What Fresh Lunacy is This?

by Robert Sellers

  Which made it all the more unfortunate that when The Curse of the Werewolf opened the following spring it was met with public indifference and critical vitriol. ‘A singularly repellent job of slaughter-house horror,’ lamented the Monthly Film Bulletin. Its failure at the box office meant Hammer never attempted another wolfman picture. At least Ollie had been able to make his mark, and indeed his impact was considerable among female fans. Going to see the film with Kate produced an extraordinary scene outside the cinema when he was recognized ‘and girls fought for the privilege of touching me’. According to a Hammer press release, after Werewolf Oliver received fifty proposals of marriage from complete strangers. ‘One girl said I reminded her of James Dean,’ he boasted to a reporter. ‘Another that she prayed for me every night.’ Many of these fan letters came from America, and one said: ‘Until recently I revered and worshipped the memory of Rudolph Valentino. But after seeing you in the Werewolf I have transferred all my allegiance to you.’

  *

  On 21 January 1961 Oliver became a father for the first time when Kate gave birth to a son they named Mark. By design or otherwise, it did seem to be a fortuitous time to start a family, with Oliver having firmly established himself in Hammer’s repertory company of actors; in 1961 alone he’d make three films for them. However, there did appear to be a lack of imagination among their casting directors since Oliver would invariably be asked to play villains, no doubt because of his intimidating physical presence. This ‘typecasting’ did begin to grate after a few years, especially since his performance as Leon had proved he was more than capable of playing a romantic lead. But for now he was happy to play the thug. After all, it paid the rent, and kept Mark in nappies and himself in beer.

  The Damned, which Ollie made for Hammer in the spring of 1961, is among the most interesting of his early pictures. Films and Filming called it ‘undoubtedly one of the most important British films of the year, even, perhaps, of the 60s’. It saw him work for Joseph Losey, a director then blacklisted in his native America by Senator McCarthy’s anti-Communist witch-hunt. A clever and intoxicating mix of cold war drama, seaside teddy boy flick and sci-fi drama, The Damned is about as bleak as any British film got in this period, with its cautionary tale of innocents stumbling upon a secret government programme where imprisoned radioactive children are being schooled to repopulate the planet after a nuclear war.

  Oliver plays King, who is clearly psychotic and harbours an unhealthy obsession with his kid sister (played by Shirley Anne Field), getting her to flirt with older men so his gang can rob and beat them up. A malevolent creation, Oliver performs with such brooding intensity that he practically steals the film from the two main leads. Whistling and swaggering around the streets of an out-of-season Weymouth, King and his predatory cohorts uncannily resemble the choreographed gang violence of Alex and his Droogs in Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange. Interestingly, in the late sixties Ken Russell was mooted as a possible director for Clockwork, with the inevitable consequence of Ollie playing Alex, which would have been quite something to behold.

  The collaboration between Oliver and Losey appears to have been a little rocky but ultimately a fruitful one, with Ollie recalling how the director would take the cast out to dinner and preach anti-bomb stuff to them. ‘He was very left of centre.’ Losey liked the young actor enormously. ‘He had talent but no training at all and he already had a certain arrogance. So he wasn’t easy.’ Despite that, the two men remained on friendly terms. ‘And I think there is a certain mutual respect,’ Losey reflected years later.

  Within a week of finishing work on The Damned, Ollie was required on another Hammer adventure, shot on location in Black Park. Adjacent to Pinewood Studios, Black Park’s woods and lakes are as familiar to Hammer fans as gravel pits are to advocates of seventies-era Doctor Who, and many a wandering strumpet or rampant horse and carriage has traversed its atmospheric avenues of pine trees. A passable Transylvania then, but by no stretch of the imagination the setting for a pirate movie. Hammer couldn’t even afford a boat! With its penny-dreadful title, The Pirates of Blood River features Ollie as one of a gang of cut-throats, led by an eye-patched Christopher Lee, who invade a community of persecuted Huguenots in the belief they are storing treasure. In a now infamous scene Lee leads his crew across a swamp; in reality a condemned pond in Black Park. Even the stunt men refused to go into the water, and yet Ollie, Lee and others were obliged somehow to remain in character as foul-stinking liquid plopped about unerringly near their mouths. So soft was the mud beneath their feet, and the pathway so littered with debris and dead wood, that some of the shorter actors had to be held up by their colleagues lest they go under completely. At one point Ollie does battle with a fellow cut-throat and they both thrash about in the water, so it’s no surprise to learn that the experience resulted in an eye and ear infection for Ollie that required hospital treatment. The icing on the cake arrived a few days later when it was discovered that the septic tanks over at Pinewood ran into this very pond.

