One of the stars of The Three Musketeers, Oliver Reed was a British actor who achieved a degree of notoriety for his prodigious drinking habits which few other hell-raising actors have matched. By the time he came to appear in Gladiator, Ridley Scott's revival of the sword and sandals epics, his alcohol consumption had barely abated, and it was perhaps inevitable that booze would prove to be his final undoing. It was during a break from filming in Valetta in Malta that Oliver Reed suffered a fatal heart attack, rumoured to be in the midst of an arm wrestling matches between crew members of the Royal Navy frigate HMS Cumberland. It's ironic that Reed was perhaps a product of his own myth-making and that his alcoholism was a trap he created for himself that his public image wouldn't permit him to escape from. In one interview he said, "Even if I wanted to make myself seem like a normal human being I couldn't, because that's not what people want me to be. They want a baddy or a carouser or a rake."
