After playing a villain in a horror movie, The Shuttered Room (1967), he did a third with Winner, I'll Never Forget What's'isname (1967), co-starring with Orson Welles. Robert Oliver Reed was born on 13 February 1938 at 9 Durrington Park Road, [3] Wimbledon, southwest London, to Peter Reed, a sports journalist, and Marcia (née Napier-Andrews).

But even here the film has a few surprises to offer: in places it actually becomes genuinely moving to watch. His next project with Ken Russell was Tommy, where he plays Tommy's stepfather, based on The Who's 1969 concept album, Tommy, and starring its lead singer Roger Daltrey. There was a break in shooting to work out a special effect, and when the crew was ready to resume Ollie and Corinne were nowhere to be found. Reed got his first significant role in Hammer Films' Sword of Sherwood Forest (1960), again directed by Fisher. Later, in the 1970s, I was tremendously impressed with Oliver Reed’s work with director Ken Russell.

I sort of hope this is misguided, because it’s not a great movie by any chalk – the actors do their best, but the script is poor, the direction not especially impressive, and some of the special effects are absolutely awful. Nevertheless, every year BIFA gives out the Douglas Hickox Award for the best new director, which probably isn’t anything to do with Theatre of Blood – but I can’t help feeling it should be. Perhaps if Reed and Rigg had gone on to have the kinds of film careers their talent deserved, this film would just be a curious historical oddity and a reminder that even a film that sounds promising can turn out to be a bit duff. The one who came closest was Douglas Hickox, the director, who had a longish career, much of it as the AD on fifties potboilers: I’ve heard of some of the films he made ( Behemoth the Sea Monster and Zulu Dawn, for example), but would struggle to describe them especially distinguished.

In the case of The Crimson Horror I think it was just because this was a rattling good yarn where the basic plot came first, didn’t feel over-squashed by other considerations, and didn’t seem to exist mainly to articulate some sort of hackneyed and overwrought emotional story. One is almost inclined to feel sorry for the retinas of our American cousins, given that this show wasn’t broadcast in colour on its original UK showing (colour TV didn’t start here until the end of the decade, and remained something of a minority pursuit until the mid-1970s).I’m pretty sure this is a horror movie – it’s genuinely unsettling for long periods, deals with proper horror material, and Wright deploys a few classic horror gags along the way – but it is also a very modern piece dealing with the topics of mental health and misogynistic violence. He also must have been well read because he was able to effortlessly embody many memorable characters from literature such as Gerald Crich in WOMEN IN LOVE and Athos in THE THREE MUSKETEERS. I was possibly the only teenager of my generation to organise an Avengers viewing party – one friend came along, mainly because he’d enjoyed the New Avengers repeats, I think. I suppose some people might say that Theatre of Blood isn’t really a horror film because it’s not actually scary – and it is true that it functions as a knowing, grand guignol comedy more than anything else. National service took him along the same path as his father (though he served in the medical corps), and he would happily have continued the military life but for the obstacle of dyslexia.