The phone rang: it was Ken Russell, and he was planning something sensational. If the noses of prudes had been put out of joint by a naked Ollie, he was going to outrage them even more with masturbating sister superiors and naked, devil-worshipping nuns. Was the world ready for what Russell was going to give them? The answer ended up being a pretty emphatic no.
Aldous Huxley’s book The Devils of Loudun was published in 1952 and described the supposedly true events of demonic possession and sexual hysteria that took place in the small French town of Loudun in the 1600s; in other words, perfect Russell material. And the director had no qualms whatsoever about Oliver playing the lead role of Father Grandier, the parish priest of Loudun and its spiritual and political figurehead, constantly railing against the state in his bid to keep the town and its people independent. Yet he’s also insensitive and vain, preening himself and dropping pregnant lovers like crumbs from his fingers; he was a most unpriest-like priest. Such foibles and the making of political enemies ultimately led to his downfall. Falsely accused of witchcraft, he was tried and executed. A fascinating figure from the margins of history, Grandier was without doubt the most complex and testing role of Oliver’s career and he would rise to the challenge magnificently. ‘He worked so hard on that role,’ remembers Jacquie. ‘He did a lot of research on it, he was totally blinkered. He had a lot of dark moments over The Devils, he worried a lot about it.’
As filming began at Pinewood in the winter of 1970 rumours quickly reached the outside world of diabolical happenings on Russell’s closed set, of orgies and wanton sexual abandonment. ‘I admit there was some naughtiness,’ Ollie later confessed. ‘And quite a few incidents of one kind or the other, mostly the other.’ No one, however, was made to perform any act against their will. Right from the off Russell informed the women what would be required of them, namely scenes of flagellation, masturbation and nudity. ‘I mean, there were some of those nuns who couldn’t wait to strip off,’ says actor Murray Melvin. ‘And there were some who were petrified.’
Things did indeed get out of hand during the filming of a sequence that is now infamous beyond measure, the rape of Christ. One afternoon Russell brought on to the set a large prop of a naked Christ upon the cross, a very well-endowed naked Christ, and the female extras went bat-fuck crazy over it. God knows what Russell’s instructions were to them that day but they all whipped off their clothes and frolicked about with such wantonness that the plaster phallus split and fell off. Not surprisingly the shock value of this scene was too much and the censor ordered its removal.
Oliver wasn’t involved in this sequence but one would be forgiven for thinking that, with a dozen naked women writhing all over one another, he might have paid Pinewood a visit that afternoon. It is a suggestion roundly rebuked by Melvin. ‘No, no! He was too polite. He wouldn’t have embarrassed those performers more than they had to be embarrassed. It was his upbringing, his breeding. That’s why he didn’t turn up for those scenes. But that was Ollie, that was the Ollie you loved. It was part of his character that people wouldn’t dream was there, but it was and it was a very important part of Ollie, it was his whole background.’
The special bond that Russell had cultivated with Oliver over the years was plain for all to see on the set of The Devils. ‘Ken adored him,’ says Murray. ‘There was a great rapport between them. And they often got smashed together.’ There was the odd barney as well, predictable given their raw emotional states during what was a tough shoot. Russell wanted Oliver to speak Latin in a couple of scenes, reams and reams of the bloody stuff. For someone who didn’t do too well at school and was dyslexic, such a task vexed Ollie, so much so that he told associate producer Roy Baird of his intention to quit the film.
‘What are you talking about?’ said Baird.
‘I am not a scholar,’ replied Ollie. ‘Had I wanted to be a scholar, I would have gone to Cambridge University. The only reason I didn’t go there is that I cannot spell, I cannot add up – and I sodding well can’t stand Latin. Now I want off this film because I didn’t sign to read a script that was full of Latin and you are in breach of my contract. So tell Ken Russell to piss off!’
A compromise was reached: the Latin was drastically reduced. For the bits that remained, however, Ollie came up with a cunning plan, to secrete his lines in the loaf of bread he breaks during communion. It certainly fooled Russell. ‘That was absolutely marvellous,’ he roared after take one. But on the second take he noticed one of Ollie’s eyes peeping open when they should have been shut in prayer. Ollie was ordered to his caravan to learn the lines by heart.
