Diana Rigg & Oliver Reed: The Shocking Truth!

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And that’s just some of the present day sequences: the stuff set in the late sixties is arguably much worse. The film was released after his death with some footage filmed with a double, [33] digitally mixed with outtake footage. Richard Burton, Richard Harris, Oliver Reed and Peter O'Toole were among the four greatest actors of their generation. I’ve been trying to think why this should be – I don’t think it’s just down to my appreciation of the performances involved. He also did some good work in the cinema, too, writing a couple of fun late-period Hammer horrors ( Doctor Jekyll and Sister Hyde and Captain Kronos – Vampire Hunter, the latter of which he directed himself), although the less said about his involvement with Highlander 2: The Quickening the better.

The first episodes of series 5 were the ones I initially watched as a swivel-eyed devotee, anyway, so I know them quite well. On the other hand, the credibility of the script is certainly matched by its scientific accuracy and its general coherence: at one point, Mrs Peel is telling Steed about the BVS for the first time, at which point the chimney-sweep is killed by the ‘UFO’. As you might expect from the title and the subject matter, this is a film with a very significant body-count – there are various shootings, stabbings, poisonings and a lot of deaths by bombing – and the film neither treats these seriously enough to work as a proper thriller, nor floats them past the camera archly enough for it all to work on a tongue-in-cheek level. His final role was the elderly slave dealer Proximo in Ridley Scott's Gladiator (2000), in which he played alongside Richard Harris, [31] an actor whom Reed admired greatly both on and off the screen.Well, firstly, a mild sense of surprise, although quite at whom it should be directed I’m not entirely certain.

Broccoli and Harry Saltzman were looking for a replacement for Sean Connery and Reed (who had recently played a resourceful killer in The Assassination Bureau) was mentioned as a possible choice for the role, with Timothy Dalton and Roger Moore as the other choices. 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. 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.He was also a phenomenally hard-working actor who pushed himself and his directors to make good movies and please his audience.

Both benefit from James Hill’s direction – Hill knows exactly what this episode’s about, and takes great care to give both his stars reaction beats they can utterly nail. Understanding the depth and range of Oliver Reed’s talent can be summarized by simply saying that his grandfather was Queen Victoria’s favorite actor, Herbert Beerbohm Tree, who founded the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. Brian Clemens himself would gleefully tell the tale of how A Touch of Brimstone was omitted from the series’ original run in the States, due to the rather pronounced sado-masochistic overtones and cheerfully dwelt-upon debauchery in the latter sections of the episode. On 26 September 1975, while Reed was interviewed by Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show, Shelley Winters, angered by derogatory comments Reed had made about feminists and women's liberation, poured a cup of whiskey over his head on-camera.

He arm-wrestled all comers, and always won, then settled into an ongoing series of bouts with the beefiest camera dolly grip who was nicknamed Moose. Reed appeared in The New Spartans (1975), then acted alongside Karen Black, Bette Davis, and Burgess Meredith in the Dan Curtis horror film, Burnt Offerings (1976). Perhaps this was the result of moral concerns, or perhaps because one of the things that lifts the film is that fact that Lionheart is somehow a doomed, tragic figure from the start. But he had a great heart and was often an example of love and kindness to his family and longtime friends as well as to actors and others on the set.