Oliver Reed was once warned by a doctor that his heavy drinking could lead to his demise, and on May 2, 1999, he died of a heart attack at a pub in Malta after a drinking contest with a group of sailors.
Featureflash Film Archive / Alamy Stock PhotoOliver Reed was known for both his acting abilities and his heavy drinking.
English actor Oliver Reed was notorious for his alcoholism. Over the course of his 44-year career, he made waves for his behavior while drinking both on and off film sets. So, the death of Oliver Reed in a pub in May 1999 didn’t come as a total surprise to many who knew him.
At the time, Reed was in Malta filming Gladiator, in which he played the role of Proximo, the gruff old gladiator trainer. He had promised the director, Ridley Scott, that he wouldn’t drink during the movie’s production. However, he reportedly still visited bars on the weekends during breaks between shoots.
Indeed, 61-year-old Reed spent his final hours racking up a $435 tab during a drinking contest with a group of sailors. He then suffered a heart attack, collapsed on the floor of the pub, and was pronounced dead on the way to the hospital.
Reed still had several scenes to film for Gladiator, but because filming was about to wrap, it would be too difficult to recast his role. Instead, Scott decided to use CGI to add Reed’s face to another actor’s body in order to complete the movie. As such, Oliver Reed’s death left a glaring hole in both the Gladiator cast and the British acting community.
Oliver Reed’s Early Life And Rise To Fame
Robert Oliver Reed was born in London on Feb. 13, 1938. His uncle, Sir Carol Reed, was a film director, and his grandfather, Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree, was an actor. Young Reed ultimately followed in their footsteps, and he began appearing as an extra in films in 1955 when he was still a teenager.
PA Images / Alamy Stock PhotoOliver Reed with actress Diana Rigg at a press reception for their film The Assassination Bureau in 1967.
Alcohol also entered Reed’s life at an early age. After his parents divorced when he was still a toddler, his mother went through a series of lovers. According to a 2013 article in the Irish Independent, Reed once recalled to a journalist how he watched these men stagger into his home after a night of drinking. “Sometimes I would be allowed to stay up late, playing barman,” he said.
“I was four and didn’t know what I was doing,” Reed continued. “So in the end, there was just an empty room with a mother sobbing in the corner and a lot of empty bottles in the bottom of the cocktail cabinet.”
Drinking continued to be a common theme throughout the rest of Reed’s life. However, his binge drinking didn’t initially affect his acting career. He got his first break in 1959 when he was cast as Richard of Gloucester in the BBC series The Golden Spur. Two years later, he landed his first starring role in The Curse of the Werewolf. And in 1968, his appearance as Bill Sikes in Oliver! — which was directed by his uncle — garnered him critical praise.
However, at the same time Reed was gaining popularity for his on-screen performances, he was also becoming infamous for his off-screen antics.
A Controversial Life Behind The Scenes
Keystone Press / Alamy Stock PhotoOliver Reed at home with his dog in 1963.
Even 30 years before Oliver Reed’s death, his tendency to drink heavily began to have an impact on his life. According to a 2024 article in El País, Reed’s good friend Michael Winner once said, “Ollie was the kindest, calmest, and most polite man in the world… except when he was having a drink.”
In 1964, Reed reportedly got into an argument at a nightclub in Leicester and was attacked by men wielding broken glass bottles in the bathroom. The assault left the actor with 63 stitches and a large scar on his cheek, which he feared would affect his acting career, though these worries never came to fruition.
Columbia PicturesOliver Reed and Shani Wallis in Oliver! (1968).
Rumors once circulated that Reed and 36 of his friends drank 60 gallons of beer, 32 bottles of scotch, 17 bottles of gin, and four crates of wine in a single night, though the actor later claimed these reports were exaggerated. Still, he was known to binge drink, and the decisions he made while intoxicated often came back to haunt him.
In 1986, a drunken prank allegedly caused Reed’s stand-in, Reg Prince, to suffer a fractured spine. The men were at a restaurant in the Seychelles while filming Castaway when Reed began doing handstands and showing his penis to other diners. He then purportedly picked up Prince by his ankles and dangled him over a balcony, ultimately dropping him 12 feet to the beach below. Prince unsuccessfully sued Reed for this mishap in 1993, but the actor claimed Prince had fallen while trying to attack him.
Reed also gained a reputation for his behavior on talk shows. During an appearance on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson in 1975, he made such inflammatory remarks about women’s liberation that actress Shelley Winters poured a glass of whiskey over his head.
However, some people have speculated that Reed intentionally leaned into this provocative personality. Though it’s never been confirmed, there are those who suggest that Reed was not always as drunk as he seemed on television and that he was simply giving the people what they wanted from him.
Reed’s son, Mark, told the Irish Independent in 2013, “Underneath it all, there was this very mannered, intelligent, shy individual. The other side of the coin was this — as people sadly remember him — hellraiser. But, looking back on him, I remember him for his work as well as the antics. The antics weren’t all the time.”
Unfortunately, Reed never shook his “hellraiser” label — and in 1999, the years of drunken debauchery finally caught up to him.
Inside Oliver Reed’s Death While Filming ‘Gladiator’
Paramount PicturesOliver Reed as Proximo in Gladiator, his final film.
By the time Oliver Reed started filming Gladiator in 1999, he was 61 years old. After an incident on the set of Cutthroat Island in 1995 in which the actor had reportedly shown up intoxicated, exposed himself to Geena Davis, and been fired and recast, director Ridley Scott made Reed promise him that he wouldn’t drink during the movie’s production.
Reed agreed, but his sobriety didn’t last long. During a break from filming in Valletta, Malta, he visited a small pub on the morning of May 2, 1999. When a group of Royal Navy sailors who were docked nearby walked in, Reed seemingly couldn’t resist taking part in a drinking contest with them.
Over the course of just a few hours, Reed reportedly drank eight pints of beer, 12 shots of rum, and half a bottle of whiskey, racking up a $435 tab. Then, he collapsed. Oliver Reed died from a heart attack at the age of 61.
Open Media Ltd./Wikimedia CommonsDuring this 1991 episode of After Dark, an inebriated Oliver Reed was kicked off the set after making inflammatory remarks and trying to kiss feminist writer Kate Millett.
According to the biography Hellraisers: The Life and Inebriated Times of Richard Burton, Richard Harris, Peter O’Toole, and Oliver Reed, Reed once told an interviewer: “I don’t have a drink problem. But if that was the case and doctors told me I had to stop I like to think I would be brave enough to drink myself into the grave.”
Of course, that’s exactly what happened. A lifetime of alcoholism — and one morning of drinking — brought a tragic end to the 44-year-long career of the controversial actor.
After reading about Oliver Reed’s death, go inside the sudden death of actor Michael Clarke Duncan. Or, learn all about the military career of Christopher Lee.
