What Fresh Lunacy is This?

by Robert Sellers

  They were like two peas in a pod, really: Kate was very feisty, great at repartee, could be bitingly awful to people, blunt, honest, very much like Ollie. They were so well suited, equally combustible and fun-loving. ‘Kate was a lovely Irish girl,’ says Muriel Reed. ‘She had a great sense of humour and I can’t understand later on what possessed Oliver to leave her. But they were very volatile together, they loved a joke, they loved a fight, they fought like cat and dog, very much like Burton and Liz Taylor.’ David recalls one story of when the couple were in Paris and a fight developed outside a bar and there was Kate yelling, ‘Go on, get in there, Ollie! Throw him in the bloody river.’ Conversely she was also quick to move Ollie out of the way when things got out of hand.

  Now a married man, Oliver felt a degree of responsibility to get a ‘normal’ job since his acting career didn’t seem to be going in a positive direction. Just then Hammer got back in touch: impressed by his audition, they wanted Ollie to play a small role in their latest production, The Two Faces of Dr Jekyll. ‘That was my first film for Hammer and it saved my bacon.’

  Hammer’s Bad Boy

  People had warned Oliver not to get into horror pictures, because they were seen as low-grade and once you were established in them it was difficult to escape. ‘But all I wanted to do was act.’ It was only a day’s work and paid the less than handsome fee of £25, but he was in grand company. The film was helmed by Hammer’s most valued director, Terence Fisher, who had already triumphantly brought Frankenstein, Dracula and the Mummy to life for the studio. Ollie shared his one scene with both the film’s star, Canadian actor Paul Massie, and an actor he was to work with frequently over the years, Christopher Lee.

  The Two Faces of Dr Jekyll was yet another variation on Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic tale and Fisher put Oliver’s beefy physique to good use in the role of a pimp in an elaborate scene set in a nightclub. Looking very dapper, Ollie sits with his little harem of spruced-up former backstreet trollops, and when he challenges Massie’s Hyde for mistreating one of them, speaking in a clipped voice that is highly effective, he gets a sound thrashing for his impertinence. Sadly the film didn’t find favour with critics or the public, becoming one of Hammer’s biggest flops, but Ollie had taken an important first step towards stardom.

  It was common knowledge within the film industry that powerful people, both male and female, took advantage of young, struggling actors. Oliver was once told to his face that to get on in the business he might have to take his trousers down. When one director, known to be a notorious homosexual, invited him to his house for a private audition, Kate scrawled ‘Leave it alone. He’s mine’ in biro on his cock and ‘Get off!’ on his back. This didn’t stop Ollie, though, from using similar tactics. He wasn’t averse, for example, to sleeping with secretaries of casting directors and in the morning slipping them his photograph to put on the top of the pile for their boss to see when he arrived for work. ‘I think he wanted to be a star,’ argues Simon. ‘At no stage in his life was he in love with acting. What he was in love with was being a star – and he was going to be a star whatever it took.’

  With no new job in sight, more bad news arrived when Ollie and Kate were turfed out of their flat because the lease had run out. It was David who came to the rescue. He’d recently married Muriel, and Oliver had attended the wedding with predictably disastrous results. Feeling indignant that a Greek guitarist friend of the couple had been best man, Ollie took solace in several pints at the reception before waltzing over to the guy and laying one on him, causing his wig to fall off. With people taking sides and shouting at each other, ‘the wedding ended in a bit of a shambles,’ admitted Oliver.

  David was forgiving enough to invite his brother and Kate to stay at his and Muriel’s new two-bedroom flat in Kensington. It’s a memory that causes Muriel to roll her eyes heavenward when it’s brought up. It couldn’t have been easy sharing space with Ollie, especially when David rejoined the army, having given up all hope of becoming an actor, and she was left alone with the pair. Frequently the two women clashed and tempers flared. Muriel remembers having to admonish Kate for always leaving her Tampax lying around. ‘And when I came back to the flat after work one day my whole bed was covered in Tampax, forty or fifty of them, packets of the bloody things. You had to laugh.’ Oliver boasted that he did his best to keep order by ‘putting them across my knee one at a time and spanking them soundly’. In the end things weren’t allowed to boil over completely because Muriel left to join David abroad and Oliver and Kate had no choice but to find a new place to live.

