Can a werewolf make good? Oliver Reed, who looks like a cross between a Sunset Strip hippie and a medieval minotaur, is one who did. Five years ago he was nobody, just out of the British Army, playing a rather Freudian wolf man with a cold nose in a low-budget horror film called Curse of the Werewolf. Sure, he was the nephew of British film director Sir Carol Reed, but Sir Carol’s last film had been The Agony and the Ecstasy and he was having troubles of his own. No time for family pull. So Oliver took the wolf-man job. It was the first time England had seen a method werewolf scratch and howl and paw the ground (and the necks of young ladies) with enough passion to make the Old Vic jealous. And, by Jove, he was sexy, too.
Well, the excitement he stirred up sent his stock soaring so high that the roles he turns down alone could now keep half the film actors in England in fish and chips and a good cuppa for the rest of their natural lives. He is now starring in Oliver!, Columbia’s technicolor movie version of the stage musical, which is already such a lavish project for England’s usually modest cinema sound stages that local film-watchers are calling it “Great Expectations with tap dancing.” He is the hip-hep comet to watch with the action set in London (and catching up fast in America) because of two other films, The Girl Getters and The Jokers, and has three more in the releasing stage—The Trap, in which he plays a hairy brute of a fur trapper in the Canadian wilds who is tamed by a mute (Rita Tushingham); I’ll Never Forget What’s His Name, with Orson Welles, about a man with a wife and three mistresses who returns through boredom to his former life on a small literary magazine only to discover the people there were phony too; and The Shuttered Room with Carol Lynley, which he says is “so bloody awful I didn’t even see it myself.” Soon he’ll play William the Conqueror in a European spectacular, and he has three films committed to Paramount and eight others to Universal. Impressive. And all because people forgot werewolves could be groovy.
“It was the cold nose,” he says. “When I sniffed, the birds fainted.” Then, seriously, “Everyone told me not to do horror films. But I wanted to act. I remember standing on a table blowing bubble gum as a child and everyone applauded. I liked that. My granny was an opera singer, my grandfather an actor and my uncle was Sir Carol, so it was like an involuntary muscular action, like going to the bathroom. But I had the army ahead. The British army. What a joke. I had a lot of tight-fisted ideas about military society, so they sent me to a psychiatrist. I was a featureless soldier in a featureless army. Then when I came out I went to my uncle and he said to go into repertory if I wanted to be an actor. It was good advice, because I ignored it completely. I don’t give a damn for the theatre, films is where it’s at. I took my photos around and got a bit in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and played in a lot of the Hammer films—wicked earls, pirates, swashbucklers in Sherwood Forest. Then I tested for the wolf. They knew I looked the part already, so I got it and learned a lot. We had strict discipline, strict budgets, and turned out those horrors in six weeks. Used the same sets for each one—just painted the rooms a different color, nailed a new border on and—presto!—a new movie.”
We were talking on the Oliver set out at Shepperton, where Broadway choreographer Onna White was twirling 350 extras through a massive labyrinth of Victorian London streets, Hollywood conductor Johnny Green was leading a symphony orchestra through a sweep of brassy marches and Oliver’s uncle, Sir Carol, was directing three chimney sweeps to sit in a tub of water with their pants on fire. “I see my father’s mannerisms in him,” said Oliver. “I come on the set, we have a chat—‘Hello, how are you?’—then boom. I blow.” Then he zipped through the cobblestone streets in his lemon-yellow Jaguar, crushing cabbage leaves and horse dung beneath his wheels, passing 1840 snuff shops and pubs filled with extras in stovepipe hats, and angled in under the wash of Dickens’ London hanging raggedly on the washlines near the studio commissary, where he slid into a booth next to James Coburn and James Fox and ordered a tomato salad.
“It’s you Americans who did it. Nobody in America remembers a werewolf, but I did The Girl Getters and The Jokers for a young director, Michael Winner, and got discovered there. Then I had a bad fight in a bar, got my face cut up and didn’t work for eleven months. I was picked on by this drunk who was trying to impress his girl because he recognized the werewolf of London. Now I just buy them a drink if they tease me. It’s easier. Anyway, it’s the recognition in America that counts. I’ve done a third film for Winner and now people are beginning to wonder about our relationship. But I’ve got 15 scripts on my desk and I’m making more money for Oliver! than I’ve ever made in my life. I could never go back to making horror films now. I don’t like starving. That period was filled with wet stockings hanging over strings to dry and living on tomato catsup poured over spaghetti and saying ‘Darling’ and ‘Sweetie pie’ to people I hated in bad Italian restaurants just to get a job. When I met my wife she was engaged and I was so poor I tried to get her to sell her ring.
