What Fresh Lunacy is This?

by Robert Sellers

  Periodically in his career Oliver would be asked to consider stage work. After his success in The Who’s Tommy he was inundated with offers to do musicals. In 1968 Jonathan Miller wanted him to play Richard III in a theatrical production he was directing. The approach came when Oliver was making Women in Love. ‘I said to him, “Oh, you should do it,”’ recalls Glenda Jackson. ‘But he didn’t. He had a very low boredom threshold and the idea of doing eight performances a week would have frightened him to death. It would have bored him. Also, I think he was very clear in his own mind that he was a star. He would always come on the set as though he was in charge of the whole thing; there was that undercurrent all the time, that he was a star, that was his thing, I’m a star. But he was completely unsure that he was an actor.’

  Insecurity almost certainly did play a part, the fear that he wasn’t good enough technically and would be exposed. ‘On the one or two occasions when I took him scripts with the idea of him going on the stage, he chickened out,’ reveals David. ‘And he couldn’t have done it stone-cold sober, he’d have been too shy.’ Even as late as 1991, when Dublin was the European capital of culture, Oliver was asked to play Brendan Behan in a one-man play. The concept was for Ollie as Behan to talk to the audience as he sat by the footlights having a bevvy. ‘I remember he ummed and aahed about it,’ says Mark. ‘He’d say to me, “Should I do it?” And I’d say, “Well, it’s a great honour to be invited to play one of their heroes.” But in the end it was the idea of doing that show for weeks on end, doing the same things seven times a week, I just don’t think he could get his head round that, because it lacked the spontaneity of film. I think that’s probably what theatre represented to him, it was drudgery, it was repetition, not moving on. At least with a movie you do it, it’s in the can, and then you move on to the next thing.’

  The physical act of going to the theatre didn’t enthral Oliver either, the stuffiness of it and the perceived artificiality of the acting. He much preferred going to the cinema in those early years, devouring sometimes up to three films a week. The actor to whom he found himself especially drawn was Marlon Brando, who spoke – the cliché is that he mumbled – in a brooding, quiet manner which heavily influenced Ollie. He also spoke with the ring of truth, like someone you’d meet in the street, and in a manner redolent of his blue-collar origins; he was one of the masses. Most British film stars of the time were primarily from the privileged classes or projected a clean-cut image: the likes of David Niven, Kenneth More and Jack Hawkins. ‘The sorts of actors that always looked like they’d go down with their ships,’ joked Ollie. All that was about to change in dramatic fashion.

  In the same month as Ollie finished work on The Curse of the Werewolf, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning opened in London cinemas, creating a New Wave in British filmmaking and turning the hitherto unknown Albert Finney into an overnight star. It was the age of ‘kitchen-sink’ realism and the Angry Young Man, and saw the emergence of a startling generation of new British actors with working-class roots, like Michael Caine and Sean Connery. Now, Ollie was anything but working-class: he didn’t grow up in a tenement block next to a slag heap. He was, however, perceptive enough to realize that what was beginning to happen around him was of huge significance. ‘I thought, gosh, blimey, I’d like to grab some of that. So I immediately started getting into fights in pubs, as I thought it was the thing to do, that I could emulate these angry young men.’ He even auditioned for Joan Littlewood, the doyenne of all that was new and experimental in theatre. When he heard she was making a film he turned up all mean and moody, hitting imaginary punchbags, acting the way he thought East End hard nuts behaved. Littlewood wasn’t impressed, or saw right through him, and sent him packing.

  There may have been another reason why Oliver was so keen to embrace this new acting culture: it was a way of escaping from his own privileged roots. ‘You could see that he was well bred and was fighting it all the time,’ reveals director Michael Apted, who worked with Ollie in the early seventies. ‘In the sense that he wouldn’t acknowledge that he was posh. He was a rough boy, he preferred the rough image rather than the other image. But there was no hiding his breeding.’ Michael Crawford, who worked with Ollie twice over the years, also recognized that there was something inside him that rebelled against his background and authority in general. ‘And also against his natural advantages in life, including his talent. Part of him wanted to tear it all down, and perhaps this is what gave him the air of danger that made him stand out among English actors of his generation.’