  It was Kate’s parents, having forgiven their headstrong daughter for marrying Oliver, who offered a solution: the couple could stay with them at their council flat in Stockwell, south London, until their prospects improved. That seemed a long way off, with Kate the only one currently earning. She was working as a photographic model, even after she found out she was pregnant, a fact she hid from Ollie at first. By May 1960 the Reed finances were so bad that Oliver contemplated accepting an offer to become a door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman. That’s when Hammer came calling, in the nick of time once again. Michael Carreras, a producer at the studio and son of the company’s founder, James Carreras, had seen Jekyll and come away impressed by Oliver. With the encouragement of Stuart Lyons he’d agreed to his casting in Hammer’s next production, Sword of Sherwood Forest.

  Arriving in Dublin airport to start work at the newly opened Ardmore Studios, Ollie was reunited with Terence Fisher, who’d directed several episodes of the original fifties Robin Hood TV series, of which this was the first spin-off movie. Also reprising his TV role was Richard Greene, a poor man’s Errol Flynn who’d brought sexuality and danger to the part. Greene is about as threatening as a cinema usherette with halitosis. Much better is Peter Cushing as the Sheriff of Nottingham. Ollie plays the villainous Lord Melton, a small role but he makes it count, hinting at the character’s borderline-psychopathic tendencies and performing with a bewitching effeminacy, complete with a high-pitched, whispery voice. His big moment is the slaying of Cushing’s Sheriff, an event the film never really recovers from since it was Cushing’s towering personality that was driving the whole thing along. Ollie is also involved in the story’s climactic sword fight, hurled across an abbey floor by Nigel Green’s hulking Little John and finally dispatched by Robin himself.

  Running around the beautiful countryside of County Wicklow, brandishing swords and riding horses, was for Ollie rather like re-enacting his childhood at Bledlow, only he was getting paid for it. ‘It was goodies and baddies and damsels in distress and I was Errol Flynn and every other hero I watched at the cinema.’ He had hero worshipped Flynn for years, both the screen image and his don’t-give-a-damn attitude to life. When the old hell-raiser passed away the previous October, Ollie was in a pub and immediately ordered a pint of Guinness. Standing to attention, he downed the black nectar in a single gulp.

  After his scenes were completed, Ollie shared a flight back home with Terence Fisher’s family and the wife of the make-up artist, who Ollie sensed was definitely the nervous type. They had arrived at London airport and were walking towards Customs when he decided to have some fun. Wearing a cloak that Fisher’s daughter thought made Oliver look ‘fairly sinister’, he sidled over to this woman and whispered in her ear, ‘Just give me the stuff once we get through Customs, all right,’ followed by a highly exaggerated wink. The woman went into hysterics, screeching at the Customs men, ‘I’ve got nothing to hide! I’ve got nothing to hide!’ and acting so suspiciously that she was immediately grabbed and subjected to a search.

  Things appeared to be improving when Ollie landed another small film role alongside Adam Faith and Shirley Anne Field in Beat Girl, about Soho coffee-bar culture and beatniks. Oliver has only a couple of lines and tries painfully hard to look languid and hip, grooving ridiculously to the modish chords of the John Barry Seven in the credit sequence until he resembles a deranged flowerpot man. The risqué storyline and tra
shy visuals earned the film an ‘X’ certificate. It seems desperately tame today, but one can see why Warwickshire Council for one banned it at the time on the grounds that it was ‘injurious to public morality’. One reason may have been the scene where the gang play chicken on a railway line by laying their heads on the metal rail.