“I’m getting good roles too. People want something new. That old mystique of movie stars in silk-lined caravans is over. Hollywood is full of dog-food commercials now. Filming is an international word. Thank God for it, it’s giving the O’Tooles and Finneys and Richard Harrises a chance. Hollywood’s last stand was the musical. Now they’re bringing Johnny Green over here from MGM and spending eight million on Oliver! because we’ve got the talent. The old marquee names are getting old and I’m getting my chance, Charlie. We need American money and they need our talent. Like a wedding. But I’d rather marry a rich girl than a poor one, wouldn’t you? I’m being drawn to America now because my expenses are getting bigger. I have an accountant, a personal secretary, a gardener, a handyman, and a maid, because movie stars’ wives don’t scrub floors. When you make it you come home and they say, ‘All right, Big Daddy, where’s the money you promised when you got famous?’ You spend every penny and end up famous and broke. This country takes everything in taxes. Then everyone wonders where have all our British actors gone? They’ve gone to Hollywood. We’re all being driven out of the country.
“I haven’t lived long enough with this much money to know who I am yet. I don’t know if it’s big cars or gambling or fast women I want, so I try them all. People ask if I’m a hippie. I don’t know. But I hate clothes. I sort of live out of old film wardrobes they give me after each film. I’m no dandy. I own a lot of boots, but only one pair of shoes at a time till they wear out because you have to go to the cobbler and look for your ticket and I always lose mine and end up in a bloody row and get thrown out. I don’t like swinging London. I went to the Ad Lib once and it was all actors in tweed hats and corduroy pants who dribbled all over my wife’s hand and I thought, ‘Christ, is this a mirror? Am I like that?’ Actors are bores. I can only take them in twos and threes—no, three is too many—because then they start telling you about all the parts they turn down. I’d rather go to Wales and talk to the miners than to the Mirabelle or someplace ‘in’ and posh because there’s no bull there. When I was in Montreal making The Trap I went to San Francisco and lived three weeks in Haight-Ashbury with the flower people before the American press found out about them and the phonies moved in. They were gentle people. No racial tension. If this is the effect of LSD, then swing, babe, do you dig? It produces gentleness, whereas alcohol produces violence. The bars in America are like puke houses, with everyone ordering sidecars and screwdrivers and all that crap. That’s why Americans flip over our pubs. Pubs were my acting school. I got all my characterizations that way. You walk into a pub at 5:30 and a man in a bowler hat with a briefcase and creased trousers will go through every stage of mankind before he finishes his bitter.
“Actors used to have to go to the Royal Academy and have a very prissy background. Then war came and everyone was employed as full-time murderers and the Noel Cowards with their chiseled noses and lavender water and Brylcreem hair were out, because the newsreel cameras were shooting men crawling out of trenches. Then after the war everyone sighed relief and escaped for ten years into a world of crinoline and scarlet pimpernels and remakes of old Hollywood three-musketeer movies. Then the children of the men at war took over and the Tony Richardsons were in in British films. Now after the kitchen sinks and the contraceptives and the rooms at the top crying out for recognition, we need another escape, so it’s spies. You just saw one at the next table. James Coburn. Faces like his and mine are in. I’ve got a face like a dust bin, but through the help of the hippies people are learning that if you kick a dust bin over and rhododendrons fall out, it’s glorious. Dust bins can make love. It’s more real to today’s kids to love a pop singer with acne, long hair and a guitar by throwing jelly beans at him because he’s more real and personal than a Rock Hudson movie idol. It used to be more respectable and secure to have short hair and a business suit, but now men know it’s not necessary. Those men were not gentle. And women react to gentleness. So my kind of face has a bigger future than ever, do you dig?”
He walked out into the rain, his beard gleaming and his long hair bouncing in the breeze. The weather and the kids and the musical numbers were back in full force on the streets of Oliver! He scratched himself and grinned. “I think I’ll give it all up when I’m 40 for a long think.” Then he went back to work. It beats digging peat in Ireland.