"Shadows and dust," were the last words uttered by Oliver Reed, the darkest of British cinema's stars, in a major motion picture. Unfortunately, he never got to witness the reaction to his performance, as the gladiator turned trainer in 2000's Gladiator, Ridley Scott's Roman epic, that helped Russell Crowe bag an Oscar and revived the career of that other great hellraiser, Irish actor Richard Harris. Reed had died during the film's shoot in Malta, where he had been carousing in a bar with sailors from the Royal Navy. Whereas Harris curtailed his drinking enough to survive a few more years at the top, Reed's life, and career, came to an abrupt end.

For an actor who had the chance to play James Bond or have a long and successful time in Hollywood, Oliver Reed never took the easy path and it showed. His uncle was the famous British director, Carol Reed, and the young Oliver was also related to the famous actor-manager Herbert Beerbohm-Tree, but as an aspirant film actor, the young Oliver Reed never used his background or familial connections in the business to improve his job prospects.

Despite self-confidence bordering on arrogance - he had been a successful athlete at school - he had been expelled from several educational establishments. His word blindness, not an uncommon trait amongst actors, saw this young man from Wimbledon and son of a sports journalist, saw his first occupation as a doorman at a club. He pursued jobs as an extra with the occasional speaking role. He can be spotted early on in a sequence from the cult classic The League of Gentlemen, opposite Jack Hawkins, as a rather camp amateur thespian. Rather at odds with his later, more brooding roles, where he turned his saturnine looks to better effect.

Reed was never one for the art-house crowd and along with the Caines, the Stamps and the Hemmings he was dedicated to making it as an actor on the silver screen, rather than learning his chops on stage. In some ways, he had more in common with American actors, which is why it is so odd that he never really took to a career in Hollywood. With his hangdog expression, enhanced by injuries he sustained in a brawl, beautiful speaking voice and a foreboding physical presence were all put to good use from the beginning.

He landed the lead role in a Hammer horror, one of the most successful studios in British film history, The Curse of the Werewolf. By today's standards, the effects appear primitive, almost laughable, but as a young man suffering a tortured existence because of his heritage, he cut a dash, but it was a difficult route to stardom.

Just as the critics never really took to him, it was two of Britain's most controversial film directors who enabled Reed to continue his rise to the top of the acting tree: Ken Russell and Michael Winner.

Whereas Russell has found new-found interest in his work, albeit short-lived, through the auspices of reality television, and Winner has become a household name for his insurance ads and restaurant criticism, they were in their day, regular fodder for the tabloid press and the liberal broad-sheets. As a young director, working on the BBC arts programme, Monitor, for the legendary television producer Huw Wheldon, Russell had given Reed the part of the classical composer Mahler in a forthcoming documentary. Reed had suffered facial wounds in a fight before the audition and was certain his acting career was finished, but Russell gave him the job anyway.

Around this time, Reed also began a working relationship with another of British cinema's more controversial directors, Michael Winner. One of the last films Reed ever worked on was with Winner and they collaborated several times, including the unlikely Second World War adventure about a British POW and his elephant, Hannibal Brooks.

Because of his later appearances on television chat shows, often drunk, Reed's sensitivity as an actor has largely been overlooked. Tales of alcoholic debauchery and general bad behaviour make better tabloid copy than his depth as a screen actor, but beyond the cartoon cut-out that he became, there was also a shyness and vulnerability that created a tension within many of the characters he played on screen.

His performance as Gerald in Russell's first big hit, 1969's Women in Love, adapted from the novel by D H Lawrence, is clearly one of Reed's best performances. Unfortunately, the infamous nude wrestling scene with his co-star Alan Bates has rather diluted the critical faculties of the film-watching public. It was one of the first examples of full-frontal male nudity in mainstream cinema, although its erotic appeal has dimmed its initial shock value. Both Bates and his co-star were uneasy about doing the scene, but after checking out each other's credentials - so to speak - they eventually created one of British Sixties cinema's most homoerotic scenes.

Both Russell and Winner had an uncanny ability to elicit strong performances from Reed, but it would be with the former director that would court the most controversy.

Adapted from the non-fiction book by Aldous Huxley, Russell's The Devils portrayed the brief rise and swift downfall of a renegade priest in seventeenth-century France. Details of the film began to leak out well before filming ended, adding to Fleet Street's appetite for controversial headlines and arresting front pages. With its lurid account of the insanity of the times that was based on fact, Russell's masterpiece was overshadowed by the attendant publicity. Reed's contribution was another of his greatest performances. True, he could overact, but he was rarely a ham. On several occasions, he could contain himself and deliver a subtlety very few actors, especially those trained in the theatre, could do. His ability to give even the most bestial of his characters a rare humanity was part of his gift as a screen actor.

His non-singing role in his uncle's big screen version of Lionel Bart's musical, based on the adventures of Oliver Twist, avoided charges of nepotism, when he scored as the villain, Bill Sikes. Most well spoken actors of the period were unable to speak in an accent other than their own, but Reed's Cockney hard man sounded authentic. His manner so exuded villainy that even Sikes's pet dog, Bullseye, deserts him, so awful has Reed's character become.

