ANDRÉ R. BRETON, THE FRENCH LEADER OF SURREALISM

Today, The Grandma has received the wonderful visit of one of her closest friends, Jordi Santanyí.

 

Jordi and The Grandma love literature, and they have been talking about André Breton, the French writer and poet leader of surrealism, who was born on a day like yesterday in 1896.

André Robert Breton (18 February 1896-28 September 1966) was a French writer and poet.

He is known best as the co-founder, leader, principal theorist and chief apologist of surrealism. His writings include the first Manifeste du surréalisme of 1924, in which he defined surrealism as pure psychic automatism. Along with his role as leader of the surrealist movement he is the author of celebrated books such as Nadja and L'Amour fou.

Those activities combined with his critical and theoretical work for writing and the plastic arts, made André Breton a major figure in twentieth-century French art and literature.

André Breton was the only son born to a family of modest means in Tinchebray (Orne) in Normandy, France. His father, Louis-Justin Breton, was a policeman and atheistic, and his mother, Marguerite-Marie-Eugénie Le Gouguès, was a former seamstress. Breton attended medical school, where he developed a particular interest in mental illness. His education was interrupted when he was conscripted for World War I.

During World War I, he worked in a neurological ward in Nantes, where he met the devotee of Alfred Jarry, Jacques Vaché, whose anti-social attitude and disdain for established artistic tradition influenced Breton considerably. Vaché committed suicide when aged 24, and his war-time letters to Breton and others were published in a volume entitled Lettres de guerre (1919), for which Breton wrote four introductory essays.

More information: The Art Story

Breton married his first wife, Simone Kahn, on 15 September 1921. The couple relocated to rue Fontaine No. 42 in Paris on 1 January 1922. The flat on rue Fontaine in the Pigalle district became home to Breton's collection of more than 5,300 items: modern paintings, drawings, sculptures, photographs, books, art catalogs, journals, manuscripts, and works of popular and Oceanic art. Like his father, he was an atheist.

Breton launched the review Littérature in 1919, with Louis Aragon and Philippe Soupault. He also associated with Dadaist Tristan Tzara. In 1924, he was instrumental in the founding of the Bureau of Surrealist Research.

In Les Champs Magnétiques, a collaboration with Soupault, he implemented the principle of automatic writing. He published the Surrealist Manifesto in 1924, and was editor of the magazine La Révolution surréaliste from that year on. A group of writers became associated with him: Soupault, Louis Aragon, Paul Éluard, René Crevel, Michel Leiris, Benjamin Péret, Antonin Artaud, and Robert Desnos.

Anxious to combine the themes of personal transformation found in the works of Arthur Rimbaud with the politics of Karl Marx, Breton joined the French Communist Party in 1927, from which he was expelled in 1933. Nadja, a novel about his encounter with an imaginative woman who later became mentally ill, was published in 1928.

Breton celebrated the concept of Mad Love, and many women joined the surrealist group over the years. Toyen was a good friend. During this time, he survived mostly by the sale of paintings from his art gallery.

However, visiting Mexico provided the opportunity to meet Leon Trotsky. Breton and other surrealists travelled via a long boat ride from Patzcuaro to the town of Erongarícuaro. Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo were among the visitors to the hidden community of intellectuals and artists. Together, Breton and Trotsky wrote the Manifesto for an Independent Revolutionary Art, published under the names of Breton and Diego Rivera, calling for complete freedom of art, which was becoming increasingly difficult with the world situation of the time.

Breton was again in the medical corps of the French Army at the start of World War II. The Vichy government banned his writings as the very negation of the national revolution and Breton escaped, with the help of the American Varian Fry and Hiram Harry Bingham IV, to the United States and the Caribbean during 1941. He emigrated to New York City and lived there for a few years. In 1942, Breton organized a groundbreaking surrealist exhibition at Yale University.

Breton returned to Paris in 1946, where he opposed French colonialism (for example as a signatory of the Manifesto of the 121 against the Algerian War) and continued, until his death, to foster a second group of surrealists in the form of expositions or reviews (La Brèche, 1961–65). In 1959, he organized an exhibit in Paris.

By the end of World War II, André Breton decided to embrace anarchism explicitly.

In 1952, Breton wrote It was in the black mirror of anarchism that surrealism first recognized itself. Breton consistently supported the francophone Anarchist Federation, and he continued to offer his solidarity after the Platformists around founder and Secretary General Georges Fontenis transformed the FA into the Fédération communiste libertaire.

André Breton died at the age of 70 in 1966, and was buried in the Cimetière des Batignolles in Paris.

More information: Surrealist Art

 Of all those arts in which the wise excel,
Nature's chief masterpiece is writing well.

André Breton

WIKILEAKS & CHELSEA MANNING, DESCLASSIFYING DOCS

Barcelona is living a new wave of protests to reclaim freedom for political prisoners and  artists, who are been imprisoned by allowing to vote and expressing themselves using music.

