In good spirits: why actor Oliver Reed was always drunk but never bored

As Athos, in the film The Three Musketeers, Oliver Reed spoke a line that summed up his personal philosophy. “Life is so much more rosy when seen through the bottom of a glass of ale.”
Reed was born in 1938, into “a household that might have looked to the casual observer to be residing in an Edwardian time warp. There was a man downstairs who was the family’s dogsbody, gardener, car washer and so on, and upstairs a nanny who looked after both children, to all intents and purposes so that Marcia [their mother] didn’t have to,” his brother says.