Booze-guzzling actor Oliver Reed had knocked back 10 pints of ale and 12 shots of rum – and run up a bar tab of $435 – when he dropped dead of a heart attack this week.
The hell-raising star of “Oliver!” and “The Three Musketeers” suffered the fatal seizure Sunday on the Mediterranean island of Malta, where he was filming the movie “The Gladiators.”
Witnesses said Reed, 61, knocked them back at a bar in Valletta, the Maltese capital, for three hours during a break in filming.
As his wife, Josephine, and friends watched in amusement, Reed – as well-known for his tippling exploits as for his 53 movie roles – bought drinks for everyone at the bar.
Then he arm-wrestled sailors from the Royal Navy frigate HMS Cumberland and shared two bottles of rum with them.
“The sailors could not take the pace and left,” one bar employee told London’s Sun newspaper.
“When they’d gone, Oliver drank a couple of glasses of whiskey before his collapse.”
At that point, witnesses said, Reed nonchalantly sat down on a bench, closed his eyes and fell to his side.
He died minutes later as he was being rushed to a hospital by ambulance.
Pathologists at Malta’s St. Luke’s Hospital confirmed last night that a massive heart attack was the cause of death.
One of the sailors told the newspaper: “I could not believe it when I heard that he had died. At least he died happy, with his boots on.”
Reed’s tab has been put on display behind the bar – and will remain unpaid, a spokesman for the bar said.
Reed – who was playing a trainer of gladiators in the new Steven Spielberg movie – reached his acting peak in the 1960s and 1970s in films such as “Oliver!” and “Women in Love.”
The Malta Times said Reed’s scenes in “The Gladiators” had been “pretty much completed,” and they are expected to be retained in the finished movie.
His body is expected to be flown tomorrow to Ireland, where he lived with his wife.
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