When many actors, singers and bands decamped to foreign climes as Britain's tax laws began to cut into their finances, Reed was one of the few who stayed to weather the financial storm. He even started to refer to himself as Mr England, as he resided on his estate in the country, Broome Hall. His refusal to move to Hollywood, as the British film industry struggled in the economic downturn of the early seventies, forced him eventually into tax exile, first to the Channel Islands and then to the Republic of Ireland.

Turning down roles in not only 1973's The Sting and the blockbuster of 1975 Jaws exacerbated the downward spiral, although he continued to work, but mainly on low-budget features, moribund sequels and television mini-series. His burgeoning reputation, as a hellraiser, that had stopped him from gaining the prize role of 007 now threatened to scupper his entire career.

Appearances on several prominent chat shows, severely worse for wear, as well as courting the attentions of the gutter press, conferred the public image of a dissolute rogue. One particular appearance on a late night Channel 4 programme landed him in hot water with accusations of not only being drunk but also a misogynist.

His nearest rival for column inches and attention-seeking antics was the veteran footballer George Best, but it was Reed's favourite partner in crime, Keith Moon, legendary drummer with the rock band The Who, that matched him for outlandish behaviour. Sadly, Moon died in 1978, at a fairly young age, but Reed's constitution must have been stronger as his antics continued unabated.

Even a reprise of his role as the haunted Athos in Richard Lester's sequel of his earlier adaptation of the Musketeer stories by Alexandre Dumas failed to re-ignite Reed's failing acting career. A cloud had settled on the production early on, when Roy Kinnear, the under-rated British comic actor, died after falling from a horse. The production continued, as footage had already been shot of Kinnear, but for the rest of the film, the actor's role had a stand-in. Sadly, the film never captured the magic of the original.

When necessary, and allowed to shine by a sympathetic director, he still revelled in his abilities as a screen actor. Terry Gilliam, no stranger to eccentricity both on and off-camera, gave free rein to Reed on the set of his version of the legend of the world's greatest liar, Baron Munchausen. And, yet these occasions became rarer and rarer, as time marched on.

One particularly fascinating project, revealed in Michael Winner's autobiography, was that of a film based on the events surrounding the Norman invasion of England in 1066. There was a screenplay ready to shoot and Reed would have surely made a fantastic William the Conqueror. Yet again, the fates conspired and that film was never made.

By the time that he was asked to audition for his role of Proximo, he was still getting acting roles, but nothing that he has appeared in for many years, had set the film world alight. After roles in 1975's Tommy and four years later in The Brood, an early feature film by Canadian horror director David Cronenberg, decent parts for him to play were becoming fewer and fewer. He even took the role of the villain in The Sting II, despite him turning down the original film.

As Ken Russell had becoming increasingly disenchanted with the film industry, making fewer and less successful offerings, Michael Winner, however, continued to direct, despite critical brickbats. Fortunately, the director was able to keep faith with one of his favourite actors, but it was also Winner who encouraged Reed to audition for Ridley Scott. Rather reluctantly, Reed took Winner's advice and landed the role of a lifetime.

When the filming for Gladiator moved to Malta, Reed went with the circus. He had been drinking with sailors of the Royal Navy, as he had never been one to find solace with actors and theatrical types, much preferring the company of ordinary people, when he experienced a fatal heart attack. As the story goes, he had been engaging in an arm-wrestling contest with several of the sailors, but whether this is a myth, we will probably never know.

Reed's untimely demise was one of several hiccups on the making of the film. When the shoot had started, the screenplay had not been finished. Other mishaps included tigers who refused to growl and a rather stroppy leading man, who decided not to deliver a particular speech and had to be tricked by the director into doing so. As not all of the scenes that would have included Proximo had been shot, this was a further burden on Scott; who had not had a box-office hit for around ten years.

Through the use of a double and aided by recent developments in computer-generated technology, Reed's last appearance in a major hit movie became the monument to a life less ordinary. Sadly, he was unable, unlike his fellow co-stars and survivors of the 1960's, such as Richard Harris and David Hemmings, to profit from it. Eventually, time took its toll, even on his fellow hardened hellraisers and, within a few short years, Harris and Hemmings too succumbed to a life of artful debauchery. Of their time, only Peter O'Toole hangs on, waiting evermore for that elusive Academy Award, another elusive prize that Reed never won, despite delivering several definitive screen performances.

Without that last hurrah as Proximo, Reed's career could so easily have become another man of promise and talent, like footballer George Best, to fall into the realm of a digital village idiot and tabloid fodder. That he managed with almost his last gasp as a screen actor to finally pull a performance from the bag and deliver on all that early promise is a testament to his staying power as an actor and as a human being.

His funeral was held in Ireland, rather appropriately, and the only person there from the world of film was Michael Winner. Far from being a celebrity magnet and away from the cameras of the paparazzi, Reed's funeral was in his new homeland, where there is a low threshold for bullshit and they enjoy their whiskey. He was buried in view of his favourite local pub in Buttevant, County Cork. "You meet a better class of people in pubs," he once said. The epitaph on his gravestone simply reminds the world that: He made the air move.

© Howard Watson 2008