  Ollie returned to Bray in July 1962 for another Hammer picture, not a gothic horror this time but a contemporary thriller called Paranoiac, from the prolific pen of Jimmy Sangster, who’d written the studio’s Dracula and Frankenstein movies. He’d also been responsible for The Pirates of Blood River, during which he’d become friends with Ollie or, more accurately, a drinking companion. ‘But, as in most things, Oliver overdid things and rather scared me off.’ The role on offer was the best of Ollie’s career so far: Simon Ashby, the most unhinged member of a family that resides in the sort of gothic manor house where you expect to hear eerie organ music at midnight. With his parents dead, Simon lives with his daffy aunt and suicidal sister and is set to inherit the family fortune when his brother, long presumed dead, suddenly turns up. Or is it an impostor? A not very original premise but quite nicely done all the same by renowned cinematographer turned director Freddie Francis.

  Playing the sister, and securing top billing, was Janette Scott, a former child star. All these years later Janette can still remember meeting Oliver for the first time out on location in Dorset. ‘My memory is of someone who was rather shy, which is amazing when you think of what he became. I was the youngest person on the set and I had never heard of Ollie or seen him in anything and because he appeared so nervous and shy I felt it was my duty, as sort of the star of the show, to befriend him and relax him a little bit.’ This she did on that first day of shooting by sharing her lunch with him and over the course of their time on location they got to know each other well. ‘I thought all this was being friendly, I didn’t realize how far it was going with him. When we moved into Bray Ollie was much more relaxed. It was then that he started falling for me.’

  At first Janette thought it was all very sweet, like one of those crushes you have at school. Luckily it didn’t impinge on the working atmosphere and everyone came away thinking they’d made a pretty solid chiller. ‘Oliver was very good in the film,’ says Janette. ‘Slightly over the top but right for what he was doing and for the part he was playing.’ Sangster agreed. ‘He stole the picture and gave a really great over-the-top performance.’ When the film opened in America Hollywood’s industry bible Variety reported that Oliver played ‘with demonic skill’.

  On the last day of filming, cast and crew said their goodbyes at the wrap party. Janette saw Oliver brooding in the background and went over to wish him luck for the future. She was convinced she’d never see him again. ‘Then he began calling me up in the middle of the night. It was getting a little bit out of hand but I thought nothing I couldn’t handle.’ A little while later Janette started work on another movie at the MGM Studios in Borehamwood. Ollie found out; certainly Janette hadn’t told him. ‘Anyway he turned up on the set. Of course, we all made him feel very welcome – how are you?, come and have lunch, that sort of thing – but then he came the next day and the next day. I don’t know if he was popping pills or drunk but he was in a bit of a state and disturbing the actual scenes when we were shooting them. Sadly it got to the point where the director had to bar him from the set and then from the actual studios; the guards at the gate were told not to let him in.’

  Janette had been filming for a couple of weeks when one night Oliver was waiting for her in his car outside the studio and started following her home. ‘And he actually forced me off the road. Thank God he forced me on to a grass verge, so although I was really panicky and frightened I wasn’t hurt. He said he had to see me
, you know, the usual sort of things one says when one is desperately in love. And I was so frightened at that point that I said yes, let’s drive into town and I’ll meet you somewhere. He followed me very closely in his car, so I couldn’t go straight to my home. We went to a pub, I think in Chelsea, because I really didn’t know what to do with him and I was afraid. We sat down and talked, I told him I had to get to the studios the next morning, we couldn’t see each other. And then I left him in the pub, went back to my car, which fortunately was still working, and drove off. I never saw him again.’

  It was only later that Janette discovered Ollie was married. ‘And he had a child! I knew nothing of this! Absolutely nothing. He never said anything, and nobody at the studio mentioned he was married. Nothing.’ Only now did it begin to dawn on Janette that Oliver was probably making those late-night phone calls to her from the home where his wife and child lay asleep. Or was he traipsing off to use a public phonebox? Both images conjure up feelings of sadness and desperation.

