Being tall, dark and handsome, charismatic, rebellious and intense, Oliver Reed belonged to a new generation of British actors of the 1960s known primarily for their youthful physical prowess. As Pam Cook and Claire Hines suggest, around this time, ‘British cinema began to feature muscular, virile, working-class rebel heroes, personified by the likes of Albert Finney, Richard Harris and Stanley Baker, whose bodies were put on display for erotic contemplation, and whose hedonistic, amoral attitudes threatened the polite surface of the public-school ruling class.’ Their personae were influenced by the growing importance of youth culture, its related consumerism, and the emergence of the so-called ‘permissive’ society with a more liberal attitude towards sexuality, and this applies equally to Reed, who can also be seen as a ‘zeitgeist icon’. Such figures tend to ‘restate, often in new and modern forms, old identities and values, as well as calling a society towards newer, and perhaps confused, emergent values and value systems’. From his time at Hammer between 1961 and 1965 as a (Byronic) horror heart throb, Reed’s career, star image and performance style evolved significantly through specific collaborations with two directors: Michael Winner and Ken Russell. Through an analysis of his career in the 1960s, this chapter will explore how Reed's individualistic and rebellious disposition both resonated with the era’s shifting zeitgeist, from (pre-)swinging London to the counterculture of the later part of the decade. Reed's troubled on-screen performances, his rather reductive reputation as daring hellraiser and charming womaniser, and his own decidedly ambivalent cultivation of his rebel image will be related to the similarly conflicted nature of the decade and its cinema. Reed was a predominantly physical and ‘excessive’ performer and he both represents and sublimates a particular kind of rebellious 1960s on-screen masculinity. In this regard, how Reed's rebellion is coded both in different roles (characterisation and diegesis) and on a performative level (how his specific ‘excessive’ performance style manifests) is an important consideration.

HAMMER'S MOODY NEW SEX SYMBOL? – THE ‘REEDIAN’ BYRONIC

Robert Oliver Reed was born on 13 February 1938. Despite the early separation of his parents, Reed experienced a comfortable upper middle-class upbringing that included nannies and boarding schools. In this regard, it is crucial to note that the Londoner markedly differed from his working-class contemporaries such as the northern Finney, Welshman Richard Burton or Edinburgh-born Sean Connery in terms of both class and educational background.