Watch Oliver Reed give a class on acting: “You’re not playing a f**king trumpet”
There is a case to be made that Hollywood lacks the assortment of characters that it once previously boasted. In the contemporary era, actors are more concerned with keeping up appearances, often refusing to give too much of their genuine personality away to the masses. Whilst there are a few notable exceptions to this trend, Hollywood is screaming out for someone larger than life to emerge and re-energise the heavily PR-managed industry. From Errol Flynn to Paul Newman, the entertainment business used to be brimming with unique individuals, with the late Oliver Reed offering one of the clearest examples of this.
Reed starred in an array of pictures and is widely hailed as one of the finest actors of his generation. Most remember him for his role as the murderous Bill Sikes in 1968’s Oliver! or his final outing in Ridley Scott’s historical epic Gladiator. Yet, his career was comprised of many other excellent titles, including The Trap, Revolver, The Three Musketeers and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, to name but a few.
In addition to his talent as an actor, Reed was infamous for his off-screen behaviour, with his alcoholism often playing a major role in his life. Many stories exist, but the most well-known is a claim that one night, Reed and 36 friends got through 60 gallons of beer, 32 bottles of scotch, 17 bottles of gin, four crates of wine, and a bottle of Babycham. Elsewhere, another tale tells of a marathon pub crawl that he and another notorious character – Steve McQueen – embarked on in London in 1973, a night which ended with Reed vomiting on his friend.
Compounding his penchant for pushing life to the limits was the sense that Reed tended to be as fearsome as his characters. His boorish antics on The Word and After Dark in the early 1990s are seared into the memories of his fans. Given the numerous controversial moments in Reed’s story, people tend to forget that, before all else, he was an outstanding entertainer of a kind that is rare in today’s world. A true character actor, he channelled the likes of Laurence Olivier and John Gielgud, a wonderous achievement as he forged his career with the training of his peers. There’s a reason why Oliver Reed’s filmography is so consistent: he understood the minutiae required to make a performance believable.
Showing the more sociable side of his personality, Reed once gave a class on acting for television. In it, he explained some of the finer details of acting and how he made his villains so impactful: “If one is going to play a heavy in the film, then the great difference between the really dangerous man and the loud man is the dangerous man has a great silence about him,” he said. “And so, always, I find I have terrible trouble with sound men, because I’m known in the business as ‘The Whispering Giant’, but my eyes are quite hard, you see.”
Reed continued: “I don’t blink. The screen is so wide, you see, that it makes every eye about six-foot across, and if the audience is supposed to be frightened of you and you start blinking like this, like Bambi, a lot, which people are sometimes inclined to do when they’re nervous, then it sweeps across the screen, and it’s not as convincing as if you’re going to be deadly. You don’t see a cobra blink do you.”
Afterwards, Reed had real fun with the interviewer as they read part of a script. He took particular exception to how his opposite number was shaping his mouth when speaking his lines, roaring back at him: “You’re not playing a fucking trumpet.”
