How Oliver Reed was unleashed on Saddam
The British hell-raiser brought mayhem to Baghdad in a bizarre film project backed by the infamous dictator. Neil Armstrong reports
Hollywood has known its fair share of megalomaniacs. Legendary movie moguls like Louis B Mayer and Jack Warner ran their studios like dictators, hiring and firing young starlets on a whim. But, according to a documentary to be aired tonight, one film, made 35 years ago in the Arabian desert, had a real tyrant at the helm: Saddam Hussein.
The former Iraqi dictator, who was executed in 2006, financed a $30 million historical epic starring a host of British actors, including the notorious hellraiser Oliver Reed, in a vain attempt to stir up national feeling and link his Ba’ath party to the Iraqi revolutionaries who overturned British rule in 1920.
Called Clash of Loyalties, the film, which tells the story of the birth of modern Iraq, was shown at several film festivals in the early Eighties, but was never released and has lain forgotten in a Surrey garage ever since.
Now its producer, Lateif Jorephani, an Iraqi based in Britain, and members of the cast have told the full story of the making of the film and how they coped with the wild behaviour of both Saddam and Reed, and a production schedule that went ahead despite the outbreak of war with Iran.
Lured by fat pay cheques – even minor cast members earned £1,000 a week (a sky-high wage at the time) – the surviving actors admit they had no idea what they were letting themselves in for.
It only dawned on them, says actor Mark Penfold, when they were over Iraqi airspace and they noticed that a fighter jet was escorting their plane. “Suddenly the reality of what we were going into became a bit more serious.”
Their plane had to land without any lights on to avoid a missile attack. The cast and crew were taken to Baghdad’s one decent hotel, but there was not enough room and many ended up in half-built accommodation infested with cockroaches and had to put up with temperatures of up to 50C.
Meanwhile, Iraqi technicians and actors continually disappeared, having been called up to fight in the war.
But the factor that caused most disruption was Reed’s low boredom threshold and passion for alcohol.
The Wimbledon-born star, who died in 1999 on the set of the Ridley Scott film Gladiator after a marathon drinking session, had been cast as Lt Col Gerard Leachman, a British army officer in Mesopotamia who was assassinated by Iraqi rebels in 1920.
Reed, 43, had brought his 17-year-old girlfriend (later his wife) Josephine Burge with him, but she spent her time in the hotel room revising for her A-levels and he was left to his own devices.
He liked to kickstart his day with a large bowl of sangria, graduating to daiquiris by mid-morning, switching to champagne at around midday and continuing drinking long into the night, sometimes mixing a bottle of Remy Martin cognac and a bottle of champagne in an ice bucket and glugging from that.
All the usual Reed antics ensued: arm-wresting matches, kicking-in hotel doors and fighting.
Camera assistant Roger Macdonald recalls Reed’s minder, Reg Prince, holding the actor by the neck over a balcony on the top floor of the hotel. “Ollie was screaming at him: ‘Go on then, Reg. Have you got the f---ing nerve? Go on, drop me!’ ”
Cast member Helen Ryan says of his behaviour in restaurants: “If the hors d’oeuvres didn’t arrive fast enough, Oliver would shout for the manager and when the manager came he would get him by the scruff of the neck, lift him up into the air and throw him across the room.”
The Iraqis put up with a lot but one night Reed overstepped the mark.
Jorephani says: “Ollie was at the restaurant. He produces an empty bottle of wine and fills it up with his bodily fluid, calls the waiter and asks him to take this bottle of good wine to the next table with his compliments.” News of this reached Saddam’s officials who felt it was one hilarious jape too far. Jorephani was ordered to replace Reed and had to fight to keep him.
According to actor Marc Sinden, Reed did get to meet Saddam in person.
Sinden, who isn’t featured in the documentary, says Reed was invited for dinner at the presidential palace one night. During the meal, Sinden told journalist James Montague in a 2014 interview, Saddam started ranting in Arabic. Reed muttered “What a ----!” After dinner, Saddam came over to the actor and said: “Mr Reed, I hope I didn’t bore you too much.”
Somehow, filming was eventually completed and Saddam was delighted with the result. The film went down well with audiences at the London Film Festival in 1984 and was nominated for a prize in Moscow.
But by then, much more was known about Saddam Hussein and the nature of his totalitarian regime. The film couldn’t find a distributor, Saddam pulled it back to Iraq, the country fell apart and Clash of Loyalties vanished into a black hole. Few of the cast ever got to see it. Nevertheless, most seem to have at least some fond memories of the experience.
“I couldn’t have enjoyed myself more. I loved the adventure of it,” says actor Virginia Denham. “And the only time I was frightened was of Oliver Reed. Oliver Reed was a weapon of mass destruction.” Saddam Goes to Hollywood is on Channel 4 today at 8pm