Robert Oliver Reed was an English actor known for his well-to-do, macho image and "hellraiser" lifestyle.
67 Facts About Oliver Reed
2.
For playing Antonius Proximo, 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 in 2000.
3.
The British Film Institute stated that "partnerships with Michael Winner and Ken Russell in the mid-60s saw Oliver Reed become an emblematic Brit-flick icon", but from the mid-1970s his alcoholism began affecting his career, with the BFI adding "Oliver Reed had assumed Robert Newton's mantle as Britain's thirstiest thespian".
4.
Robert Oliver Reed was born on 13 February 1938 at 9 Durrington Park Road, Wimbledon, southwest London, to Peter Reed, a sports journalist, and Marcia.
5.
Oliver Reed claimed to have been a descendant of Peter the Great, Tsar of Russia.
6.
Oliver Reed attended 14 schools, including Ewell Castle School in Surrey.
7.
Oliver Reed claimed he had worked as a boxer, a bouncer, a taxi driver and a hospital porter.
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Oliver Reed then did his compulsory army service in the Royal Army Medical Corps.
9.
Oliver Reed appeared uncredited in Ken Annakin's film Value for Money and Norman Wisdom's film The Square Peg.
10.
Oliver Reed played a bouncer in The Two Faces of Dr Jekyll for Hammer Films with whom he would become associated; the director was Terence Fisher.
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Oliver 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.
12.
Oliver Reed got his first significant role in Hammer Films' Sword of Sherwood Forest, again directed by Fisher.
13.
Oliver Reed 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.
14.
Oliver Reed's first starring role came when Hammer cast him as the central character in Terence Fisher's The Curse of the Werewolf.
15.
Hammer liked Oliver 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 Oliver Reed as a Roundhead.
16.
Oliver Reed had the lead in a non-Hammer horror, The Party's Over, directed by Guy Hamilton.
17.
Oliver Reed narrated Russell's TV movie Always on Sunday.
18.
Oliver Reed returned to Hammer for The Brigand of Kandahar, playing a villainous Indian in an imperial action film for Gilling.
19.
Oliver Reed later called it the worst film he ever made for Hammer.
20.
Oliver Reed guest-starred in episodes of It's Cold Outside and Court Martial, the latter directed by Seth Holt.
21.
Oliver Reed had a regular role in the TV series R3.
22.
Oliver Reed was the lead in a Canadian-British co-production, The Trap, co-starring with Rita Tushingham.
23.
Oliver 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.
24.
Oliver Reed was reunited with Russell for another TV movie, Dante's Inferno, playing Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
25.
Oliver Reed 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.
26.
An anecdote holds that Oliver Reed could have been chosen to play James Bond.
27.
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.
28.
Oliver Reed did The Triple Echo directed by Michael Apted, and featured Reed alongside Glenda Jackson.
29.
Oliver Reed appeared in a number of Italian films: Dirty Weekend, with Marcello Mastroianni; One Russian Summer with Claudia Cardinale; and Revolver with Fabio Testi.
30.
Oliver Reed had great success playing Athos in The Three Musketeers and The Four Musketeers for director Richard Lester from a script by George MacDonald Fraser.
31.
Oliver 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.
32.
Oliver Reed appeared in The New Spartans, then acted alongside Karen Black, Bette Davis, and Burgess Meredith in the Dan Curtis horror film, Burnt Offerings.
33.
Oliver Reed did Tomorrow Never Comes for Peter Colinson and The Big Sleep with Winner.
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Oliver 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.
35.
Oliver Reed did a comedy for Charles B Griffith, Dr Heckyl and Mr Hype and played Gen.
36.
Oliver Reed was a villain in Disney's Condorman and did the horror film, Venom.
37.
Oliver Reed was in Spasms, Two of a Kind, Masquerade, Christopher Columbus, Black Arrow and Captive.
38.
Oliver Reed says he was contemplating quitting acting when Nicolas Roeg cast him in Castaway as the middle-aged Gerald Kingsland, who advertises for a "wife" to live on a desert island with him for a year.
39.
