Hellraisers

by Robert Sellers

  Reed undertook the role in Gladiator with little inkling of what its impact would be, or that it would ultimately be his cinematic curtain call. He’d always had a peculiar take on death, particularly the whole rigmarole of what would happen to his body. He had no desire to be laid out for days in his Sunday best: ‘And have people gawking at me to see what a dead hellraiser looks like.’ Nor did he want to be cremated: the very thought of his body frying in its own fat made him quite queasy. Burial wasn’t an option, either. He didn’t want maggots crawling up his nose and out of his mouth. Burial at sea was out, too. ‘Who wants to be gobbled up by a big fish and become excrement that gets eaten by a sardine whose excrement is swallowed by a prawn?’ Reed didn’t much relish the thought of being part of a prawn cocktail eaten by some pretty girl in a fancy restaurant, which, when passed through her body, is flushed into the sewer and then into the sea again: ‘I don’t want to be a permanent shit.’ Reed eventually came to the perfect solution. He’d become fertiliser that’s spread under a sunflower and made eventually into sunflower seed oil, ‘So instead of nibbling me in her prawn cocktail the pretty girl will rub me on her Bristols as she suns herself on a beach in the Caribbean.’

  In the end Reed’s death was messy, nonsensical and avoidable. Much of Gladiator was shot in Malta and Reed quickly found the most English bar on the island, a pub called – imaginatively – The Pub. On May 2nd 1999 Ollie had drunk there with Josephine and was about to leave when a gang of sailors burst in. Reed saw them and there was only ever going to be one outcome: ‘Let’s have a drink,’ he roared, pulling them towards him. ‘Black rums all round.’ Reed downed 12 double measures of rum and then retreated to his more accustomed double whiskies. He also challenged the sailors to an arm wrestling contest, beating a number of challengers.

  When the sailors got up to leave Reed happily signed autographs and then slumped back into his chair to rest, snoring audibly. Then the snoring stopped. Josephine noticed his lips were darkening. Something was very wrong. Laid out on a bench, Reed was given mouth to mouth resuscitation while someone called for an ambulance. Quick to arrive, it sped off with Reed to hospital but the paramedics couldn’t feel a pulse. Inside casualty doctors struggled to revive Reed but it was too late. The great man had passed over. ‘It was very sad because I spoke to him two days before he died,’ says Winner. ‘A Daily Mail reporter was going over to see him and I said, “Do me a favour dear, don’t throw her in the pool, don’t take her knickers down and hurl her round the room. Please just be very nice to her.” He said, “Michael, I promise you, I’ve only got a couple more shots in the movie and they’ve offered me Uncle Silas on television.” So he was very pleased that he thought he was washed up and now he was back. Then I got the call, Oliver Reed’s dead, and I just burst into tears. Terrible.’

  There was almost an inevitability about Oliver Reed’s death, but it still came as an enormous shock to friends and colleagues. ‘I was really sad when Ollie died,’ says Mark Lester. ‘The Americans were terrified of Ollie because of his reputation, but after Gladiator I think he would have got a lot more work and a lot more substantial roles in Hollywood. Because he was a very, very good actor, a very powerful actor. But the trouble with Ollie was that he was his own worst enemy, as many of those hellraisers were, and he wasn’t as powerful as Burton so that he could get away with doing a lot of the things he did. The trouble was, Ollie was a binge drinker so he could go for days and weeks without having anything, but when he did drink he used to drink huge amounts and in the end I don’t think his body could take it.’

  ‘His death was a total nonsense,’ is Ken Russell’s take. ‘It shouldn’t have happened. It was very sad. He’d just done Gladiator and shown that he was a bloody good actor and was all set for a comeback, and then he resorted to arm wrestling with 18-year-old sailors. It was a terrible waste.’

  At least one could take solace in the fact that, just like Bing Crosby croaking it on a golf course, can you think of a better place for Ollie to die than in a pub? ‘I am very sorry he has gone,’ Reed’s old co-star Glenda Jackson told the press, ‘but I think he probably went the way he would have wished.’ Winner holds similar thoughts. ‘There’s no question that he missed his resurrection with Gladiator. But at least he went quickly. He didn’t suffer, not like my dear friend Burt Lancaster who had a stroke and was a zombie for seven years. So from Ollie’s point of view it wasn’t a bad exit.’

