In spite of their age difference Oliver and Josephine behaved like any normal couple. They dined out quite often, even went to the theatre a couple of times, and were regular moviegoers, despite the fact that Oliver was a nightmare to go to the cinema with. He’d sit there saying, ‘The lighting in this film is hopeless.’ He’d complain he could see a shadow or the lighting was too harsh, or it was too this, or too that. ‘We’d walk out of so many films,’ says Josephine. ‘He did have his favourites at home that we’d watch again and again on video. He loved Anthony Hopkins. He enjoyed watching his work, he was a big fan. And The Duellists he absolutely adored.’ Ridley Scott’s debut feature as a director was a film Ollie had been obsessed with for years, as Sarah can testify. ‘We were all bored to tears by The Duellists. That was one of his favourite films. There was a period of about four years where I knew probably every line in that film. He’d say, “Come on, girlie, come and watch this,” and it would be something like four o’clock in the morning.’
Mostly, though, Ollie and Josephine were homebodies. A perfect evening for Ollie was snuggling up with Josephine on the sofa watching television or a video after a quiet dinner, which they always ate at six o’clock. Or he might just relax and listen to the radio. ‘He loved Radio 4,’ says Josephine. ‘He was passionate about Radio 4.’ For much of his adult life Oliver had terrible trouble sleeping and needed something in the room making a noise, such as the radio, and sometimes very loudly. Jacquie remembers that, rather than walk round and wake him, she would often resort to crawling under the bed to turn down the volume. With Josephine his sleeping disorder persisted. The cause was diagnosed as tinnitus, or ringing in the ear, which Oliver claimed was due to being too close to loud sound-effect bangs on film sets. The radio would be tuned to Radio 4 all night and when they were abroad it was the World Service. If they were filming in a country where the World Service was not available they’d put the television on and cover the screen with a towel. Much later Oliver started taking audiobooks with him to play through the night.
As for television, it was mainly documentaries and sport he watched, primarily rugby, cricket and horse-racing. He loved his gardening programmes, of course. ‘Also One Man and His Dog,’ remembers Josephine. ‘He was really into that show. And Come Dancing. We used to watch that.’ One of the most popular programmes on television in the mid-eighties was In at the Deep End. It was a simple format: each week two presenters, Chris Searle and Paul Heiney, undertook various professional jobs as complete beginners, maybe ballroom dancing or becoming a chef at a top London brasserie. The show’s producer had come up with a brilliant idea for Heiney’s next challenge, playing a movie baddie. ‘Our producer was very good at finding people to act as your mentor and adviser,’ recalls Heiney. ‘And because Ollie was the most famous bad man on the screen at that time they persuaded him to give me a lesson in how to play a screen baddie.’ It was an experience Heiney has never forgotten.
Not just Heiney but the whole TV crew were nervous about meeting Oliver. When they arrived at the allotted time outside Pinkhurst and knocked on the front door, there was an ominously long silence. Perhaps he’d forgotten. They knocked again. This time the door opened very, very slowly and an eye appeared, and then the door closed again. It then reopened and Ollie revealed himself. ‘He was wearing a heavy army overcoat,’ says Heiney. ‘Like the ones the Russian army wear, and he said there was nothing underneath. I had no reason to disbelieve him. He was wearing a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles; one of the lenses was cracked. He had a sort of look of death about him, although I’m sure that was put on, and he had in his fist a pint mug with this clear, colourless liquid in it which he said was vodka and tonic, and I’ve got no reason to doubt that, either. Clearly he’d decided from the outset that he was going to play the bad man every inch of the way. Come in, sit down, shut up, don’t sit there, all that kind of stuff, and he was clearly enjoying it. And I wasn’t enjoying it.’
The advice Ollie gives in this interview is like a master class in how to play a villain on film. His big thing was not to blink: bad men do not blink. ‘You don’t see a cobra blink, do you?’ he says. The next thing was the voice. Villains don’t shout, they don’t need to. Dangerous men have a great silence and stillness about them. ‘Then when he told me to do my villainous foreign accent he took the piss out of me mercilessly.’ Tension seemed to be building, until, exasperated at Heiney’s feeble line readings, Ollie put down the script, got up and bodily threw the presenter out of the house. ‘Piss off!’ he yelled as Heiney was unceremoniously deposited on the driveway and the door slammed in his face. ‘Now, he clearly planned on doing that. And I remember at the time being really quite scared. Then once the interview was all over he was a completely different man. He was a really nice guy. It was, come on in, have a drink, how are you?’
The team stayed on for maybe an hour or two, during which time Heiney was taken to a room at the back of the house by either a cleaner or the housekeeper. ‘This is the games room,’ he was told. ‘Do you know what that means?’ Heiney didn’t have the first idea. ‘It all happens here,’ came the reply. It was now that the presenter noticed a bar in the corner, and was told, ‘What happens is that Ollie gets all his mates in here and they drink and they drink and they drink and they drink, and then they smash up all the furniture. Then we come in the next morning and clear it all out and buy some more furniture and then a week later it happens all over again.’ That was the games room.