  There’s little doubt that what Ollie felt for Janette, who was married herself at the time to TV host and songwriter Jackie Rae, was sincere and meaningful and not merely a desire for a quick fling. Janette remembers, while still working on Paranoiac, one weekend when Oliver invited her on a nostalgic drive to see one of his old schools. Other times she’d invite him for Sunday lunch at her home, where he made quite an impression on her mother, the actress Thora Hird. All very amiable, but then, during the filming of Paranoiac, Oliver had been ‘completely courteous and very sweet,’ confirms Janette. ‘He also had a great sense of humour. He gave the impression, and I’m sure it was a true impression, of being slightly timid. I’ve an awful feeling that it was getting over this fear that he got the Dutch courage with the booze. Watching Paranoiac again recently, one of the scenes made me very sad, where his character gets very, very drunk in a pub and the people in the pub are well aware of how drunk and silly he’s being. And I thought to myself, wasn’t he in Malta in a pub with sailors getting drunk when he died? I thought, oh my God, I wonder if it was like this. I wonder if his last night on earth was something like this.’

  Ollie was still working on Paranoiac when he tested for a film that promised to tackle the dark underbelly of early-sixties youth culture. Producer Anthony Perry vividly recalls his audition. ‘We didn’t want stars, we wanted to find new people. And we spent ages interviewing actors. I think it was Mike Stanley Evans, an executive over at Rank, who said, “I saw a guy called Oliver Reed, you should get him.” He came to see us and he was bright, sharp, and interested, and he’d taken the trouble to find out something about what he was being interviewed for. And we loved him and from that day on we pretty much built the film around him. Clearly he had to be the central character. He had a real presence, it was tangible. Normally, if you’re casting a lead, you run a film to see what they look like, but not in Ollie’s case: we hired him straightaway.’

  The plot of The Party’s Over concerns a posh American girl called Melina who escapes her domineering father by coming to London, where she falls in with a pack of hedonistic beatnik types led by a highly magnetic Ollie. After a riotous drunken party one of the group, Phil, assaults Melina, believing her to be drunk, only to discover later that she’s actually dead. The father arrives to take her body back to America. Meanwhile Phil commits suicide and the pack disperses. It was an interesting and edgy premise and part of the attraction of doing it for Perry and his fellow filmmakers, middle-aged and middle-class every one of them, was an opportunity to get down with the kids. They wanted to be ‘with it’, even though they had little idea of what ‘it’ was and even less grasp, as Perry freely admits, of the actual subject matter, of these groups of youths who were dropping out of society. ‘It was a very innocent and naive time,’ he insists. ‘For instance, marijuana was called pot, but in fact most people still thought pot was a place you grew flowers in.’ As a result, most of the characters in The Party’s Over come over as rather middle-class dropouts. ‘Ollie was the only one who seemed to know about this kind of lifestyle,’ says Perry. ‘He appeared to have a working-class background and a working-class knowledge. Of course, he didn’t really have either – he came very much from our world – but he was quite intelligent and tuned in actually. He certainly did get a grasp of what the film was about.’

  Shooting of the film, which was partly funded by Rank, got under way in September, under the direction of Guy Hamilton, in a dilapidated house in Chelsea rented by the production company. Almost from day one a young actress by the name of Katherine Woodville felt herself naturally gravitating towards Ollie; they’d always share their lunch together and chat and joke between takes. ‘We felt so comfortable with each other. He was a very sensitive person and yet he was also very bold and confident and that’s an unusual mixture. I saw a man who was truly confident about who he was, he never tried to be something he wasn’t, and I liked that a lot about him. It wasn’t egotism or cockiness, he was just comfortable in his own skin. Nor was it necessarily macho. Sometimes the word “macho” implies that somebody is being overly masculine; he wasn’t like that. He was such fun to work with and have as a buddy on the set.’

