Description
Book SynopsisOliver Reed may not have been Britain''s biggest film star - for a period in the early 70s he came within a hairsbreadth of replacing Sean Connery as James Bond - but he is an august member of that small band of people, like George Best and Eric Morecambe, who transcended their chosen medium, became too big for it even, and grew into cultural icons.
For the first time Reed''s close family has agreed to collaborate on a project about the man himself. The result is a fascinating new insight into a man seen by many as merely a brawling, boozing hellraiser. And yet he was so much more than this. For behind that image, which all too often he played up to in public, was a vastly complex individual, a man of deep passions and loyalty but also deep-rooted vulnerability and insecurities. Why was a proud, patriotic, intelligent, successful and erudite man so obsessed about proving himself to others, time and time again?
Although the Reed myth is of Homeric proportio
Trade Review
This is a brilliant and beguiling account of Reed’s life and times * Mail on Sunday *
There is a great feeling of loss and tragedy at the core of Sellers’s biography. He is unflinching in the depiction of how awful Reed could be, but balances that with a strong sense of the love and affection he inspired in those around him. If nothing else, this highly readable book is a permanent reminder of just how exhausting it must have been to be Oliver Reed. * Glasgow Sunday Herald *
For the first time, Reed’s close family has collaborated on a project about Reed himself, revealing a complex man behind the façade, a person of great passions and loyalties underscored by deep-rooted vulnerabilities and insecurities. With never-heard-before anecdotes and new interviews with family, friends and peers, What Fresh Lunacy Is This? is a revealing examination of his mould-breaking personality * Sight and Sound *
Like Reed himself, the book might not be subtle but in places it’s hilariously funny and, by the end, oddly moving as well * The Observer *
In this adulatory but always entertaining book, Sellers… shows that “Ollie” was a more interesting figure than the cartoon drunk of the tabloids * Sunday Times *
What Fresh Lunacy Is This? is a nice, racy romp with Reed the rum-sodden rogue * Financial Times *
