He also had the lead in a non-Hammer horror, The Party's Over (made 1963, released 1965), directed by Guy Hamilton.
Michael Winner and Ken Russell
In 1964 he starred in the first of six films directed by Michael Winner, The System, (known as The Girl-Getters in the U.S.).
The following year he had his first collaboration with Ken Russell, The Debussy Film (1965), a TV biopic of Claude Debussy. Reed, who played the title role, said this was crucial to his career because " "That was the first time I met Ken Russell and it was the first part I had after I'd had my face cut in a fight and no one would employ me. Everybody thought I was a cripple."[10] He narrated Russell's TV movie Always on Sunday (1965).
Reed returned to Hammer for The Brigand of Kandahar (1965), playing a villainous Indian in an imperial action film for Gilling. He guest starred on episodes of It's Cold Outside and Court Martial, the latter directed by Seth Holt. He had a regular role on the TV series R3 (1965).
Reed was the lead in a Canadian-British co production, The Trap (1966), co-starring with Rita Tushingham.
Reed's career stepped up another level when he starred in the popular comedy film The Jokers (1966), his second film with Winner, alongside Michael Crawford.
More successful than either was his fourth film with Russell, a film version of Women in Love (1969), in which he wrestled naked with Alan Bates in front of a log fire.[14] In 1969 Interstate Theatres awarded him their International Star of the Year Award.[15]
An anecdote holds that Reed could have been chosen to play James Bond. In 1969, Bond franchise producers Albert R. Broccoli and Harry Saltzman were looking for a replacement for Sean Connery and Reed (who had recently played a resourceful killer in The Assassination Bureau) was mentioned as a possible choice for the role, with Timothy Dalton and Roger Moore as the other choices.[19] Whatever the reason, Reed was never to play Bond. After Reed's death, the Guardian Unlimited called the casting decision, "One of the great missed opportunities of post-war British movie history."[20]
In March 1971 he said he would make a film, The Offering which he would co write and produce, but it was not made.[21] He did The Triple Echo (1972) directed by Michael Apted, and featured Reed in drag, alongside Glenda Jackson.
Reed returned to the horror genre as Dr. Hal Raglan in David Cronenberg's 1979 film The Brood and ended the decade with A Touch of the Sun (1979), a comedy with Peter Cushing.
Reed was a villain in Disney's Condorman (1981) and did the horror film Venom (1981). He was a villain in The Sting II (1983) and appeared in Sex, Lies and Renaissance (1983).
He also starred as Lt-Col Gerard Leachman in the Iraqi historical film Al-Mas' Ala Al-Kubra (a.k.a. Clash of Loyalties) (1983), which dealt with Leachman's exploits during the 1920 revolution in Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq).
He says he was contemplating quitting acting when Nicolas Roeg cast him in Castaway (1986) as the middle aged Gerald Kingsland, who advertises for a "wife" (played by Amanda Donohoe) to live on a desert island with him for a year.[10]
Reed was in The Misfit Brigade (1987), Gor (1987), Master of Dragonard Hill (1987), Dragonard (1987), Skeleton Coast (1988), Blind Justice (1988), Captive Rage (1988), and Rage to Kill (1988). Most of these were exploitation films produced by the impresario Harry Alan Towers filmed in South Africa at the time of apartheid and released straight to video in the United States and UK.
Reed was in Return to Lonesome Dove (1993); Funny Bones (1995); Russian Roulette - Moscow 95 (1995); Luise knackt den Jackpot (1995); Die Tunnelgangster von Berlin (1996); The Bruce (1996); Jeremiah (1998); The Incredible Adventures of Marco Polo on His Journeys to the Ends of the Earth (1998); and Parting Shots (1998).
His final role was the elderly slave dealer Proximo in Gladiator (2000), in which he played alongside Richard Harris,[23] an actor whom Reed admired greatly both on and off the screen.[24] The film was released after his death with some footage filmed with a double,[25] digitally mixed with outtake footage.[26] The film was dedicated to him.[27] In addition to his posthumous BAFTA recognition, he shared the film's nomination for the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture with the rest of the principal players.
Music
In addition to acting, Reed released several singles in the popular music vein, though with limited success. These included "Wild One"/"Lonely for a Girl" (1961), "Sometimes"/"Ecstasy" (1962), "Baby It's Cold Outside" (duet with Joyce Blair) and "Wild Thing" (1992) (duet with snooker ace Alex Higgins). Oliver also later narrated a track called "Walpurgis Nacht" by heavy metal band Death SS.[28]
Personal life
In 1959, Reed married Kate Byrne.[29] The couple had one son, Mark, before their divorce in 1969. While filming his part of Bill Sikes in Oliver!, he met Jacquie Daryl, a classically trained dancer who was also in the film.[30] They became lovers and subsequently had a daughter, Sarah. In 1985, he married Josephine Burge, to whom he was still married at the time of his death. She was 16 years old when they met, he was 42.[31] In his last years, Reed and Burge lived in Churchtown, County Cork, Ireland.