  With money coming in, Ollie now looked for somewhere to put down roots, and the obvious place was Wimbledon. The flat they decided to rent, at 29 Woodside, near Wimbledon train station, was small and airless, but Ollie felt back where he belonged, especially important since he was involved in such a precarious business. ‘I needed an environment that was familiar from which to draw reassurance.’ Kate meanwhile had been sacked as a model after an astute photographer noticed her bump. It was up to Ollie now to single-handedly bring in the dosh and his agent managed to quickly line up bit parts in a couple of comedies. The Bulldog Breed was yet another Norman Wisdom film, almost indistinguishable from its churned-out predecessors; this is the one where Norman joins the navy and ends up getting blasted into space in a rocket. It was just a day’s work for Ollie, playing one of a gang of bovver boys who menace poor Norman in a cinema queue. It’s quite rough stuff: when Norman is felled, Ollie especially is seen putting the boot in, and his toecaps can’t have failed to connect with the comedy institution’s gonads. But rescue is at hand, thanks to the timely intervention of a trio of sailors, one of them played by Michael Caine, and for a moment these two future titans of British cinema square off against each other, until Ollie meekly backs down.

  Next stop was Elstree Studios, where Ollie joined other young actors Sandor Elès, Paul Massie and Gary Lockwood playing beatniks discussing art in a Parisian bistro. Their passionate discussion engages the interest of the lad from East Cheam himself, Tony Hancock, who has escaped the London rat race to realize his dream of becoming a great painter. It’s a pivotal moment in The Rebel, one of the best British film comedies ever made.

  A huge television star, Hancock was making his first foray into feature films and, taking no chances, he’d roped in his regular writing team of Ray Galton and Alan Simpson. Both men were often to be seen on the set, certainly on this particular day since they can still remember, over fifty years later, catching sight of the young Oliver and definitely sensing something special about him. ‘He was mesmerizing,’ says Simpson. ‘And it was obvious that the camera loved him. But he kept fluffing his lines. Now on a film you have a tight schedule and for one little speech there’s a limit to how many takes they’re going to do. And he was so good, but he kept fluffing it and the director yelled, “Cut. Go again.” I think they got up to seven takes and Reed fluffed every one.’ Witnessing all this and shaking his head in dismay, according to Galton, was the film’s producer. ‘And he kept saying to the director Robert Day, “He’s got to go. If he doesn’t get it right now he’s got to go. We can’t waste any more film, it’s costing money. Give the line to somebody else.” I don’t know whether anybody said anything to Oliver because on the next take he was absolutely perfect and it made the final cut.’

  By the close of the day the scene was in the can and Ollie offered Sandor Elès a lift back into London. According to Elès, they’d only been driving a few minutes when Oliver pulled the car into a lay-by and ‘started crying like a baby. Oliver was convinced he was an awful actor and would never be asked to do a film again.’ Elès tried to be positive and suggested a visit to his Uncle Carol. Oliver shot back a glare of hurt pride and indignation that burned away the tears in his eyes. As Elès would recall years later, ‘At that time Oliver had a bigger fear of nepotism than he did of failure.’

  Far from never being hired again, Oliver was about to land his big break in one of Hammer’s most ambitious productions ever and the resurrection of another classic movie monster: the werewolf.

  It was all thanks to horror make-up maestro Roy Ashton, who had turned Christopher Lee so effectively into Frankenstein’s monster, that Oliver was cast in The Curse of the Werewolf. Seeing him around Bray Studios, Ashton was convinced of the young actor’s suitability, if purely from a physical perspective. He had dark, penetrating looks, incredible bone structure, ‘and already looked like half a wolf when he was angry’. Hammer’s management remained unconvinced, though, that Oliver was sufficiently experienced to play so demanding a role.

  Terence Fisher had been assigned to the picture and immediately set up a screen test; the results put everyone’s mind at rest. ‘It was obvious that, experienced or not, Oliver was our man,’ said producer Anthony Hinds. ‘He was a very powerful actor.’ So, from being a bit-part player with just a handful of scenes to his name, Ollie was in a featured role and getting £90 a week. Writing in the film’s British press book, Fisher was already picking him for future fame: ‘Were I invited to predict sure stardom for an unknown young actor of today, and asked to back that prediction with a heavy bet, the youngster I’d pick would be 22-year-old Mr Reed.’