Oliver Reed was the subject of This Is Your Life in 1986 when he was surprised by Eamonn Andrews at Rosslyn Park rugby club in west London.
40.
Oliver Reed was in The Misfit Brigade, Gor, Master of Dragonard Hill, Dragonard, Skeleton Coast, Blind Justice, Captive Rage, and Rage to Kill.
41.
Oliver Reed was in Terry Gilliam's The Adventures of Baron Munchausen ; The Lady and the Highwayman with Hugh Grant; The House of Usher ; The Return of the Musketeers with Lester and Fraser; Treasure Island with Charlton Heston; A Ghost in Monte Carlo ; Hired to Kill ; Panama Sugar ; The Revenger ; The Pit and the Pendulum ; Prisoner of Honor for Russell; and Severed Ties.
42.
Films Oliver Reed appeared in include Return to Lonesome Dove ; Funny Bones ; The Bruce ; Jeremiah ; and Parting Shots.
43.
Oliver Reed's final role was the elderly slave dealer Proximo in Ridley Scott's Gladiator, in which he played alongside Richard Harris, an actor whom Reed admired greatly both on and off the screen.
44.
Oliver Reed later narrated a track called "Walpurgis Nacht" by Italian heavy metal band Death SS.
45.
In December 1974, Oliver Reed appeared on BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs, a show where the guest, a "castaway", talks about their life and chooses eight favourite songs and the reasons for their choices.
46.
In 1964, Oliver Reed was in the Crazy Elephant nightclub in Leicester Square and got into a dispute at the bar with a couple of men that ended with Oliver Reed walking away with a dismissive remark.
47.
Oliver Reed received 63 stitches in one side of his face, was left with permanent scarring, and initially thought his film career was over.
48.
In 1993, Oliver Reed was unsuccessfully sued by his former stuntman, stand-in and friend Reg Prince, for an alleged spinal injury incurred by the latter while on location for the filming of Castaway.
49.
Oliver Reed claimed to have turned down major roles in two Hollywood movies, The Sting.
50.
Oliver Reed had sold his large house, Broome Hall, between the Surrey villages of Coldharbour and Ockley, and initially lodged at the Duke of Normandie Hotel in Saint Peter Port.
51.
Oliver Reed often described himself as a British patriot and preferred to live in the United Kingdom over relocating to Hollywood.
52.
Oliver Reed supported British military efforts during the Falklands War.
53.
Oliver Reed 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.
54.
Oliver 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.
55.
Sir Christopher Lee, a friend and colleague of Oliver Reed, commented on his alcoholism in 2014: 'when he started, after [drink] number eight, he became a complete monster.
56.
Oliver Reed was often irritated that his appearances on television chat shows concentrated on his drinking feats, rather than his acting career and latest films.
57.
On 26 September 1975, while Oliver Reed was interviewed by Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show, Shelley Winters, angered by derogatory comments Oliver Reed had made about feminists and women's liberation, poured a cup of whiskey over his head on-camera.
58.
Oliver 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.
59.
The series had many other issues, and a fellow-guest revealed that Oliver Reed recognised this when he arrived, and virtually had to be dragged in front of the cameras.
60.
Oliver Reed 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.
61.
However, Evil Spirits, a biography of Oliver Reed that was written by Cliff Goodwin, offered the theory that Oliver 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.
62.
In October 1981, Oliver Reed was arrested in Vermont, where he was tried and acquitted of disturbing the peace while drunk.
63.
In December 1987, Oliver Reed, who was overweight and already suffered from gout, became seriously ill with kidney problems as a result of his alcoholism, and had to abstain from drinking for over a year, on the advice of his doctor.
64.
Oliver Reed died from a heart attack during a break from filming Gladiator in Valletta, Malta, on the afternoon of 2 May 1999.
65.
Oliver Reed fell ill during the drinking and collapsed; despite efforts at resuscitation by his friends, Oliver Reed died in an ambulance while en route to hospital.
66.
Oliver Reed was in an Irish bar and was pressured into a drinking competition.
67.
Oliver Reed's body was interred in the Bruhenny Graveyard there.