Oliver Reed

Robert Oliver Reed (13 February 1938 – 2 May 1999) was an English actor, known for his upper-middle class, masculine image and his heavy-drinking, "hellraiser" lifestyle. His screen career spanned over 40 years, between 1955 and 1999. At the peak of his career, in 1971, British exhibitors voted Reed fifth-most-popular star at the box office.

After making his first significant screen appearances in Hammer Horror films in the early 1960s, his notable film roles included La Bete in The Trap (1966), Bill Sikes in Oliver! (a film directed by his uncle Carol Reed that won the 1968 Academy Award for Best Picture), Gerald in Women in Love (1969), the title role in Hannibal Brooks (1969), Urbain Grandier in The Devils (1971), Athos in The Three Musketeers (1973) and The Four Musketeers (1974), Uncle Frank in Tommy (1975), Dr. Hal Raglan in The Brood (1979), Dolly Hopkins in Funny Bones (1995) and Antonius Proximo in Gladiator (2000).

For playing the old, gruff gladiator trainer in Ridley Scott's Gladiator, in what was his final film, Reed was posthumously nominated for the BAFTA Award for Best Actor in a Supporting Role and a Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture in 2000.

The British Film Institute (BFI) stated that "partnerships with Michael Winner and Ken Russell in the mid-[19]60s saw Reed become an emblematic Brit-flick icon", but from the mid-1970s his alcoholism began affecting his career, with the BFI adding: "Reed had assumed Robert Newton's mantle as Britain's thirstiest thespian".

Robert Oliver Reed was born on 13 February 1938 at 9 Durrington Park Road, Wimbledon (now part of southwest London) to Peter Reed, a sports journalist, and Marcia (née Napier-Andrews). He was the nephew of film director Sir Carol Reed, and grandson of the actor-manager Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree and his mistress, Beatrice May Pinney (who later assumed the name 'Reed'), she being "the only person who understood, listened to, encouraged and kissed Oliver". Reed claimed to have been a descendant (through an illegitimate step) of Peter the Great, Tsar of Russia. Reed attended 14 schools, including Ewell Castle School in Surrey. "My father thought I was just lazy," Reed later said. "He thought I was a dunce."

Reed claimed he had worked as a boxer, a bouncer, a taxi driver and a hospital porter. He then did his conscription in the Royal Army Medical Corps. "The army helped," he said later. "I recognized that most other people were actors as well. I was in the peacetime army and they were all telling us youngsters about the war."

Reed began his acting career as an extra in films. He appeared uncredited in Ken Annakin's film Value for Money (1955) and Norman Wisdom's film The Square Peg (1958). Uncredited television appearances included episodes of The Invisible Man (1958), The Four Just Men (1959) and The Third Man. He appeared in the documentary Hello London (1958).

Reed's first break was playing Richard of Gloucester in a six-part BBC TV series The Golden Spur (1959). It did not seem to help his career immediately: He was not credited in the films The Captain's Table (1959), Upstairs and Downstairs (1959), directed by Ralph Thomas, Life Is a Circus (1960), The Angry Silence (1960), The League of Gentlemen (1960) or Beat Girl (1960). He played a bouncer in The Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll (1960) for Hammer Films with which he would become associated; the director was Terence Fisher. Reed was then in The Bulldog Breed (1960), another Wisdom film, playing the leader of a gang of Teddy Boys roughing up Wisdom in a cinema.