Oliver Reed was better known as a hellraiser than an actor. Indeed acting came a poor third to his main pursuits: arm-wrestling and consuming prodigious quantities of alcohol. The two were often combined in any convenient hostelry, where he would cause the drink to flow and then challenge anyone in the house to take him on.

Yet his undoubtedly powerful screen presence never flagged and he remained in demand by producers and directors throughout a switchback career in which he starred in more than 50 films. The majority of them were forgettable, and were soon forgotten by a man who could never take his talent seriously, but there were a few of which he could be justly proud.

His nude wrestling scene with Alan Bates in Ken Russell's 1969 film of Lawrence's Women in Love was a daring first which electrified audiences. The two actors were to confess later that they were able to do the scene with the necessary conviction only after comparing the size of their respective manhoods (they decided they were both on the small side) and then getting gloriously drunk. This last was no hardship for Reed.

The year before, Reed had starred as the wicked Bill Sykes to wonderfully chilling effect in his uncle Carol Reed's film adaptation of Lionel Bart's Oliver! Reed's dour demeanour was ideal for the role in a musical which, alongside the jollity, retained something of Dickens's message about the iniquities of child labour, pimping, abduction, prostitution and murder. Ron Moody, as Fagin, came close to having his scenes with Reed stolen from under his twitching nose.

Reed made his mark, too, in director Nicolas Roeg's Castaway (1987), based on a true account of a publisher who advertised for a woman to spend a year with him on a desert island. Reed played the publisher and Amanda Donohoe the woman adventure-seeker. Once again he was near-naked, as was she, and their rompings, fierce quarrels and imminent starvation amid splendid scenery all went to show that tropical islands are not necessarily paradise getaways.

Robert Oliver Reed was born in Wimbledon, the son of a novelist and racing journalist. A chequered education included attending Ewell Castle in Surrey, although he later said it was just one of his 15 schools. He was in fact dyslexic. "I was taken out of boarding school because my father thought I was ill-disciplined," he said.

Leaving school he took a job briefly as a nightclub bouncer and then worked as a medical orderly before joining the Medical Corps for his national service. He decided he wanted to be an actor and found work as a film extra. He also by-passed all recognised acting tuition, since he reckoned that his army experience was better than anything he could learn at a drama school.

His first fleeting appearance on screen was in the teenage trifle Beat Girl (1959), playing a young lout. His next was more promising, a factory worker in The Angry Silence (1960), a significant film of its day in which Richard Attenborough is sent to Coventry by his workmates for refusing to join a union. In that same year came an obvious casting against type when he played a ballet dancer in The League of Gentlemen, a crime caper in which ex-Service misfits led by Jack Hawkins carry out a military-style robbery.

His first screen credit was in a dull comedy, His and Hers, in which he played a poet, followed by another in the brighter Tony Hancock vehicle The Rebel, where he was cast as a fellow painter. Reed's grimacing dynamism on the screen stood out, and a big break was inevitable.

Star billing came with the title role in the Hammer horror film The Curse of the Werewolf (1961). The blood-letting was excessive even for Hammer, but Reed was off and running and his ability to switch from menacing charm to sullen-eyed rage made him a Hammer favourite for a series of films.

Among them was the science- fiction thriller The Damned (1963), directed by Joseph Losey, in which Reed led a motorcycle gang. He led another kind of gang, described as "Chelsea beatniks", in Guy Hamilton's The Party's Over. There was a row when the British censor demanded cuts, and the film was not released until 1965.

Reed put in an impressive performance alongside Rita Tushingham in The Trap, in which he played a brutal and callous fur trapper, although the film itself was not a success. A couple of comedies followed - The Jokers with Michael Crawford, and I'll Never Forget What's-'is-Name with Orson Welles - before Reed's success in Oliver! and Women in Love.

Through the 1970s Reed churned out film after film, including Ken Russell's Tommy (1975). Most were unremarkable, yet his confidence never wavered. He told one American reporter: "Destroy me and you destroy the British film industry. Keep me going and I'm the biggest star you've got. I'm Mr England." And this was not just exaggeration. He was perhaps the first actor to break the mould of the typically bland English matinee-idol screen star since the scowling James Mason back in the 1940s in films such as The Wicked Lady.

In Britain and in Hollywood, Reed contributed toughly and sinisterly to numerous routine dramas and thrillers; he proved a gutsy Athos in robust costume romps such as The Three (and later The Four) Musketeers.

Meanwhile his dedicated boozing and bingeing around the globe - he was once spotted drunk and trouserless on the streets of Toronto in December - attracted countless column inches in the press. It occasionally resulted in a punch-up, police arrest, and even a few hours in jail.

At one time he saw himself as Britain's answer to Errol Flynn, and he liked to boast occasionally of his sexual prowess. He claimed membership of the Mile High Club - sex in an aircraft - and his name was linked with a number of his co-stars, including Jill St. John, Faye Dunaway, Susan George, Carol White, Carol Lynley and Sarah Miles. As a symbol of his sexual flamboyance he even had a small emblem (a pair of cockerel's claws) painfully tattooed on his manly pride. Womanising, however, was of less interest to the roistering Reed than his alcoholic exploits, whether abroad, in his favourite Surrey pubs, or at his tax-exile mansion home in Guernsey; at home he favoured champagne and good wines by the case.

Reed was married twice. His first wife was the Irish model Kathleen Byrne, whom he married in 1960. The marriage lasted ten years and produced a son. He also had a daughter by the ballet dancer Jacquie Daryl. His second marriage created yet more headlines in 1985 when he married Josephine Burge, who was 27 years his junior and whom he had first courted when she was 16. She vowed at the time to wean him off the drink, and succeeded - but only briefly. Two years later Reed stopped again for six months when one of his kidneys played up and doctors warned him that he had only two years to live if he continued.

But once more he fell off the wagon when, as he put it, "I realised what a bore I was becoming." The uncharitable said that they could see no difference. He appeared seemingly drunk on Michael Aspel's television show (although he later said it was a put-up job to give the viewers what they anticipated). On another occasion, apparently drunk while recording a television programme, he foolishly aimed a punch at the boxer Henry Cooper, connecting instead with the actress Wendy Richard.

Reed's second marriage to the tall, beautiful, country-bred Josephine was largely happy though they remained childless. She was totally devoted to him and headed off any marital difficulties by leaving him to do what he wanted. He was rarely out of work because the power of his screen personality remained unscathed to the end.

He was a better actor then he gave himself credit for. He might have achieved more if he had chosen roles carefully, instead of doing whatever came along for the money and the kicks. He made at least three films last year, of which Gladiator has yet to be seen here.