  Even better was the funeral. Thousands of ordinary people turned up to show their respect, and when Reed’s coffin came out of the wagon spontaneous applause started, and a few raised voices cried, ‘Go to it Ollie,’ while a single lone piper started to play as the congregation walked into the church. ‘I was the only person from showbusiness who went to Oliver’s funeral,’ is Winner’s personal recollection. ‘All the people who said he was wonderful, none of them turned up, they couldn’t be bothered to go as far as Cork. I didn’t cry at my mother’s funeral. I didn’t cry at my father’s funeral. I wept at Oliver’s funeral. The coffin was down there in the church, I walked down, touched the coffin, I was in floods of tears.’

  Newspapers everywhere carried the news of Reed’s passing. As with Burton before him, commentators spoke of a life of waste, a career that had such promise in the 70s thrown away in pubs, chat show embarrassments and gutters of puke. ‘When Oliver died a lot of the papers said he had a wasted life,’ says Winner. ‘It wasn’t a wasted life at all, he had a wonderful life. He enjoyed himself. He did a lot of movies, he had a long career considering, he didn’t end up broke, he lived in a lovely house in Ireland which he loved, and he had a lovely wife and lovely children. How can that be a wasted life?’

  Perhaps the tragedy of Reed is that he created a persona for himself that he felt obliged constantly to live up to. ‘If I went around kissing babies and doing good, the public wouldn’t be interested,’ he once said. ‘That’s not what the public expects from Oliver Reed. They want him to fall off the edge of a dustbin, get into fights and get drunk and do all the things you read in the papers.’ There was nobody better in the world at playing the public clown than Ollie Reed, and thank God he took up the mantle. The only problem was that in the end it obscured the talents of a truly great actor.

  Oliver Reed’s passing left a gaping hole in so many people’s lives. ‘He was a great man who did things his own way,’ says top chef Marco Pierre White. ‘He used to come into my restaurant in Wandsworth and sit on the floor to have a drink before going to the table. On one occasion, he started praising everything – the décor, the service, the food. I said, “Ollie, you’ve been here dozens of times and I know you like the place. You don’t have to say all these nice things.” And he said, “Yes, but this is the only time I’ve been here sober.”’

  Such antics and blissful ignorance of normal life were priceless; no wonder those who shared his friendship mourned him so heavily. ‘Ollie would phone me sometimes late at night, pissed out of his mind,’ says Michael Winner, ‘but 99% of the time I was with him he was the quietest, gentlest, most considerate and kind human being you could ever meet.’

  When Richard Harris heard that his ‘old slugging partner’ Reed had died he was shocked and unsettled, particularly by the manner of his passing. For Harris, Reed’s end would not be his own. ‘I intend to die in bed aged 110, writing poetry, sipping Guinness and serenading a woman.’

  Ironically, Harris had just finished making his one and only film with Reed, though they never shared any scenes together. He was cast as Emperor Marcus Aurelius, and most of his scenes in Gladiator were with young guns Russell Crowe and Joaquin Phoenix. After their first scene together Harris came over to Crowe and said, ‘I am going to make one assumption about you, Crowe – I bet you love rugby.’ From that instant they were boozing buddies and, although they only worked on the film together for three weeks, developed a close friendship, with the elder statesman tipping the Antipodean star to carry on his bad boy behaviour. ‘Russell’s a top bloke, a b
rilliant actor and a much loved new friend. He will carry the baton on. He irritates the hell out of the Hollywood bigwigs, but he’s much too good for them to ignore.’

  Both, however, couldn’t quite fathom out Phoenix. The young actor was incredibly nervous on the set and would ask Crowe to rough him up before their big scenes together so he could psyche himself up into his villainous character. Crowe was at a loss as to what to do and so went over to Harris to ask his advice. ‘Mate, what are we gonna do with this kid, he’s asking me to abuse him before takes.’ Harris thought for a while and then replied, ‘Let’s get him pissed.’ Over the course of several hours and several pints of Guinness, Harris and Crowe managed to relax their young co-star.