Activities
Broome Hall, Surrey, Reed's home from the late 1960s to 1980s
In 1964 Reed's face was cut in a bar fight. He received 63 stitches and was in danger of losing his film career due to the scarring. He claimed to have turned down major roles in two Hollywood movies, including The Sting (although he did appear in the 1983 sequel The Sting II).
When the UK government raised taxes on personal income, Reed initially declined to join the exodus of major British film stars to Hollywood and other more tax-friendly locales. In the late 1970s Reed relocated to Guernsey as a tax exile. He had sold his large house, Broome Hall, between the villages of Coldharbour and Ockley, some years earlier and initially lodged at the Duke of Normandie Hotel in Saint Peter Port.[32]
In 1993 Reed was unsuccessfully sued by his former stuntman and stand-in Reg Prince, for an injury incurred by the latter while filming Castaway.[33]
In 2013, the writer Robert Sellers published What Fresh Lunacy Is This? – The Authorised Biography of Oliver Reed.[34]
Reed was known for his alcoholism and binge drinking.[35] Numerous anecdotes exist, such as Reed and 36 drinking friends drinking in one evening: 60 gallons of beer, 32 bottles of scotch, 17 bottles of gin, four crates of wine, and a bottle of Babycham. He subsequently revised the story, claiming he drank 106 pints of beer on a two-day binge before marrying Josephine Burge; "The event that was reported actually took place during an arm-wrestling competition in Guernsey about 15 years ago, it was highly exaggerated." Steve McQueen told the story that in 1973 he flew to the UK to discuss a film project with Reed and suggested the two men visit a London nightclub.[36] They ended up on a marathon pub crawl during which Reed got so drunk he vomited on McQueen.[36]
Reed became a close friend and drinking partner of the Who's drummer Keith Moon in 1974 while working together on the film version of Tommy.[37] With their reckless lifestyles Reed and Moon had much in common, and both cited the hard drinking actor Robert Newton as a role model.[38]Christopher Lee, a friend and colleague of Reed, commented on his alcoholism in 2014: "when he started, after [drink] number eight, he became a complete monster. It was awful to see."[39]
Reed was often irritated that his appearances on TV talk shows concentrated on his drinking feats rather than his latest films and acting career. On 26 September 1975, in front of a speechless Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show, the bellicose Reed had a glass of whisky poured over his head on-camera by an enraged Shelley Winters (Winters had been upset by Reed's derogatory comments toward women).[40]David Letterman cut to a commercial when Reed became belligerent after being asked too many questions about his drinking on 5 August 1987 after pointing out that Letterman's researcher had already been told that Reed did not want to talk about drink, during his appearance on Late Night with David Letterman.
Reed was held partly responsible for the demise of BBC1's Sin on Saturday after some typically forthright comments on the subject of lust, the sin featured on the first programme. The show had many other problems, and a fellow guest revealed that Reed recognised this when he arrived and virtually had to be dragged in front of the cameras. Near the end of his life, he was brought onto some TV shows specifically for his drinking; for example The Word put bottles of liquor in his dressing room so he could be secretly filmed getting drunk[citation needed]. He left the set of the Channel 4 television discussion programme After Dark after arriving drunk and attempting to kiss feminist writer Kate Millett, uttering the phrase, "Give us a kiss, big tits". [citation needed]
However, Cliff Goodwin's biography of Reed, Evil Spirits, offered the theory that Reed was not always as drunk on chat shows as he appeared to be, but rather was acting the part of an uncontrollably sodden former star to liven things up, at the producers' behests. In October 1981, Reed was arrested in Vermont, where he was tried and acquitted of disturbing the peace while drunk. However, he pleaded no contest to two assault charges and was fined $1,200.[41] In December 1987, Reed, who was overweight and already suffered from gout,[42] became seriously ill with kidney problems as a result of his alcoholism and had to abstain from drinking for over one year on the advice of his doctor.
In his final years, when he lived in Ireland, Reed was a regular in the one-roomed O'Brien's Bar in Churchtown, County Cork, close to the 13th-century cemetery in the heart of the village where he would be buried.[43][44]
Death and aftermath
Reed died from a heart attack during a break from filming Gladiator in Valletta, Malta, on 2 May 1999.[45] Some said he drank eight pints of lager, a dozen double rums and half a bottle of whiskey[46] in a drinking match against sailors on shore leave from H.M.S. Cumberland.[47] He was 61 years old. Fellow Gladiator actor Omid Djalili said in 2016: "He hadn't had a drink for months before filming started ... Everyone said he went the way he wanted, but that's not true. It was very tragic. He was in an Irish bar and was pressured into a drinking competition. He should have just left, but he didn't."[48]Russell Crowe also said in 2010: "I never got on with Ollie. He has visited me in dreams and asked me to talk kindly of him. So I should... but we never had a pleasant conversation."[49]
A funeral for Reed was held in Churchtown, County Cork,[52] in Ireland where he resided the last years of his life, his body being interred in Churchtown's Bruhenny Graveyard.[53] On his gravestone reads the message, "He made the air move".[54]
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