Diana Rigg & Oliver Reed: The Shocking Truth!

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I went over to Cannon and helped them get up and running as they put four features into simultaneous production. And this was a shame, because I have to confess that overall I enjoyed The Crimson Horror much more than most of the other episodes in the last year, its only real rival being The Snowmen (another Paternoster Street Gang story, funnily enough). Creatively, I think his intensity and rage as well as his enormous drive as a fighter came from the confusion of his early years, being an extremely intelligent person, but hindered by his learning disability.

Reed died from a heart attack during a break from filming Gladiator in Valletta, Malta, on the afternoon of 2 May 1999. A funeral for Reed was held in Ireland in Churchtown, [67] where he had resided during the last years of his life. However, the mob of homeless people clearly would like there to be some trouble, and set upon Maxwell, bloodily stabbing and hacking him to death, all in sight of an oddly detached policeman and a poster advertising a production of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. The first time I ever saw Oliver Reed in a movie was when he played Bill Sykes in his uncle Carol’s production of OLIVER!The first episodes of series 5 were the ones I initially watched as a swivel-eyed devotee, anyway, so I know them quite well. I was on good terms with Hernando Courtright, known as “El Padrino del Casa” who owned the Beverly Wilshire at the time, and Reed was welcomed back into the El Padrino Room to drink, but still banned from staying as a guest. He says he was contemplating quitting acting when Nicolas Roeg cast him in Castaway (1986) as the middle-aged Gerald Kingsland, who advertises for a "wife" (played by Amanda Donohoe) to live on a desert island with him for a year. Moustapha had somehow connected with Muammar Gaddafi who financed THE LION OF THE DESERT, which was a biography of Omar Mukhtar, a national hero in Libya and Gaddafi’s personal hero.

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. And that’s just some of the present day sequences: the stuff set in the late sixties is arguably much worse. Reed had an uncredited bit-part in Russell's Mahler (1974), was the lead in Blue Blood (1973) and And Then There Were None (1974), produced by Harry Alan Towers. I think both Oliver Reed and Diana Rigg are tremendous actors, neither of whom had the big-screen career their talents deserved, and so I can only assume the lack of chemistry between them is down to the script: Rigg is almost playing a slightly more vulnerable variation on her Mrs Peel character, while Reed is stuck with the dashing male lead, the kind of role which doesn’t require the intensity and suggestion of inner darkness which were his real strengths.

The director, Salem Kapsaski, was friends with the dearly departed Ken Russell and I have often wished both Ken and Ollie Reed were still with us to turn this movie inside out faster than you can say Timothy Carey and Beach Blanket BINGO! The first episode of series 5, which one of the high-numbers TV channel had decided to rerun with near-perfect timing. I sort of hope this is misguided, because it’s not a great movie by any chalk – the actors do their best, but the script is poor, the direction not especially impressive, and some of the special effects are absolutely awful.

Royal Flash (1975) reunited him with Richard Lester and George MacDonald Fraser, playing Otto von Bismarck. It initially looks like this is going to be a love letter to the glamour of that period, the London of Carnaby Street and the Beatles and their peers – a young Cilla Black appears as a character – something only emphasised by the appearance in the cast of such iconic sixties faces as Diana Rigg, Terence Stamp, and Rita Tushingham. In addition to their insiders/outside status, Ollie was a disruptive kid and suffered from undiagnosed dyslexia into his late 20s. Clash of Loyalties) (1983), which dealt with Leachman's exploits during the 1920 revolution in Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq). His “drunky” antics don’t play any better today with modern, younger audiences than Dean Martin’s do.It was the game that made the biggest splash in the press during the ’60s and ’70s, the endless postwar party. After playing a villain in a horror movie, The Shuttered Room (1967), he did a third with Winner, I'll Never Forget What's'isname (1967), co-starring with Orson Welles. Later, in the 1970s, I was tremendously impressed with Oliver Reed’s work with director Ken Russell. He appeared uncredited in Ken Annakin's film Value for Money (1955) and Norman Wisdom's film The Square Peg (1958).

Is the media’s need for sensational headlines to blame or is there just a general misunderstanding of the man and the impressive body of work he left behind? I’m hoping for more of the same over the next fortnight; not, admittedly, with much expectation of them actually appearing. The Avengers quite often resembles a slightly kinky version of the 60s Batman TV show, and never more than here.He played the role of Sebastian in the ITV series It's Cold Outside, which was popular with teenagers, making him an idol for the first time.