  Ollie’s big moment in the film is a sword fight with actor Peter Arne, finishing with Ollie getting run through. Before keeling over, he mumbles an effectively pitiful ‘Mama’. Other dimensions were added to his characterization, mainly on a physical level. In one scene a stunt man refused to jump over a high wall. Not only did Ollie bound over the obstacle but did so with a sword in his mouth. Director John Gilling fired the stunt man on the spot. ‘From that time on, Gilling thought I was really quite something, because I’d do things that stunt men wouldn’t do. It was only because I was stupid!’

  In his memoirs Christopher Lee described how he often picked Oliver up in his second-hand Merc on the Cromwell Road in Earls Court and drove him to Bray Studios. ‘He sat in the back seat, thin, nervous and worried, muttering about leaving the industry and how he wasn’t cut out to be an actor.’ It was during these car journeys that they developed a close friendship. Sometimes Lee would be accompanied by Denis Shaw, who had a small part in the film. Shaw, who’d been the jailer in Werewolf whom Ollie flattened with the door, was a character actor specializing in slimy ne’er-do-wells and a familiar face around the pubs and drinking dens of Soho. Lee had no choice but to allow Shaw to tag along, despite his regular condition (pissed) and his habit of chain-smoking in the front seat, which once resulted in the car almost catching fire. What’s interesting here is Lee’s belief that Shaw was a bad influence on Oliver and that, whenever he picked them up, ‘they’d obviously been through Soho the night before’. Lee also believed it was Shaw who got Ollie into most of his pub fights, including ‘the one where he got cut up. He’d start the trouble, then push Ollie in.’

  In September Ollie started work on his third film for Hammer that year, Captain Clegg, based loosely on Russell Thorndike’s popular Dr Syn novels and starring Peter Cushing. This too had something of a piratical flavour to it, with its gang of smugglers in an English coastal village trying to outwit the king’s revenue officers. Oliver plays Harry, the squire’s son and a secret member of the smugglers, in love with sultry barmaid Yvonne Romain. Their love affair is incidental to the film’s more gripping elements of marsh phantoms and mute savages running amok, but it’s nicely played all the same and Oliver must have drawn encouragement from being cast as a dashing hero for a change and working with Yvonne, for whom he had begun to develop a crush. ‘He was very dashing was Oliver, but he was complex,’ says the actress, who was never aware of Oliver’s feelings for her. ‘You could tell that he wouldn’t have wanted to show his feelings. He was very shy about that kind of thing.’

  In one scene Harry is shot in the arm during a skirmish and when Cushing helps to take off his bandage Ollie plays the moment for all it is worth, wincing in pain. A few days later he received a letter from his venerable co-star. ‘I think you’re going to go a very long way, Oliver,’ it began. ‘But always remember, if you are hurt, you don’t have to act hurt. If somebody grabs you, just blink. The screen is so big that even the slightest movement m
akes the point.’ Oliver cherished Cushing’s advice and we see it in action in almost every subsequent performance, for the power of understatement is central to so many of his great screen moments. ‘To keep things very still and very slow can be extremely effective on screen,’ says Mark. ‘He was very aware that on stage you obviously had to be very big in order for people sitting at the back to see anything, whereas with a camera stuck up your nose you had to do very little for it to be able to pick up things. Less is more.’

  For Ollie, it was advice that came in handy just a few days later while watching Yvonne play a scene. ‘It was a very long and intense scene,’ she remembers. ‘And Oliver was incredibly kind because afterwards I asked if it was all right and he said, “Can I tell you something? You won’t be offended?” I said, “No, no, any advice, please.” He said, “Just try being more still.” Now, I’m by nature quite an animated person. He said, “Remember that movie screen has got you blown up and every move you make is so much bigger, so less is more.” I did the scene again and the difference was extraordinary. Afterwards I went up to him and thanked him. He was so helpful. And a wonderful actor.’

