The final shot of Gladiator was supposed to have been Proximo, the old entertainer, entering the empty Colosseum and burying in the sandy arena the wooden sword given to him by Marcus Aurelius, the symbol of his freedom. ‘That would have been incredibly moving,’ says Douglas Wick. ‘And what a great final image of Oliver’s performance and of his career.’ Sadly it was not to be.
Once the shock and tragedy of Oliver’s death had passed, the filmmakers were left with what looked like an insurmountable problem. At least 20 per cent of his performance was incomplete, including his most important screen moment, where the cynical Proximo redeems himself. A meeting took place, with the insurance people looking into the option of going back and reshooting all of Proximo’s scenes with another actor. ‘At that meeting, it was the first time I’d ever seen Ridley Scott really distressed,’ recalls Wick. ‘Ridley is so impermeable, but he just looked crushed, because aside from the loss of Ollie he knew something extraordinary had happened and he was determined to save that performance. It was irreplaceable.’
Very early on in the production there was a buzz surrounding Oliver’s performance. Everyone on the movie was talking about it. And those who knew a little of his history were beginning to speak about a glorious comeback. ‘We knew we had lightning in a jar,’ says Wick. ‘It was a very original performance, just the way his particular qualities, his magnetism, his primitiveness, this strange honesty, intersected with that character. He had found a balance of roughness and cynicism, and you could see just the beginnings of a rumble of a heart. It was a part that he was so wonderfully suited for and it evolved in his hands – Oliver was Proximo.’
The only solution left was to somehow create a new storyline for the character using a combination of body doubles and existing footage. This was done with consummate skill and technical brilliance. What we have in effect is Ollie’s ghost saving Crowe’s Maximus from imprisonment and meeting his end with nobility at the hands of Roman assassins. It’s a fitting denouement to Oliver’s cinematic odyssey, and a great rescue job on the filmmaker’s part, but one is still left to lament what might have been.
Oliver’s death was tragic on so many levels, not least because here was a man thriving and about to have a complete rebirth with the public. The world was going to rediscover Oliver Reed. The enormous success of Gladiator would surely have re-energized his career. Producers who had been shit scared of him would have suddenly gone, OK, it’s worth taking a little bit of a risk with him, and that would have led to better roles and perhaps some of his best performances because he still had what Ridley Scott termed a ‘fantastically powerful screen presence’. As Terry Gilliam notes, ‘He’s one of the best things in Gladiator. If you want to see acting, don’t look at Russell Crowe, look at what Ollie’s doing, he’s magnificent.’ When Georgina Hale went to see it at her local cinema she remembers walking out afterwards thinking, ‘he was fabulous, drunk or sober, who cares? He was just magic to watch’.
When Gladiator was finished, Mike Higgins remembers, there was a private screening in London before the film opened. ‘And when the credits came up at the end and it said, “To our friend: Oliver Reed”, the entire audience, which was made up of the crew and the actors, burst into applause.’