  Less of a shocker than previous Hammer horrors, The Curse of the Werewolf plays out more like a Greek tragedy. Oliver is Leon, the bastard child of the vile rape of a servant girl, played by Yvonne Romain, by a filthy, rabid beggar. Taken in by kindly scholar Alfredo (Clifford Evans, excellent in the role but one wonders why Hammer didn’t cast Cushing), Leon grows into a fine-looking young man but deep within him lurks a bestiality that each full moon is becoming harder to suppress. Unlike other screen monsters, Leon is not inherently evil. ‘He has not sold his soul to the devil, like Baron Frankenstein did,’ said Fisher. ‘He is more like Dracula, who was a cursed creature as well.’ Bringing exuberance and a great deal of physicality to the role, Oliver also exhibits real pathos and it is a performance that far surpasses that of Lon Chaney Junior in Universal’s 1941 classic The Wolf Man.

  It’s pretty late in the film before we see Oliver in total transformation but it’s well worth the wait, as it rates among the most exhilarating moments Hammer ever put on film. Locked in a jail cell, Leon tears his shirt to shreds as the animal side of his tortured soul is unleashed, and as he turns to face the camera the snarl Oliver manages to emanate is truly blood-curdling. Ripping off the cell door, Ollie was so lost in the moment that it scared the life out of Denis Shaw, a somewhat portly actor playing the jailer. ‘I picked up that door and threw it at him. It wasn’t a balsa-wood door – it was a real door. And Denis shat himself . . . literally. He shat himself.’

  Unleashed, the wolf hurls himself across roofs and bell towers as the predictable village mob descends with pitchforks and flaming torches. Stand-in Jackie Cooper did the more hazardous shots but Ollie was up for doing as much stunt work as possible. ‘He was a most courageous bloke,’ remembered Ashton. ‘There was nothing he wouldn’t dare do.’ That went for the laborious make-up process too. Ollie would turn up at the studio each morning at seven on the dot to sit for sometimes upwards of two hours while Ashton weaved his magic, and he never complained once. Using a plastic mask moulded from a plaster cast of Ollie’s head, dyed yak hair for fur, and wax plugs stuffed up his nostrils to create a snout, Ashton pulled off a masterstroke. By not covering his face completely, he allowed Ollie freedom of expression. Indeed, some of the film’s most poignant moments come when Ollie, in full monster make-up, is able to show us the helpless Leon trapped inside the snarling, dominant beast. Sometimes, instead of spending an hour peeling the make-up off at the end of the day, Ollie drove back home with the whole ghastly lot still on. ‘It was great fun sitting in the car at traffic lights.’

  For certain close-up shots the producers wanted Oliver to wear special contact lenses to lend his horrible visage a supernatural quality, but co-star Yvonne Romain remembers he got a terrible eye infection, ‘so they didn’t use them, which was much better because Oliver had these extraordinary eyes. He really was very beautiful in his youth and had the most wonderfully cinematic face, and those incredible eyes that stared right through you. I’d never seen anything like them.’

  Like Ollie, Yvonne was just starting o
ut in the business, and while they didn’t share any scenes in the film they often had lunch together in the studio canteen, ‘where they made the best bread and butter pudding; it was all home-cooked food’. Sometimes they’d idly chat on the set or in the make-up room and Yvonne recalls in particular Ollie’s interest in the fact that her mother came from Malta and his desire to visit the island one day. ‘And whenever I saw Ollie in the studio or playing in a scene there was no sign of him drinking, he was completely professional.’

  Filming ended in November 1960 after two months of enjoyable but diligent and hard work. Particularly difficult was the large amount of night shooting, as it rained incessantly and the huge bulbs in the arc lights kept exploding. Ollie loved the friendly but disciplined atmosphere at Bray, which really was a studio like no other then operating in the film business. ‘It was a lovely feeling working for Hammer,’ remembers Yvonne. ‘It was like a wonderful repertory company. They were very loyal to the people working for them, so we all did everything with good humour. There was nobody whinging like they do today: you just got on and did it. There was that feeling of everybody doing their best to make the picture great.’

  Ollie also thoroughly enjoyed working with Terence Fisher, not a bad director to have to show you the ropes. ‘Terry was a wonderful gentleman who loved a little bevvy. I found him very, very easy. I was a very nervous actor then, who’d done very little, and he just gave me my head.’ Fisher himself always looked back fondly on his time with Ollie, singling out his performance as Leon as one of the best he ever gave. Ashton too had nothing but praise. ‘He was a really professional chap. I thought he was marvellous. He put everything he had into that role, it was a great performance.’