In Gladiator with Russell Crowe, when we spent twelve weeks in Valletta, Malta, in spring 1999, I played the Roman senator Gracchus, and it was during the filming that Oliver Reed died. I had worked before with Olly in a film based on a true story at Longleat. Occasionally, if you are still awake well after midnight, it comes on television and is called Blue Blood, the film version of a book written by that strange man, the Marquis of Bath, in whose stately home we filmed, with all the ‘wifelets’ and the Kama Sutra bedroom.
Under his former name Alexander Thynne he wrote a book called The Carry Cot, which was about the abuse of his daughter by the nanny: the nanny was in thrall to the butler, who was a Satanist. Oliver played the butler, I played the Marquis of Bath, and Meg Wyn-Owen played the nanny. We filmed much of it at Longleat. I had bedroom scenes in the Kama Sutra room with the Marquis of Bath’s wife, who was a Hungarian-born French actress called Anna Gaël. She was also the lady of Longleat.
There was a Page Three girl taking part whose name was Fiona Lewis, an actress model. For the nude bedroom scenes the mistress of Longleat, Anna Gaël, also had to be naked, and so had I. Anna was very self-conscious, clasping her dressing gown round her to make sure no one could see her bits. She would take off her gown a little at a time, get into the bed, take it off a little more under the sheets, all very coy. Meanwhile Fiona, the Page Three girl, just stripped and said, ‘OK boys, there it all is, the tits, the cunt, have a good look, get over it!’ And they did, and within seconds they weren’t looking, whereas with Anna they all couldn’t wait to see a bit more.
This was my first film with Olly, and we hit it off at once. I think he really liked me, and when he was sober he was the gentlest, kindest of fellows. When he was drunk he was very aggressive, and could be dangerous. He was very competitive, too. Once in the bar at our hotel in Longleat, where there was a barracks nearby, some soldiers came in for a drink. He was chatting to these soldiers when he suddenly came out with ‘OK!’ and selected three peanuts from the saucer on the bar counter and threw these three peanuts down on the floor.
‘The three of us – the first to get these peanuts out of this bar, out of the hotel, across the road to the other side: with your nose! Five hundred quid for the winner!’
These soldiers got down on all fours, pushing the peanuts with their noses, and they and Olly did it. I was watching, and naturally he was winning – he had to – when they packed it in. He gave them the £500, but he had to win.
On Gladiator, for the insurance he had to promise not to touch a drop, and he was, as the slave dealer Proximo, being marvellous, for this was his big comeback. One weekend his wife Josephine was with him, but I think because of the death of her grandmother she had to return to Cork, leaving Olly in Valletta on his own.
He straight away got pissed in the bar at the hotel, so drunk that they cleared the bar, because nobody would go near him except for me, John Shrapnel and David Schofield, who were the three senators in the film. We sat there in the Forum in endless shots like the three monkeys – see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil – and we calmed him down.
His wife flew back to Malta and it was the following Sunday. They went out together to a pub and he was still hitting the booze. A boat had just docked so the pub was full of sailors: he challenged them – this was at two o’clock in the afternoon – and fell off his stool. Soon after that he was dead. We found out later he had downed three bottles of rum the previous night. Next day, being a Monday, they carried on filming, and the cast and crew held a minute’s silence on the Colosseum set. It was very moving. By the afternoon they had already found a lookalike, and when you stared across the Colosseum there was Olly – except that it wasn’t Olly: it was a doppelgänger. This was eerie, it was bizarre, but this is how the movies work.
They had shot most of the film, but the ending was to have been a big scene for Olly. The last shot should have shown him as Proximo returning to the arena where Russell Crowe is lying dead, so they had to change the ending. My character Gracchus was due to be stoned to death, and I am in prison, but because of Olly’s death I was upped and reinstated, and let out. So when Russell Crowe is lying dead in the middle of the arena, instead of Olly as Proximo, it is Gracchus who comes forward and says, ‘Who will help me lift Marcus?’
All these giant gladiators, with legs up to their armpits, step forward and between us we pick up Russell Crowe and hoist him on our shoulders. This was done in long shot. We pick him up, but he is way up high above me, for with these giants he is out of my reach. I am not touching him at all, but in long shot it looks as if he is on all our shoulders, including mine.
We fast forward to the stage door of the Vaudeville Theatre where I am performing God Only Knows, Hugh Whitemore’s play about the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, claiming it was a fake and had never taken place. It had not been a great success, for, as Duncan Weldon said, any play with God in the title does not go down well. One night I am leaving the stage door when a woman comes forward, asks me for my autograph, and plants a kiss on my shoulder.
‘What on earth was that for?’ I respond.
‘I’m a Gladiator fan,’ she says, ‘and that shoulder’s had Russell Crowe’s bum on it!’
I didn’t like to tell her, ‘I got nowhere near his bum, love – he was way up there out of reach!’