Spiking snooker ace Alex Higgins's whisky with Chanel perfume, followed by Higgins squirting washing-up liquid in his creme de menthe.And very often I have hit someone only to avoid being hit myself.'Įscapades which either he or others have recounted include: 'But I don't punch people any more I am too old for that now. 'That is why, if I go on a chat show, I give them the very thing they want, and sometimes I go over the top,' he said. The actor explained his behaviour by saying that having 'cultivated the image of a baddie', he would pursue it, if it was what people wanted to see. His hard-drinking reputation and the scrapes he found himself in almost overshadowed later films, including Musketeers' Triple Echo and Castaway. His larger-than-life screen presence was capitalised on by Ken Russell, who cast him in Debussy on television and then in the films Women in Love, The Devils and Tommy.īut it was the nude wrestling scene with Alan Bates in the 1969 film Women in Love that started the wave of publicity that later threatened to engulf Reed. He was quickly cast as the type of actor people 'love to hate' and became one of the handful of British actors never out of a well-paid job. The lead role in a BBC series, playing Richard of Gloucester, led to a string of television parts before the movies beckoned in the shape of Hammer horror films. He ran away from the family home in Tunbridge Wells, Kent, to become a Soho strip club bouncer, fairground boxer and hospital porter.Īcting soon followed, during his national service in Hong Kong, and his long search for a showbusiness break began soon after. The BBC's Arts Correspondent Nick Higham looks back at Oliver Reed's careerīut by the time he hit his teens, his wild streak had already surfaced.

He was born in Wimbledon, south London, on 13 February 1938. His career took off in the 1960s, but he found greater fame as a hard-drinking hellraiser. Oliver Reed will probably be better remembered for his off-screen antics than his work as an actor. His notoriety peaked in 1985 when he married 21-year-old Josephine BBC News | UK | Oliver Reed: The original hellraiser