Oliver Reed
Robert Oliver Reed was an English actor, known for his upper-middle class, masculine image and his heavy-drinking, "hellraiser" lifestyle. His screen career spanned over 40 years, between 1955 and 1999. At the peak of his career, in 1971, British exhibitors voted Reed fifth-most-popular star at the box office.
After making his first significant screen appearances in Hammer Horror films in the early 1960s, his notable film roles included La Bete in The Trap, Bill Sikes in Oliver!, Gerald in Women in Love, the title role in Hannibal Brooks, Urbain Grandier in The Devils, Athos in The Three Musketeers and The Four Musketeers, Uncle Frank in Tommy, Dr. Hal Raglan in The Brood, Dolly Hopkins in Funny Bones and Antonius Proximo in Gladiator.
For playing the old, gruff gladiator trainer in Ridley Scott's Gladiator, in what was his final film, Reed was posthumously nominated for the BAFTA Award for Best Actor in a Supporting Role and a Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture in 2000.
The British Film Institute stated that "partnerships with Michael Winner and Ken Russell in the mid-60s saw Reed become an emblematic Brit-flick icon", but from the mid-1970s his alcoholism began affecting his career, with the BFI adding: "Reed had assumed Robert Newton's mantle as Britain's thirstiest thespian".
Early life
Robert Oliver Reed was born on 13 February 1938 at 9 Durrington Park Road, Wimbledon to Peter Reed, a sports journalist, and Marcia. He was the nephew of film director Sir Carol Reed, and grandson of the actor-manager Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree and his mistress, Beatrice May Pinney, she being "the only person who understood, listened to, encouraged and kissed Oliver". Reed claimed to have been a descendant of Peter the Great, Tsar of Russia. Reed attended 14 schools, including Ewell Castle School in Surrey. "My father thought I was just lazy," Reed later said. "He thought I was a dunce."Reed claimed he had worked as a boxer, a bouncer, a taxi driver and a hospital porter. He then did his conscription in the Royal Army Medical Corps. "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."
Career
Early years (1955-1961)
Reed began his acting career as an extra in films. He appeared uncredited in Ken Annakin's film Value for Money and Norman Wisdom's film The Square Peg. Uncredited television appearances included episodes of The Invisible Man, The Four Just Men and The Third Man. He appeared in the documentary Hello London.Reed's first break was playing Richard of Gloucester in a six-part BBC TV series The Golden Spur. It did not seem to help his career immediately: He was not credited in the films The Captain's Table, Upstairs and Downstairs, directed by Ralph Thomas, Life Is a Circus, The Angry Silence, The League of Gentlemen or Beat Girl. He played a bouncer in The Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll for Hammer Films with which he would become associated; the director was Terence Fisher. Reed was then in The Bulldog Breed, another Wisdom film, playing the leader of a gang of Teddy Boys roughing up Wisdom in a cinema.
Reed got his first significant role in Hammer Films' Sword of Sherwood Forest, again directed by Fisher. He went back to small roles for His and Hers, a Terry-Thomas comedy; No Love for Johnnie for Ralph Thomas; and The Rebel with Tony Hancock. He played the role of Sebastian in the ITV series It's Dark Outside, which was popular with teenagers, making him an idol for the first time.
Leading man
Reed's first starring role came when Hammer cast him as the central character in Terence Fisher's The Curse of the Werewolf. Hammer liked Reed and gave him good supporting roles in the swashbuckler The Pirates of Blood River, directed by John Gilling; Captain Clegg, a smugglers tale with Peter Cushing; The Damned, a science fiction film directed by Joseph Losey; Paranoiac, a psycho thriller for director Freddie Francis; and The Scarlet Blade ; a swashbuckler set during the English Civil War, directed by Gilling, with Reed as a Roundhead.During this time, he appeared in some ITV Playhouse productions, "Murder in Shorthand" and "The Second Chef", and guest-starred in episodes of The Saint. He also had the lead in a non-Hammer horror, The Party's Over, 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. The film was seen by Ken Russell who then cast Reed in the title role of The Debussy Film, a TV biopic of French composer Claude Debussy. Reed 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." It was also the first time he broke away from villainous roles. "Until that time they thought I was a neolithic dustbin," said Reed. Reed later said "Hammer films had given me my start and Michael Winner my bread then Ken Russell came on the screen and gave me my art."He narrated Russell's TV movie Always on Sunday. Reed returned to Hammer for The Brigand of Kandahar, playing a villainous Indian in an imperial action film for Gilling. He later called it the worst film he ever made for Hammer. He guest-starred in episodes of It's Dark Outside and Court Martial, the latter directed by Seth Holt. He had a regular role in the TV series R3. Reed was the lead in a Canadian-British co-production, The Trap, co-starring with Rita Tushingham, where his voice was dubbed.