  Approaching his 70th year, Harris took up residency at London’s prestigious Savoy hotel. Such self-imposed isolation worried him not a jot. ‘I find myself the best company in the world.’ And he loved the fact that if he wanted a sandwich at 4am, he could get one; that the hotel’s staff was at his beck and call. For this he considered £6,000 a week cheap at the price: ‘If you’re paying the mortgage on a home you can’t ask the bank manager to fetch you a pint.’ He could press a bell and dinner would arrive, press another and the valet came to take his clothes away. ‘And as for female company?’ asked one inquisitive journalist. ‘Oh, you bring those in yourself.’

  Harris prided himself that he was still attractive to women and enjoyed a relatively active sex life for a pensioner, though the famous libido was now somewhat limited. ‘All of a sudden you can’t do it any more, as well or as often. Sometimes it’s a struggle.’ So he once resorted to using Viagra, but never again. ‘It worked too well. I was taking this woman out to dinner afterwards and couldn’t zip up my trousers. I couldn’t get it down.’

  By 2000 Harris was passing into legend. The Daily Telegraph saw him as someone with ‘the forehead of an Old Testament prophet’. His face indeed looked magnificently battered: ‘My life’s stamped on it.’ At a European film ceremony he received a lifetime achievement award. ‘I consider myself in God’s departure lounge,’ he told the audience, ‘waiting for that final plane, but luckily some of my scheduled flights have been cancelled – mostly because I’ve said I’m not going to die yet.’ He’d even taken to helping out fellow hellraisers during their own private turmoils, such as mentoring fallen star Mickey Rourke, holing him up in an LA hotel while he sorted out his fractured career and life.

  For a change it was Harris’s son making all the tabloid headlines, not him. Jamie had inherited many of his father’s hellraising genes and been a regular and hard drinker since the age of 14. At boarding school he’d been fined £1,000 for stealing a cement mixer and driving it two miles back to school after a drunken night out. Harris proudly framed and displayed his son’s drunk and disorderly fine in the rear porch at his home in the Bahamas.

  Before the curtain finally closed on Harris there was to be one last flourish. When the offer arrived in 2001 to play Professor Albus Dumbledore in the first Harry Potter movie Harris did what Sean Connery had done just weeks before, he turned it down. The actor didn’t want the hassle any more of early morning calls, or the thought of being saddled to a long running series. ‘I hate commitment of any kind – that’s why I’ve got two ex-wives. It scares me.’ It was Harris’s 11-year-old granddaughter who begged him to reconsider, threatening never to talk to him again if he refused the role. ‘What could I do?’ moaned Harris. ‘I wasn’t going to let her down.’ The film was a box office phenomenon and Harris became something of a hero to the young cast and a whole new generation of cinema goers.

  So it was with great satisfaction that he turned up for work on the sequel the following year, but on the set people noted his weariness and how thin he suddenly looked, not fully aware that he was very ill indeed. But the old lion was still there, not hesitating to call for a re-take or question the lighting. However, when his colleagues deigned to do the same he’d rant, ‘Look, there’s a war in the Middle East and bombs being thrown all over the world. There’s real life going on out there. This is all just make-believe crap.’ One evening he teamed up with Alan Rickman and Kenneth Branagh on a pub assault and the trio was still drinking come 4 o’clock the next morning. ‘Richard was regaling us with stories about his life,’ recalled Rickman. ‘We just sat there with our mouths wide open.’ The old magic was still there, but for how long?

  Finishing his Harry Potter duties in the summer of 2002, Harris retreated to his Savoy suite and all but disappeared. Friends grew worried that he was barely eating, and even his bedtime Guinness was proving too painful to digest. Then there was silence: nothing, no phone calls, no visits, and no letters. It got so bad that Elizabeth and his sons went to the Savoy and literally banged the door down. Inside Harris’s condition had deteriorated. He was emaciated and weak and they insisted on calling an ambulance. ‘When they took him away to hospital,’ recalls director Peter Medak, ‘the lobby just completely stopped, and Richard sat up on the stretcher and turned back to the whole foyer and shouted, “It was the food! Don’t touch the food!” That was typical Richard.’