Looking back, the most disturbing aspect of the whole day for Heiney was the sight of Josephine, who sat on the periphery the whole time, observing but not participating in any way in what was going on. ‘She looked like a rather nervous creature, like a cat afraid that the dog might go for it. She just sat there all the time at the very back of the room and never moved and never said anything, just sat there completely silently and watched everything. It looked a very strange set-up.’
As a rule Ollie disliked doing publicity. He understood his responsibilities when it came to publicizing a new movie, but premieres and large press junkets left him cold. Some were obviously more bearable than others. Take the occasion in the summer of 1985 when he was asked to take part in a three-day press jamboree on the cruise ship the Achille Lauro, a vessel that just a few months later made headlines around the world when she was hijacked by members of the Palestine Liberation Front. The terrorists had obviously waited until Ollie was safely no longer aboard. Scores of journalists and film critics had been invited to watch and then interview members of the cast of a new, Italian-made epic TV mini-series on the life of Christopher Columbus. Gabriel Byrne starred as the famous explorer, while Ollie played Martin Pinzon, who sailed with Columbus on his first voyage to the new world as captain of one of his ships.
Adequately told, the drama featured a top-notch supporting cast of Max Von Sydow, Faye Dunaway and Eli Wallach. In a small role was Murray Melvin, who hadn’t seen Ollie since his antics in Budapest on The Prince and the Pauper. Everyone was flown to Naples, where the Achille Lauro was docked.
Murray remembers Ollie turning up at nine a.m., already on the vodkas. Once aboard they set sail, with the ship merely steaming round in a very large circle for the entire three days. The press were on board all the time and so the actors had breakfast, lunch and dinner at the same table, talking with different media people. And the drink flowed. Like a limpet mine, Ollie attached himself to Murray. ‘I used to have to pour my gin and tonics into a plant pot because there was no way I could keep up. Ollie was a big lad, so he absorbed more. I was a matchstick. So after the evening meal it was, “Right, come on, Murray, to the bar.” I’d say, “Oh, Ollie, no. Listen, I need an early night.” “Don’t be ridiculous, come to the bar.” So I was in the bar and I’d pour my drinks away when he wasn’t looking, but then he’d see my empty glass and go, “Another gin and tonic for Murray.” There wasn’t a way out. So then I used to try and sip it slowly and of course Ollie would roar, “Drink the bloody thing, Murray!” Two nights I was with him.’
One particular night a group of Italians had gathered round a piano to sing songs, and Murray thought it all rather enchanting. ‘Oh, Ollie, let’s go over and join them.’
‘Italians – don’t want to go anywhere near them.’
‘Ollie, listen, they’re just having a nice time.’
As the clock struck one a.m., Ollie downed another vodka and bang, he was past the point of no return, his face screwed up in pain and confusion. ‘Fucking Italians, look at ’em.’ He started to make his move.
‘Ollie, no, Ollie, you really mustn’t, Ollie, no, you cannot,’ screeched Murray.
‘Why not? They need a jolly good punch.’
‘No, Ollie, please don’t.’ All the time Murray was straining to hold him back.
‘Why?’ asked Ollie.
‘Because you’re Brown Owl,’ said Murray.
‘What do you mean, I’m Brown Owl?’
‘You’re the head of the English contingent, you’re Brown Owl.’ Oliver started to laugh and ordered another vodka. ‘And that’s how I did it,’ says Murray proudly. ‘All the time I kept saying, “Ollie, you cannot, you’re here representing ENGLAND. You’re representing the Queen.” And of course he was very patriotic, very “raising the flag”. And this went on till something like half past two every night, and I’m starting to flag, and you had to be up next morning for interviews, but I had to wait for him to go, “I can’t stand this any more, I’m off to bed.” And I’d go, “All right, Ollie, I’ll see you at breakfast, love. Have a good sleep.” I’d get back to my cabin and think, I’ve got another night of this. But I did it, because it would have caused a diplomatic incident, a scandal beyond belief.’
As for Josephine, who was there for the entire trip, Murray found her no help whatsoever. ‘She would sit quietly while he was tipping tables in restaurants. She just sat quietly until he said, “Come on, let’s go.” It was quite extraordinary, she never said, “Ollie, darling, don’t,” as most women would have done, but not Josephine, not a word. None of us understood it. I always equated it to, sort of, like the gangster’s moll, who just sat there quietly, because sometimes you did think, Josephine, come on, say something.’
To be fair, Josephine was by nature a fairly tolerant, quiet person, and when it just got too rowdy, or Ollie’s drinking friends came and things got out of hand, she’d simply take herself out of the situation and go somewhere else. ‘I didn’t shout, pout, stamp, or berate him. What was the point? This was a man who had been doing this all his life. Who was I to suddenly say, don’t? And he did say, right from the outset, that’s the way he was. I always said I never wanted to change him. You fall in love with somebody. What’s then the point of changing that, because then you end up with someone else. So I would just sit quietly in the corner if it was just generally exploding.’ Ollie also reassured her that if he said something untoward he generally didn’t mean it, and if he behaved badly he wanted her to know that wasn’t really his true personality and that things generally looked better in the morning, which invariably they did. It was also one of the reasons why he’d put on hold any thoughts of marrying Josephine until they’d been together for five years, ‘Because by then I think you’ll know me well enough.’ Those five years were now up.
