Hard Man To Get Along With...

Man, I love Oliver Reed, & I love reading & hearing stories about him. He was a hard dude to get along with. He wasn't exactly the happiest or friendliest of people. People were scared of Ollie, he could make you crap your pants. Everyone from Karen Black (Burnt Offerings) to Ann Margaret (Tommy), Michael Caine & Russel Crowe (Gladiator) had some real eye opening things to say about Mr. Reed.

Quoting Crowe on Reed in a interview he did for GQ magazine some years back.

"I never got on with Ollie [Reed]," he says of his Gladiator co-star, who died during the making of the film. "He has visited me in dreams and asked me to talk kindly of him. So I should... but we never had a pleasant conversation."

"I have seen him walk down the street in Malta drunk as a lord and just hit anybody he got near to - even a man walking with his children. I just found that to be... not impressive."
He wants to take the romance out of Reed's debauchery. "He drank himself to death. He sat on a bar stool until he fell off it and carried on drinking... Lying in his own piss and vomit he continued to drink till he passed out. What did the tabloids estimate he'd had on the day he died? Something like 30 beers, eight or ten dark rums and half a bottle of whisky. In the end, he created such a weird energy around him that no one drinking with him cared."


True enough, Ollie loved his drink & his women.

Rest easy Oliver.