Co-star Brian Murphy saw the volatile and often playful nature of Ollie’s relationship with Russell first-hand. ‘He was a great practical joker, Oliver, and it seemed to me that he and Ken played games with each other. I remember one particular scene: Oliver had done several takes but Ken wanted more and in the end Ollie stormed off the set. Everything ground to a halt.’
After a short delay, word reached Murphy that his presence was requested in Ollie’s dressing room, along with fellow actors Max Adrian and Murray Melvin. They all sat down and Ollie was grinning from ear to ear. ‘We’ll have a drink in a minute,’ he said.
‘Have you got something?’ Murphy asked.
‘No,’ Ollie replied. ‘But we soon will have.’
There was a knock at the door and an assistant came in with a bottle of champagne. ‘This is from Mr Russell,’ he announced. ‘And when you feel ready for it, Mr Reed, we’ll see you back on the set.’
Murphy and the other actors came away from this episode with the belief that Ollie was up to that kind of thing all the time.
Another cause for heated debate was the film’s terrifying climax, in which Grandier had all his facial hair removed before being tortured and then burned at the stake. Ollie was fine with his head being shaved, even his legs, ‘although it was a bit embarrassing because it made me look like an ostrich’, but he drew the line at Russell’s suggestion that his eyebrows also had to go. ‘God!’ raged Ken, his arms gesticulating wildly. ‘We might as well not make the film at all.’
‘Don’t be so bloody silly,’ said Oliver. ‘It can’t make all that much difference.’
This infuriated Russell even more. ‘Of course it’s important! They shaved off all of Grandier’s bodily hair and then stuck red-hot pokers up his arse!’
Ollie finally relented but only on the condition that his eyebrows were insured (by Lloyd’s of London, no less) for half a million pounds in case they didn’t grow back properly.
The burning climax was gruelling to shoot, not least the preceding torture scene, where Grandier’s legs are pulverized with a hammer by a religious maniac. Ollie’s legs were protected by huge oak planks, but even so poor Murray found it hard to take. ‘It just went on and on and on, and there was the screaming and the pounding, something went through you, your whole body was saying, we shouldn’t be doing this, this is wrong. Then Ken called the lunch break and I went outside and threw up. It was so horrific. And dragging a weak, bruised, battered, cut Ollie on that cart up towards the stake, God!’
According to Murray, the burning finale took three weeks to shoot on the outside lot. ‘And it was freezing. Under my suit I had snow boots because you stood still for three weeks, from eight o’clock in the morning until six or seven at night, you just stood still and you froze. It was a toughie.’ By the end of it all, Ollie, already minus his eyebrows, was left with virtually no eyelashes either. It was a dangerous stunt with him tied to a stake and the fire was for real. At least he’d been given a safety device to hold behind his back that turned the gas off if he couldn’t stand it any more. ‘But Ollie,’ claims Murray, ‘over and above the call of duty, very often on takes didn’t turn the gas off and his face was scorched and the eyelashes all went. It was terrifying.’
It’s a tour de force, a screaming, manic crowd and Ollie, raging against his persecutors while his face blisters and boils. With Grandier now a charred husk, nothing stands in the way of Loudun’s conspirators destroying its walls, and therefore destroying its independence. It was an important shot, and with the explosives in position and the effects crew waiting for Russell’s hand signal to set them off, the director grew anxious. Shouting, ‘I’m not having this fucked up!’, Russell stormed over to the main camera to take charge himself, but alas his frantic arm-waving was taken as the cue and the walls were blown without a single camera rolling. Ten days later, and the set rebuilt, it was second time lucky.
