It’s almost remarkable, in fact, that a film with so much talent attached to it should end up so extremely undistinguished. Later, in the 1970s, I was tremendously impressed with Oliver Reed’s work with director Ken Russell.

I said “We had to let your little island get bombed lower into the Atlantic so all the stuck up Nazi loving Brits in the house would accept our help. 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. 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. In his final years, when he lived in Ireland, Reed was a regular in the one-roomed O'Brien's Bar in Churchtown, County Cork, close to the 13th-century cemetery in the heart of the village where he would be buried.

The year was 1991 and a rerun of The New Avengers had recently concluded – this had woken up all my memories of the repeats of the original show I’d seen in the late 80s. There are several actions that could trigger this block including submitting a certain word or phrase, a SQL command or malformed data. Creatively, I think his intensity and rage as well as his enormous drive as a fighter came from the confusion of his early years, being an extremely intelligent person, but hindered by his learning disability.

He named " Jardins sous la pluie" by French composer Claude Debussy as his favourite piece of music, and when asked what book and inanimate luxury item he would take with him on a desert island Reed chose Winnie-the-Pooh by English author A.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. As a result of his death, Reed's remaining scenes in Gladiator had to be completed using a body double and computer-generated imagery (CGI) techniques. In 1993, Reed was unsuccessfully sued by his former stuntman, stand-in and friend Reg Prince, for an alleged spinal injury incurred by the latter while on location for the filming of Castaway. From the schools, he learnt to look after himself, and from his mother and the holiday nannies arranged by his army officer father he learnt to be indulged by women.