10 Actors Whose Movies Eerily Foreshadowed Their Real Death

7. Oliver Reed

Though never a match for Brando in the awards stakes, Oliver Reed was still a fine actor and every bit the American€™s equal with regard to his voracious appetites and apparent willingness to sabotage his own career. Where Brando sought solace in mountains of food, Reed routinely consumed rivers of alcohol and made public his desire to drink every pub dry and bed every woman on earth. By the late-1960s, Reed was Britain€™s highest-paid actor and would have succeeded Sean Connery as James Bond were it not for the producers€™ understandable concerns that the Englishman€™s ludicrous drinking habit and hell-raising ways made him an untenable choice. Reed€™s last role €“ as Proximo in Gladiator €“ was one of the finest of the latter stages of his career, but also the one that that would see him fail to make last orders. During breaks from filming, Reed could often (and fittingly) be found in The Bar in Malta, which is where he succumbed to a heart attack after downing several bottles of rum, numerous beers and arm wrestling local sailors. Reed required no resort to method acting to firmly inhabit some of his most famous roles €“ he was a natural fit for the hard-drinking Athos in The Three Musketeers and the alcoholic Simon Ashby in Paranoiac. Nevertheless, it was the part of Billy Bones in Treasure Island that provided an ominous portent; an entrenched drunkard, Bones holes himself up in an inn where he suffers an alcohol-related death.