Diana Rigg & Oliver Reed: The Shocking Truth!

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The book - with no title page, no contents, not even an author's name - is OBVIOUSLY being marketed to tell some lurid stories about the relationship between Rigg and Reed. 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’ve been trying to think why this should be – I don’t think it’s just down to my appreciation of the performances involved. In retrospect, I think one of the big reasons there’s been a lack of focus on Reed’s career and more attention paid to his eccentric antics and drinking is that so many of his early films were incredibly difficult to get a hold of. Perhaps this was the result of moral concerns, or perhaps because one of the things that lifts the film is that fact that Lionheart is somehow a doomed, tragic figure from the start.

He had lobbied successfully for the Reed line to be recognized as royal and felt this made him the head of the family. He had an incredibly rich and diverse career which included playing werewolves and pirates in Hammer horror films to tackling complex characters from history such as Urbain Grandier in THE DEVILS and Dante Gabriel Rossetti in DANTE’S INFERNO. As a result this is one of the actor’s greatest films, as he gets to play not just Lionheart, but Lionheart performing many of Shakespeare’s greatest roles. You may also notice briefly the young Reed, whose personal ineptitudes - the booze, the weight, the consistently shot-off mouth - cured him into a particularly thick-skinned ham, and did for what might have been a more interesting movie career. Reed was often irritated that his appearances on television chat shows concentrated on his drinking feats rather than his acting career and latest films.In 1964, Reed was in the Crazy Elephant nightclub in Leicester Square and got into a dispute at the bar with a couple of men that ended with Reed walking away with a dismissive remark. Thomasin McKenzie, who for a while has looked like one of those actresses one really good film away from significant stardom, plays Ellie, a young girl who has grown up in Cornwall with a head full of the sights and sounds of the swinging sixties. Reed got his first significant role in Hammer Films' Sword of Sherwood Forest (1960), again directed by Fisher. I had worked on the second unit reshoots of a Corman drive-in movie that was written and directed by Charles B. When he was not working, he would inhabit a pub for days at a time, joyfully putting everyone in sight under the table.

Clash of Loyalties) (1983), which dealt with Leachman's exploits during the 1920 revolution in Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq). Born in Wimbledon, south London, to warring parents, he knew about trouble from the outset, and was sent away to boarding school - the first of 14 - at the age of four.

Last Night in Soho might not be quite the genre-bender that some of Edgar Wright’s films have been, but it’s still a slightly tough film to pin down. This is quite a recent phenomenon – certainly, even during David Tennant’s final full season I remember walking away from each episode shaking my head in delighted amazement at the consistent inventiveness and surefootedness of the show in balancing its various constituents, and my memories of Matt Smith’s first year are overwhelmingly positive too. This character, the Brigadier, is played by Jon Pertwee, a fact which invariably causes clanging cognitive dissonance in members of my former tribe. Reed became a close friend and drinking partner of the Who's drummer Keith Moon in 1974, while working together on the film version of Tommy.

So in 1963, Reed was cast in the TV Debussy life; and later Russell used his lubberliness, and willingness to expose himself in every possible way, in his 1969 feature film Women In Love (in which Reed was rather more like Seth Starkadder in Cold Comfort Farm, undoing another button of his shirt, than DH Lawrence's Gerald Crich); and, better, as Urbain Grandier in The Devils (1971). He liked to challenge events and people on a personal level to provoke honest and truthful responses. Speaking of which, the switch to colour does encourage some spectacular, if not downright garish, decisions from the costuming and art departments: at one point we see Steed lounging about in what appears to be a maroon silk tuxedo with a mauve shirt, while a purple jumpsuit seems to have become Emma’s outfit of choice.Since I wrote the above the news has broken of the passing of Dame Diana Rigg, giving these current pieces a resonance I could frankly have happily lived without.

At that time there were many people in Hollywood willing to work for free as a PA to get started in the business. a film directed by his uncle Carol Reed), Women in Love (1969), Hannibal Brooks (1969), The Devils (1971), Athos in The Three Musketeers (1973) and The Four Musketeers (1974), the stepfather in Tommy (1975), Funny Bones (1995) and Gladiator (2000). He was not ill tempered by nature, but after hours of partying things could get wildly out of control, especially with personal friends like Keith Moon, Richard Harris, Harry Nilsson, and John Lennon. She is determined to go to London and make it as a fashion designer – what also rapidly becomes clear is that a suitcase full of old LPs is by no means the only baggage she is carrying with her: her mother took her own life, which has not stopped Ellie from seeing her about the place sometimes. Ellie sees Sandie fall under the sway of Jack (Matt Smith), a shady and controlling character, and begins to fear for what eventually happened to her.

There was also a terrific performance in Theatre of Blood, and an award-winning one in the 1989 BBC drama Mother Love. And, as I say, influential: somehow this little black-and-white TV episode ended up inspiring an X-Men comics storyline and a bunch of characters who went on to be popular in their own right.