  The Wimbledon Gang

  All this fame and glamour that Ollie was beginning to cultivate left a huge impression on Simon, then attending King’s College School. ‘No one had a brother who was an actor, not only an actor but one who was starting to do pretty well. So it was a very exciting time for me.’ Often Ollie would turn up to see him play cricket for his school, matches that were all-day affairs, going on until seven in the evening. ‘So Ollie would go to the pub about noon and very quickly we got into a ritual where I knew around three o’clock he’d arrive with his mates; you could hear them coming down the lane. They’d sit on benches watching and within about five minutes the chants would start. Because one of our players had a very short haircut it was, “Come on, marine!” Then we had Dudley Owen Thomas [born in Kenya and played for Surrey], so they’d shout in a West Indian accent, “Come on, Dudleeey.” They’d pretend they were West Indian fans for half an hour for some reason. It was a bit of an embarrassment but also it was very funny.’

  Simon was very different from Oliver. He was shy and reserved and, looking back, believes that his father encouraged him to mix with Oliver and Kate in an attempt to put some rough edges on him. ‘And I developed a few, not many, but Ollie and Kate showed me a different kind of life.’ A place Simon got to know well during this period was Woodland Wines, an off-licence on the Ridgeway in Wimbledon where Ollie and his mates sat most afternoons on crates in the back storeroom drinking while waiting for the pubs to open again. ‘I’d be around fourteen years old and walking back from school I’d pop in and there would be Oliver throwing me a can of very heavy lager.’ Something of a regular, Simon was allowed to bring along a couple of mates. ‘So I was taking in friends from class and, as you can imagine, I became fairly popular at school. Oliver had a Mini at the time and I remember him driving me home early one night and my mother seeing my feet sticking out of the window. That sort of thing happened. Ollie took on a kind of heroic form for me during that period. It was all good.’

  Very early on in his career Ollie cultivated a clique of friends whom he drank regularly with and had fun with, and Woodland Wines was one of their first hang-outs. As Ollie’s fame grew over the years his father was to call these people hangers-on; they were anything but. Besides, Ollie could always smell a rat. ‘As soon as there was anything artificial about a person or the way they treated him, Oliver would run a mile,’ says Simon. ‘For the rest he’d treat them as equals. Except financially: he knew he was the earner and he was generous, and so most of the time he’d buy the drinks or buy the meal. But I don’t think any of them were there for the freebies. I think they were there for the same reason Ollie was there, to have a good time.’ Key among this group were Johnny Placett and Mick Fryer, lifelong friends of Ollie. Placett ran a sign-making business and met Oliver one night in the Swan, where the young actor was playing darts for money. The bond was instant, so similar were they in nature. ‘I’ve never met anyone that was so much like me,’ says Placett today. ‘That’s why I miss him so much. He was irreplaceable.’

  It was in the Swan that Mick Fryer first met Ollie, or rather Kate. He’d been training at Rosslyn Park Rugby Club and often popped into the Swan before going home. This particular evening he spied a very attractive woman at the bar. Next to her was a very tall and annoying American, effing and blinding. ‘Would you mind, with the language,’ said Mick. There was a bit of a stand-off when suddenly Oliver came in and asked, ‘What’s going on?’ Kate smiled and said, ‘This guy has just told Lenny to curb his language in front of me.’ Ollie burst out laughing. ‘Quite right as well. Have a pint.’ The two of them got talking. ‘You look fit,’ said Ollie. Indeed Mick was, being in the building trade. ‘Any good at arm-wrestling?’ said Ollie. The challenge was on. ‘Let’s see how good you are.’ Mick won. ‘And that was the night I met Oliver. I realized he was a lunatic pretty quickly. And so was I. That’s what attracted me to him, he was mad. And I was looking for madness, the same as he was. That’s why we got on so well together.’ They’d do outrageous things, like stuffing a lit candle up their nose for a bet. Another time, on the lash one Sunday afternoon, they ended up in Sloane Square, and right outside the Royal Court Theatre decided to lie down in the middle of the road and stop the traffic. After ten minutes, amid a big build-up of traffic with all horns blazing, they got up and moved off.