It all sounds ghastly, a real horror show, but Murray’s memory of the shoot isn’t all funereal. He adored Ollie and the two of them grew close as shooting progressed. He did see, however, two very different sides to his personality, especially in the way he liked to have fun. After work Murray called into the studio bar for a quick Guinness before going home. Ollie was usually there. ‘And he was always arm-wrestling with someone. I’d say, “Oh blimey, look, the fifth-formers are at it again.” I always thought that Ollie’s playing up was a bit of the fifth-formers, a bit of bravado, and a bit of boredom. Anyway, he’d get up and say, “Come here, you,” and grab my arm. Now there was no way I could physically compete against Ollie, but he dragged me down on the table and he got my arm right back until it began hurting. I looked at his face, all twisted and red, and I said, “Ollie, when you break my arm I don’t think Ken is going to be very pleased tomorrow if I arrive in a sling.” He immediately let go. “Thank you, Ollie.” I got myself away and let them carry on playing and had my Guinness and went.’
Russell was a stickler for punctuality, so at eight o’clock in the morning you had to be at the studio, ready and dressed, and woe betide any stragglers late from lunch and not on set dead on two o’clock. One afternoon Murray was in the Pinewood restaurant with Ollie and, as usual, lunch consisted of a few drinks; certainly it did for Ollie. ‘I was lagging behind a bit and Ken was there. Ollie orders another drink and includes me in the order, and I’m saying, “Oh, Ollie, no.” “We’ve got time,” he said. After a few minutes I noticed that Ken had got up and was returning to the set. I looked at Ollie. “It’s five to two and Ken is going back.” Ollie looked up. “Oh God, come on, let’s go the back way.” And we ran, in hysterics, him slopping his vodka and tonic, me with my white wine. We ran through alleys and corridors and got to the set just as Ken walked on to it. We calmly strolled up to him laughing and Ollie said, “Oh, Ken, when do you want us?” Not a word did Ken say: he knew what we’d done. And Ollie giggled about it all afternoon. He kept saying to me, “It was a good run that, Murray, wasn’t it? Do you the world of good.” That was fifth-form, but joyous fifth-form. Silly, daft. And he had that in his personality.’
On that movie Ollie cultivated another friendship, with Georgina Hale, a young actress who’d done plenty of television, but The Devils was her first feature and she gives a devastating performance as one of Grandier’s mistresses. Georgina has an astonishingly erotic voice; she can read Ryanair’s safety instructions and make them sound like a page torn out of Emmanuelle. She’s also refreshingly blunt and still clearly recalls the first time she ever encountered Oliver: ‘I remember this stunning face with piercing eyes that just looked straight through you and I thought, what a fabulous-looking guy. I think we had one or two dinner dates. But we never had a love affair, we never had sex, and never went to bed. On those two dates I was waiting for it to happen and it never did. Instantly you think there’s something wrong with you, but maybe that was his conscience pricking him: he was with Jacquie, wasn’t he? At the end of the day it didn’t matter, because I valued his friendship more.’
As with his other leading ladies, Georgina remembers Ollie behaving like nothing less than a gentleman during their love scenes, sensing perhaps her nerves at having to appear full frontal for the first time on camera. ‘We rehearsed with our Marks and Sparks dressing gowns on and then when the time came, and, God, I was dreading it, I whipped off mine, and then when Ollie took his off there he was with his big white underpants on, which I thought was so unfair. But he was completely professional, he was wonderful.’
Relations with his main leading lady, however, were rather stand-offish. Failing to land his first choice of Glenda Jackson, Russell had cast Vanessa Redgrave and it didn’t take much to get her political juices flowing. When the trade unions decreed a one-day strike in protest at the Conservative government’s anti-union legislation, Vanessa and her brother Corin tried to coerce the acting profession to walk off every set and TV studio in Britain in support. Vanessa’s primary mission was to get Ollie on board. ‘She knocked on my dressing room door looking very pretty,’ is how Oliver remembered it. ‘And tried to persuade me to “down tools” – I thought she was being personal at first.’ When Vanessa made the real purpose of her visit known, Ollie pointblank refused to have anything to do with it. ‘That’s typical,’ she responded. ‘You’re so selfish.’
‘Don’t be so bloody silly,’ snapped Ollie. ‘And stop involving politics in your profession.’
That statement was like a wet haddock across the chops to Vanessa and they had a barnstorming row that lasted ten minutes. Ollie was vehement in his opposition to such a strike, for, as he made clear, the British film industry was in a perilous state already without people like her making it worse. Ollie also had a personal stake in The Devils, taking a percentage of the profits rather than a fee. ‘So I’m not jeopardizing the film’s success and my income by coming out to support a cause I don’t believe in anyway.’