Reed's career stepped up another level when he starred in the popular comedy film The Jokers, his second film with Winner, alongside Michael Crawford. After playing a villain in a horror movie, The Shuttered Room, he did a third with Winner, I'll Never Forget What's'isname, co-starring with Orson Welles. Reed was reunited with Russell for another TV movie, Dante's Inferno, playing Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
''Oliver!'' and stardom
Reed's star rose further as a result of playing Bill Sikes in Oliver!, alongside Ron Moody, Shani Wallis, Mark Lester, Jack Wild and Harry Secombe, in his uncle Carol Reed's screen version of the successful stage musical. It was a huge hit, winning the Academy Award for Best Picture, with Reed receiving praise for his villainous performance.He was in the black comedy The Assassination Bureau with Diana Rigg and Telly Savalas, directed by Basil Dearden; and a war film for Winner, Hannibal Brooks.
More successful than either was his fourth film with Russell, a film version of Women in Love, in which he wrestled naked with Alan Bates in front of a log fire. In 1969, Interstate Theatres awarded him their International Star of the Year Award.
Take a Girl Like You was a sex comedy with Hayley Mills based on a novel by Kingsley Amis; The Lady in the Car with Glasses and a Gun was a thriller directed by Anatole Litvak. The following year, Reed appeared in the controversial film The Devils, directed by Russell with Vanessa Redgrave.
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 was mentioned as a possible choice for the role, with Timothy Dalton and Roger Moore as the other choices. 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."
File:Mordi e fuggi - Oliver Reed, Carole André, Marcello Mastroianni.jpg|thumb|Reed with Carole André and Marcello Mastroianni in Dirty Weekend
He made a series of action-oriented projects: The Hunting Party, a Western shot in Spain with Gene Hackman; Sitting Target, a tough gangster film; and Z.P.G., a science fiction film with Geraldine Chaplin. In March 1971, he said he would make a film, The Offering, which he would co-write and produce, but it was not made. He did The Triple Echo directed by Michael Apted, and featured Reed alongside Glenda Jackson. Reed also appeared in a number of Italian films: Dirty Weekend, with Marcello Mastroianni; One Russian Summer with Claudia Cardinale; and Revolver with Fabio Testi.
He had great success playing Athos in The Three Musketeers and The Four Musketeers for director Richard Lester from a script by George MacDonald Fraser. Reed had an uncredited bit-part in Russell's Mahler, was the lead in Blue Blood and And Then There Were None, produced by Harry Alan Towers. His next project with Ken Russell was Tommy, where he plays Tommy's stepfather, based on The Who's 1969 concept album, Tommy, and starring its lead singer Roger Daltrey. Royal Flash reunited him with Richard Lester and George MacDonald Fraser, playing Otto von Bismarck. He had a cameo in Russell's Lisztomania.
Reed appeared in The New Spartans, then acted alongside Karen Black, Bette Davis, and Burgess Meredith in the Dan Curtis horror film, Burnt Offerings. He was in The Sell Out and The Great Scout & Cathouse Thursday with Lee Marvin. After Assault in Paradise, he returned to swashbuckling in Crossed Swords , as Miles Hendon alongside Raquel Welch and a grown-up Mark Lester, who had worked with Reed in Oliver!, from a script co-written by Fraser.
Reed did Tomorrow Never Comes for Peter Colinson and The Big Sleep with Winner. He and Jackson were reunited in The Class of Miss MacMichael, then he made a film in Canada, The Mad Trapper, that was unfinished. 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, a comedy with Peter Cushing.