Not long after they first met, Oliver put a ring pull from a Coke can on Josephine’s finger. It was meant as a joke but she wore it for quite some time, and kept it as a memento for years afterwards. When the couple were having dinner with David and Muriel at Pinkhurst one evening, Muriel suddenly blurted out that really it was about time the two of them tied the knot. Oliver looked over at Josephine and she looked at him. ‘Yeah, shall we?’ he said. ‘All right,’ replied Josephine. ‘We’ll get married this year then.’ She was twenty-one.
The wedding took place on Saturday, 7 September 1985 at the register office in Epsom. The couple tried to keep it quiet, with only family members and close friends aware that anything was happening. It was poor Peter, Ollie’s dad, who let the cat out of the bag by mistake. Phoned up by a reporter asking if the ceremony was at such and such a venue, he replied, ‘Oh no, it’s at nine o’clock in Epsom. Oops!’ Realizing what he’d done, Peter phoned Ollie to apologize. ‘So the press were there,’ says Josephine. ‘I remember having to drag my brother through the melee to get in.’
They quickly forgave Peter, and Josephine’s memories of him are of a ‘lovely, sweet, old-fashioned gentleman’. She also met Oliver’s mother for the first time at that wedding, one of only two meetings she ever had with her. Just before the ceremony was about to begin, Marcia came over to where Josephine was standing and said, ‘So, you’re the one marrying Oliver.’
The event passed off without a hitch, much to the disappointment of the press no doubt. As did Oliver’s stag party, held at home in a marquee and catered by the local pub. ‘I was at the other end of the house watching a film,’ Josephine remembers. ‘When I went upstairs to bed he was already there, having quietly snuck off and left the others to “party on”.’ Ollie was appearing at the time in a film called Captive, a hostage drama, and was due back on location at London’s Albert Docks on the Monday. ‘So he was well behaved,’ says Josephine. ‘He didn’t go crazy over the wedding period and we had a lovely day. It was fantastic.’ She always loved to lay claim to the fact that she must be one of the only people ever to spend her honeymoon at the Albert Docks.
Oliver’s previous important relationships, with Kate and then Jacquie, had produced children, and now he was married he felt a strong desire to begin raising a family with Josephine. ‘I remember us arguing about where they’d go to school before we’d even had any,’ says Josephine. ‘Which we then actually burst out laughing about.’ Oliver was full of hope and expectation about having children, talking about it with almost everyone. ‘He’d announce it in supermarkets,’ says David. ‘He’d be stroking babies’ heads and saying, “Well, of course we’re going to have a baby. We’re going to call it Barty.” Of course, that was never to happen.’
Perhaps Oliver felt duty bound to give Josephine a child because of her young age, and when it became obvious they couldn’t have one (the problem lay with Oliver, not Josephine), the guilt kicked in and it was he who kept insisting they have tests, refused by Josephine, and later that they should think about adoption, again an idea she rejected. ‘I had it in the back of my mind that, for us to work and to carry on, I don’t think necessarily a child was going to be a good thing. He might have been briefly troubled by this, but then it passed and we were fine. But he loved babies. He spent hours on aeroplanes entertaining babies, especially when he had a big moustache and these little kids would peer back at him and he’d be wiggling his moustache and pulling funny expressions.’
Once when Paul and Nora Friday were visiting Pinkhurst, Oliver turned to their daughter Louise, who was three or four at the time, and said, ‘Have you seen the winter dragon?’ Louise looked puzzled. ‘Dragon?’ she replied. ‘Yes,’ went Ollie. ‘A winter dragon. You’ve not seen the winter dragon?’ Louise shook her head. ‘Come on then,’ said Ollie, grabbing her hand as they all trudged into the woods, ‘I’ll show you the winter dragon.’ Secretly he had got Bill Dobson to hide behind a tree with a large pile of leaves doused in petrol. ‘It’s over there!’ Ollie shrieked. With that, Bill lit a match and, whoosh, a huge flame shot out. Louise looked wide-eyed at her father and mouthed, ‘No way,’ then turned round, and ran back to the house. ‘And Louise believed in dragons till she was fourteen,’ says Paul. ‘Because she’d seen one! That’s the sort of imagination Oliver had.’
Ollie also adored his two nieces, and loved playing with them whenever he visited David and Muriel, which sometimes could be late at night, when he was in a dishevelled state. ‘When our girls were very little he used to go up and terrify them and they’d wet their beds for the next three nights,’ claims Muriel. But then he’d leave money on the stairs for them to collect in the morning. ‘Despite those experiences they all adored him,’ says David. ‘Oliver loved children. He just didn’t know how to cope with them.’