After enough brickbats had been lobbed to and fro, Vanessa burst into tears. ‘So I put my arms around her,’ said Ollie, ‘and gave her a cuddle. Then I slapped her on the bottom and sent her back to her own dressing room.’
When The Devils opened in July 1971 it was treated like a soiled nappy by the British censor: they held their noses up at it and wanted to dispose of the bloody thing as quickly as possible. Had Russell gone too far this time? Er, yes, and numerous cuts were made to the film, including shots of Redgrave’s Sister Jeanne using a charred bone of Grandier as a dildo. What was left after the hatchet job was still without doubt the most savage film ever released in Britain. The US version was even more heavily cut. Ollie lapped up all the controversy, of course, and even challenged famed American critic Judith Crist to face him on a live TV chat show to explain the reason why she thought the film pornographic and disgusting; she refused. Alexander Walker, film critic of the Evening Standard, who denounced The Devils wonderfully as ‘the masturbation fantasies of a Roman Catholic boyhood’, did appear with Russell on live TV and got thwacked over the head with a rolled-up newspaper for his trouble.
The media onslaught had its origins in an editorial in the Daily Express which called The Devils ‘the most shocking film of all’ and claimed that at the press show two female journalists walked out in disgust. The Sun then barged in and labelled it ‘filthy, perverted, degrading and vile’, while in America reviewers on New York magazine couldn’t recall in all their broad experience, wading through something like four hundred movies a year, ‘a fouler film’.
While Mary Whitehouse foamed at the mouth at the mere thought of her local Odeon screening the film, Russell’s monster was banned outright in Ireland and caused chaos in Italy, where the Vatican condemned it as a ‘perverted marriage of sex, violence and blasphemy’. Needless to say, after such an endorsement half the country wanted to see it. ‘Why this hypocrisy?’ Ollie lambasted a frenzied press conference in Venice, where the city’s chief magistrate had slapped an embargo on it. ‘Why is it permissible to describe historic events in books and plays, but they must not be shown on the screen?’ A good point, and outside crowds of students who agreed with him burned an effigy of the civil servant suspended from a lamppost. The Devils was eventually allowed to be shown and its success did much to change the rather antiquated Italian laws on cinema censorship. It also resulted in the lifting of the ban that existed on Women in Love, which could now be safely released. ‘So we had two films running there at the same time,’ said Ollie. ‘And I got the Silver Mask award [from Italy] for being a pornographer.’
The Devils is an almost unique cinematic experience, by turns gross, comedic, tragic, dramatic and shocking: quite an achievement. What stands out today when you look at it are two things. First, the sheer beauty of it, the costumes, the make-up, but especially the production design by the then unknown and untried Derek Jarman. And then there is Oliver. ‘It is his greatest performance,’ says Murray Melvin. ‘And seeing it again recently with some of the gang we were all in tears at the end, saying, God, he was brilliant, why the bloody hell isn’t he here to see this now, to really appreciate what he did, because in retrospect it’s double the performance that it was when he gave it?’ Certainly it was an achievement utterly overshadowed by all the controversy surrounding the film. Ollie felt at the time that his performance was slightly compromised by Russell’s operatic visuals. ‘There was so much going on that it was difficult to make a performance live. The performances got lost in the tirade of masturbation, flagellation and kissing God’s feet.’
It’s also incomprehensible to learn that Oliver wasn’t nominated for a single acting award for The Devils. If a top-class actor gave a comparable performance today, as Murray says, ‘He would take the world by storm with it. But don’t forget, at that time Ken was persona non grata, of course, and so the film was pushed aside, so unfairly.’
The whole experience of making The Devils left Oliver physically exhausted and emotionally drained. Working with Russell yelling and screaming in your ear for four months was akin, he said, to parking your backside on a firecracker. Indeed it was tough on both of them, and their relationship took a battering. ‘Ken and I finished up very disturbed by the experience. Relations between us had to lie fallow for a while after that.’ But they would be back.