  Other Wimbledon mates included Raymond Guster, a lifeguard and later an entertainments manager at a holiday camp. When Mark was young he remembers ‘Gus’, who had a suitcase of props, dressing up as a clown at his birthday parties. There was Bill Dobson, who worked in the boiler room of a hospital, and Ken Burgess, who’d been in the navy. Conspicuously absent from this group was any representative of the film business. Throughout his life Ollie rarely socialized with his fellow actors. ‘I’m more interested in my barman and the Scotch he’s got for me than some actor rambling on about his next film.’ It wasn’t that he disliked them: he just had nothing in common with them. Instead he preferred mixing with normal, everyday folk, the road diggers, carpenters, builders, people he’d meet in pubs. ‘He always used to say, these are the real people,’ recalls his daughter Sarah. ‘These are the people that make everything work on a day-to-day basis, these are the people I enjoy spending time with. Honesty was very important to him and he felt that these were just good, honest people. There was no different faces to them.’ And gradually the circle grew and many of these friendships were to last pretty much Oliver’s whole life. He felt comfortable with them, there was no bullshit, they were good at telling stories and joining in with his larks and madness; they refused to get old.

  Mick Monks joined Ollie’s Wimbledon gang pretty early on. He worked backstage at the Wimbledon Theatre and met Ollie one night in the Hand in Hand. Soon he was sharing jars at Woodland Wines and getting roped into the occasional pub crawl. There was also the ‘pissnic,’ an Ollie invention that was a picnic with booze. The gang would be drinking in the Dog and Fox or the Rose and Crown when the cry would ring out, ‘Right, pissnic’, and they would disperse around the neighbouring shops to pick up ham, bread and cheese, and booze. ‘Then we’d all meet on the Common and stay there until the pub opened again,’ says Monks. ‘And if anybody was passing that you fancied or looked a bit of fun, you said, come and join us and have a drink.’

  If it wasn’t pissnics Ollie would always come up with some other way to have fun, usually when he was bored, which was often. He termed these ‘Happenings’. ‘They didn’t have to involve drink,’ says Simon, ‘but it usually was alcohol-fuelled. “What are we going to do now?” he’d say. “Let’s have a Happening.” So he’d drive to Wales just for the day, stuff like that. I think the fact that Oliver had an extremely low boredom threshold was a key factor in his life because the big problems arose when the work dried up and he had a lot of time on his hands. Time was a
big issue for him, and filling the hours without getting too bored. Boredom was a big thing for Oliver.’ This was something else he shared with Herbert Beerbohm Tree, who once declared, ‘Boredom is something to defend oneself against.’

  Those long gaps of time that inevitably occur between film and TV jobs might have been more creatively filled by doing theatre, a couple of weeks in rep or the West End, but Oliver had no interest whatsoever in paying his dues by going on the stage. In this he may be unique, as the only British actor to achieve fame in the cinema who never once stepped on the boards in any capacity. ‘Most actors want to hear people clapping. I don’t need applause,’ he once said. Opportunity, even in those early days, was there if he’d wanted it, at arguably the country’s most prestigious theatre. According to Catherine Feller, who played the love interest in The Curse of the Werewolf, the Memorial Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon was making overtures to Oliver to join what was soon to become known as the Royal Shakespeare Company, this at a time when Peter O’Toole had just made a huge impact there and the company comprised other young, thrusting talent like Ian Richardson, Diana Rigg and Ian Holm. When Oliver turned down the offer, Catherine told him he was making a terrible mistake, that a season at the Memorial Theatre would stretch and develop him as an actor far better than appearing in Hammer Grand Guignols. Ollie replied, ‘No, I shall do these films and become famous. Then I will choose what to do next.’ In retrospect he was right: Hammer was the perfect training ground. Even Catherine couldn’t fail to recognize his potential. ‘He was a very strong personality. He had a lot of confidence and a lot of animal charisma. There was no doubt that this was a man with a future.’

  Even if he’d wanted to do stage work, Oliver would not have coped with the task of reciting the same lines night after night for months on end. ‘I don’t think he had the discipline for theatre,’ says friend and colleague Georgina Hale. ‘He would have been too pissed, wouldn’t he, to come in and do all those hours of rehearsing and then go home and learn the lines. And then would he have arrived at night to be on stage? Theatre work is a discipline, it’s a killer. Ollie would never have made it.’