Ollie meets Oscar, just a bit too late

By Steve Cunningham

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HELL-RAISING actor Oliver Reed could win the film industry's rarest accolade - a posthumous Oscar.

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The hard-drinking star, who died aged 61 while filming Gladiator, is likely to be to be nominated for a Best Supporting Actor award for his role in this epic as Proximor.

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Oliver Reed in Gladiator

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Reed died of a heart attack in Malta in 1999 as the film neared completion.

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According to one obituary on Reed, his screen career often seemed like a mere rehearsal for the more important business of hell-raising. He once summed up his career as 'shafting the girlies and downing the sherbie'.

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After a series of Hammer horrors, Reed became one of the highest-paid actors as Bill Sikes in the musical Oliver! He later went on to two Ken Russell projects, Women In Love and The Devils. In the first, Reed achieved the distinction of becoming the first actor to appear fully naked in a mainstream film.

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The binges were legendary:

• In 1974, Reed invited 36 rugby players to a party at his home. Between Saturday night and Sunday lunchtime, they managed to consume 60 gallons of beer, 32 bottles of Scotch, 17 bottles of gin, four crates of wine … and one bottle of Babycham. Reed then led the players on a nude dawn run through the Surrey countryside.
• The same year, while filming The Three Musketeers in Spain, the police were summoned to Reed's hotel to arrest him for dancing naked in a giant goldfish tank.
• On his two-day stag night in 1985, Reed claimed to have downed 136 pints of beer.
• In 1986 Reed was forced to dig up nine acres of his back garden after forgetting where he had buried his wife's jewellery when drunk.
• He once spiked snooker ace Alex Higgins's whisky with Chanel perfume. Then Higgins squirted Fairy Liquid in Reed's creme de menthe.
• He often displayed the bird claws tattooed on his private parts, a performance once described as his 'party trick'.
• During a drinking marathon at a rugby club in Doncaster he threw �50 on the bar, saying: 'Get all these working-class pigs a drink.' He said later: 'I call a lot of people pigs. It's an endearment.'
• During one live television show he drank wine from half-pint glasses, uttered obscenities and fell over a sofa.
• On another occasion he upset the captain on a flight home from filming abroad by dropping his trousers and asking the hostesses to judge a prettiest boy contest.

Posthumous Oscars are rare indeed. Only 10 have been awarded - and just one of them to a performer. That was Peter Finch in 1977 for his role as a deranged newscaster in Network.

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Previous posthumous nominations in this category - Spencer Tracy for Guess Who's Coming to Dinner in 1967 and James Dean twice, for East of Eden in 1955 and Giant in 1956 - came long after the actors�had died.