  It was a very different story for California-born Louise Sorel, brought over to play Melina. Her first meeting with Ollie was on Albert Bridge at 4 a.m., to shoot a scene, ‘and he scared the hell out of me. I thought he was sexy and dangerous.’ Theirs was an odd sort of relationship. ‘He cajoled me, teased me, and tested me constantly. After I finished my scenes I went to Paris for a little while and when I came back to London I visited the set and finally was able to ask Oliver why he’d treated me so strangely. His answer was that he thought I was an Actors Studio type and didn’t like the thought. I set him straight and we hugged.’ A misunderstanding had soured a potentially more rewarding relationship since Louise liked him very much. ‘Oliver was dynamic and wonderfully instinctive in his acting. He also had an innate theatricality. I did think he was going to make a mark and burst on the scene. He was so very full of life but there was also something vulnerable and sad in him.’

  Katherine identified this vulnerability too, and a sensitivity that translated itself into his work. ‘And that gave him more facets than most other actors. In The Party’s Over, Oliver really brought a very strong presence to that character. You could see a thinking person underneath it, which was not dissimilar to himself. He was also very much in the moment as a performer. When you were playing a scene with him he was “there”, he wasn’t somewhere else.’

  Perry also got to know and like Oliver during the shoot, finding him highly professional. But there was one incident that the producer has never forgotten. The house used for the bulk of interiors was in such a state of decay that it had been earmarked for demolition. Most of the party scenes were shot there, including the memorable moment when Ollie enters a room with a spliff a foot long dangling from his mouth, and when told to drop dead by a girlfriend casually jumps out of the window. Perry decided to hold the cast and crew wrap party at the house too. ‘We tore walls out and had a bath full of ice and champagne. Anyway, a couple of yobs tried to gate-crash it and Ollie wanted to kill them, and that’s the only time I saw this part of his character. I didn’t realize there was this violence in him. I did see a man who very much wanted to be violent and I had to stop him because he was going to kill them. These two lads realized this and they were frightened. I told them to fuck off pretty damn quick. He really wanted to do damage to them.’

  Incredibly, when The Party’s Over was submitted to the British Board of Film Classification, the chief censor, John Trevelyan, refused it a certificate, at that time an unprecedented decision against a British film. The main sticking point was the scene where Melina’s corpse was sexually interfered with, necrophilia being a pretty racy issue for 1962. In a letter to Perry, Trevelyan (a former schoolteacher) called the film ‘unpleasant and rather offensive’ and ‘a dangerous example to the young’. True, Ollie’s character and his c
ohorts certainly lead a decadent lifestyle of drink, drugs and sex, and while Trevelyan appreciated the fact that the filmmakers had attempted to show this as not being a very estimable way of life, ‘In terms of the ordinary cinema audience, which is not markedly intelligent or subtle [author’s italics], this moral does not seem to us to be nearly strong enough.’ Interesting, isn’t it, that Britain’s chief censor for over ten years believed the average movie punter a moron?

  Certainly Guy Hamilton had no time for Trevelyan. ‘I always thought that he was the sort of censor who went around sniffing bicycle saddles.’ Years later Hamilton revealed that the censors said they could release the film if in the last reel Ollie and his gang all got run over by a bus. ‘I couldn’t see the point.’ The consequence of all this was that The Party’s Over remained unseen, which didn’t do Ollie’s career any good at all. Here was a highly accomplished central performance that slipped under the public radar and went unheralded by critics and the industry. Finally in 1965 Rank sold a cut version to an exploitation company and the film was given a limited release before fading into total obscurity. That was until 2010, when the British Film Institute brought it out on DVD to a favourable critical response. Philip French in The Observer went so far as to call the film ‘of considerable historic interest. It was made at the point when our native cinema was switching from the observation of the northern working class to the celebration of swinging London.’

  Perry finds it amusing that his film has been rediscovered as a minor classic, mainly because he doesn’t particularly rate it. ‘We all wanted desperately to do something different. But we failed. I just don’t think we were smart enough to do it really well.’ The exception is Oliver, who is utterly compelling, taking control and dominating every scene he’s in. Katherine Woodville for one remembers the sensation of watching off set something special emerging. ‘Oliver had the sort of presence that would indicate to other people that he was a star in the making, but I don’t know how convinced he was about making it in the business. But he had a very strong personality without being in any sense loud or big, just by being, his energy was such.’