  The diagnosis was Hodgkin’s disease, an insidious lymphatic cancer. Reluctantly Harris started a course of chemotherapy that lasted several weeks, with his sons and Elizabeth in constant attendance. He strove to put on a brave face for the world, telling Harry Potter director and producer Chris Columbus that if he recast Dumbledore in the third instalment, ‘I’ll kill you.’

  Despite heavy treatment it was soon clear that Harris was fighting a battle he simply couldn’t win. At peace with himself, Harris had a life to look back on that was the envy of most of us. That he’d boozed a lot of it away didn’t bother him a bit. ‘I had the happiest days of my life as a drinker. If I had my life again I’d make all the same mistakes. I would still sleep with as many women, and drink as much vodka. Any regrets would make me seem ungrateful.’

  Fearing the worst, Richard’s son Jared phoned Ann Turkel in Hollywood, advising her to fly to London immediately. On the flight over the actress didn’t believe her former husband was going to die. ‘I was willing him to survive. I felt that by being there, there might be some glimmer of hope.’ That glimmer flickered out as soon as she arrived at the hospital on October 25th and saw Harris attached to a life support machine. Beside him was Elizabeth, looking concerned, and his three sons. Ann held his hand, spoke into his ear and told him she loved him. ‘I’m here, Annie’s here, I won’t leave. You’re not going to go – you’ve got too much left to do.’ Harris slowly closed his eyes. ‘I need to sleep now,’ he said. A few minutes later the life support machine was switched off; Harris was gone.

  As Richard Harris lay in the morgue, his sons stood beside him, pausing for reflection. Thinking it too quiet and sombre, Jamie slipped outside to grab a pint of Guinness. Dipping his finger into the black nectar he moistened his father’s lips with it. That’s how the great man went to meet his maker, as he’d love to have gone, with the taste of a good pint on him.

  Ten days later Harris was laid to rest. The mass held in London was beautiful, the coffin draped in an Irish flag, but Ann broke down at the crematorium. ‘That was something else. To watch this vibrant, extraordinary man being on a conveyor belt…I just totally lost it and sobbed uncontrollably.’

  Russell Crowe flew 5,000 miles from filming Master and Commander in Mexico to attend the service and was close to tears throughout. Afterwards he told journalists outside the church, ‘I love him and I miss him. He was one of the greatest actors who ever walked this planet.’ Crowe later joined Harris’s family and friends in a London hotel and remembered his fallen pal by leaping on to the bar and raising a pint of Guinness after reciting the Irish ode ‘Sanctity’ by Patrick Kavanagh. Crowe had read the poem months earlier at the BAFTA film awards ceremony in tribute to Harris, who was then gravely ill, and was furious when the BBC cut it out of the broadcast. Hunting down the show’s director Malcolm Gerrie, he pinned the man against a wall while unleashing a foul-mou
thed tirade. Predictably the incident made headlines, cementing Crowe’s bad boy persona.

  This time Crowe’s reading of ‘Sanctity’ was an emotional moment and he cheered on Harris’s sons Damian, Jared and Jamie as they took it in turns to stand on the hotel bar and pay their respects. Mourners were determined to give Harris a huge send off and hotel staff had to call out for more Guinness as the revellers drank the place dry.

  So deep ran Crowe’s respect for Harris that he later fulfilled a promise he’d made to the dying actor to visit his home town of Limerick, drinking Guinness in some of Harris’s old haunts, followed everywhere by a phalanx of journalists. Also there was Jared, who explained to reporters the close bond that existed between his father and Crowe. ‘Dad saw himself in Russell – they were cut from the same cloth. And having met him I agree.’

  Shortly after Harris’s death a book of condolences was opened in Limerick that showed just how much he was loved by generations of people from all over the world. Alongside signatures of former colleagues and friends were childish scrawls from youngsters who knew him only from Harry Potter. One touching tribute read: ‘From a nine-year-old girl who fell in love with Albus Dumbledore and her mother who fell in love with King Arthur. Thank you for that “One Brief Shining Moment.”’

  Others remembered the actor for his hellraising reputation, including more than a few landlords and barmaids. Colette Simms recalled how on her first week working behind the bar, she served Richard Harris her first pint of Guinness. ‘He came into the bar for a quick drink because he was supposed to be leaving at three o’clock that day. But he didn’t leave until three the following day.’ It’s a story that sums up Richard Harris perhaps better than most.