Oliver Reed

A truly great man, Oliver Reed (1938-1999) was one of the finest actors Britain has ever produced. He came to promenance in the 1960s and 1970s for his work in Oliver! (where he played an extremely menacing Bill Sykes), Women in Love and The Devils. His final cinematic appearance was for Gladiator where he plays Proximo, and he died shortly before shooting was complete.

More importantly than all this though, was Reed's legendary love of alcohol. Although over sixty years of age, he passed away a few hours after challenging a group of marines to a drinking contest at his local bar in Malta (apparently he drunk them all under the table as well).

A few salient titbits from Olly's life (and IMO far more informative than any official biography):

• In one celebrated incident in 1974, Reed invited 36 rugby players to a party at his home. Between Saturday night and Sunday lunchtime, they managed to consume between them 60 gallons of beer, 32 bottles of Scotch, 17 bottles of gin, four crates of wine and a lone bottle of Babycham. The entertainment concluded with Reed leading the players on a nude dawn run through the Surrey countryside.
• In 1974, Reed made a convincingly doughty Athos in The Three Musketeers. On one occasion during filming in Spain, the police were summoned to Reed's hotel to arrest him for dancing naked in a giant goldfish tank. "Leave me alone," shouted Reed. "You can't touch me! I'm one of the Four Musketeers".
• Reed's notoriety increased yet further in 1985 when he married Jospehine Burge; she was then 21, but had been his companion since she was a 16-year old schoolgirl. At his stag party, which lasted two days, Reed claimed to have downed 136 pints of beer. But to the surprise of many, the marriage proved a success, although in 1986 Reed was forced to dig up nine acres of his back garden after forgetting where he had buried his wife's jewellery when drunk.
• In 1991, Reed appeared on the late-night Channel 4 discussion programme After Dark (popularly known as After Closing Time). The subject was violence, and Reed was determined not to disappoint. Drinking wine from a half-pint glass, he freely expressed his views on the subject, periodically falling off his chair before kissing a surprised feminist author and announcing "Right, I'm off to have a slash". Channel 4 took the programme off the air after 20 minutes; when it returned, Reed terminated the discussion with the words: "Look, I'll put my plonker on the table if you don't give me a plate of mushy peas".

A couple of nights ago in the pub I saw a bloke wearing a T-shirt. On the front was a picture of the great man himself, on the back, the simple slogan:

King of the Hellraisers
Lost in Action, May 3rd, 1999

"Lost in Action". I like that. Olly's memory will live on forever!

Oliver Reed also made a memorable appearance on a long-running, little-watched, forgotten late-night ITV show called 'The Big E' (an odd experiment in European unity, a precursor to 'Eurotrash' but without the humour or naughty bits (and really, what's the point of that?)).

Anyway, there was a regular feature called 'In the Barber's Chair', in which a French hairdresser interviewed z-list 'celebrities' whilst giving them a haircut. Reed made an appearance, after clearly having been kept in hospitality for too long.

After grumbling his way through five minutes of boredom, he noticed that the hairdresser was French and, in a graceful display of hilarious flailing, he grabbed him around the neck and attacked him. Cut to commercial.

In interviews Reed repeatedly asserted that he only had two regrets - that he hadn't drunk every pub dry and slept with every woman on Earth. Reed was part of a generation of British actors who, for whatever reason, decided to spend a lot of time drinking - Peter O'Toole and Richard Harris spring to mind. Like Keith Moon and Peter Cook he was something of a tragic case; a gifted, initially good-looking actor who never made the Sean Connery-esque leap into iconicism.

He once said that his ideal woman would be 'a mute nymphomaniac whose father owns a pub', despite which he did not marry a mute nymphomaniac.