The Grandma is too old to participate in the protests, although she has a young heart, and she is proud of young people who is fighting every night to denounce this dictatorial power that only offers repression, prison and submission.

We are free citizens not slaves or serves from a corrupt political system and a corrupt head of state, and we must continue fighting to finish with this dictatorship.

On a day like today in 2010, WikiLeaks published the first of hundreds of thousands of classified documents disclosed by the soldier now known as Chelsea Manning.

It was in another state, in another continent but the objective was the same -transparency and fight against corrupt systems.

More information: WikiLeaks

WikiLeaks is an international non-profit organization that publishes news leaks and classified media provided by anonymous sources.

Its website, initiated in 2006 in Iceland by the organization Sunshine Press, claimed in 2015 to have released online 10 million documents in its first 10 years.

Julian Assange, an Australian Internet activist, is generally described as its founder and director. Since September 2018, Kristinn Hrafnsson has served as its editor-in-chief. WikiLeaks is not affiliated with Wikipedia or the Wikimedia Foundation.

The group has released a number of prominent document caches. Early releases included documentation of equipment expenditures and holdings in the Afghanistan war, a report about a corruption investigation in Kenya, and an operating procedures manual for the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

In April 2010, WikiLeaks released the Collateral Murder footage from the 12 July 2007 Baghdad airstrike in which Iraqi Reuters journalists were among those killed. Other releases in 2010 included the Afghan War Diary and the Iraq War Logs. The latter release allowed the mapping of 109,032 deaths in significant attacks by insurgents in Iraq that had been reported to Multi-National Force-Iraq, including about 15,000 that had not been previously published.

In 2010, WikiLeaks also released the US State Department diplomatic cables, classified cables that had been sent to the US State Department.

In April 2011, WikiLeaks began publishing 779 secret files relating to prisoners detained in the Guantanamo Bay detention camp.

In 2012, WikiLeaks released the Syria Files, over two million emails sent by Syrian politicians, corporations and government ministries.

In 2015, WikiLeaks published Saudi Arabian diplomatic cables, documents detailing spying by the U.S. National Security Agency on successive French Presidents, and the intellectual property chapter of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a controversial international trade agreement which had been negotiated in secret.

More information: The Guardian

During the 2016 US presidential election campaign, WikiLeaks released emails and other documents from the Democratic National Committee and from Hillary Clinton's campaign manager, John Podesta showing that the party's national committee favoured Hillary Clinton over her rival Bernie Sanders in the primaries. These releases caused significant harm to the Clinton campaign, and have been attributed as a potential contributing factor to her loss. The U.S. intelligence community expressed high confidence that the leaked emails had been hacked by Russia and supplied to WikiLeaks. Wikileaks said that the source of the documents was not Russia or any other state. During the campaign, WikiLeaks promoted conspiracy theories about Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party.

In 2016, WikiLeaks released nearly 300,000 emails it described as coming from Turkey's ruling Justice and Development Party, later found to be taken from public mailing archives, and over 50,000 emails from the Turkish minister of energy.

In 2017, WikiLeaks published internal CIA documents describing tools used by the agency to hack devices including mobile phones and routers.

WikiLeaks has drawn criticism for its absence of whistleblowing on or criticism of Russia, and for criticizing the Panama Papers' exposé of businesses and individuals with offshore bank accounts. The organization has additionally been criticized for inadequately curating its content and violating the personal privacy of individuals.

WikiLeaks has, for instance, revealed Social Security numbers, medical information, credit card numbers and details of suicide attempts.

The wikileaks.org domain name was registered on 4 October 2006. The website was established and published its first document in December 2006. 

WikiLeaks is usually represented in public by Julian Assange, who has been described as the heart and soul of this organization, its founder, philosopher, spokesperson, original coder, organizer, financier, and all the rest. Daniel Domscheit-Berg, Sarah Harrison, Kristinn Hrafnsson and Joseph Farrell are other publicly known associates of Assange who have been involved in the project. Harrison is also a member of Sunshine Press Productions along with Assange and Ingi Ragnar Ingason. Gavin MacFadyen was acknowledged by Assange as a beloved director of WikiLeaks shortly after his death in 2016.

WikiLeaks was originally established with a wiki communal publication method, which was terminated by May 2010. Original volunteers and founders were once described as a mixture of Asian dissidents, journalists, mathematicians, and start-up company technologists from the United States, Taiwan, Europe, Australia, and South Africa. As of June 2009, the website had more than 1,200 registered volunteers.

In mid-February 2010, WikiLeaks received a leaked diplomatic cable from the United States Embassy in Reykjavik relating to the Icesave scandal, which they published on 18 February. The cable, known as Reykjavik 13, was the first of the classified documents WikiLeaks published among those allegedly provided to them by United States Army Private Chelsea Manning, then known as Bradley. In March 2010, WikiLeaks released a secret 32-page US Department of Defense Counter-intelligence Analysis Report written in March 2008 discussing the leaking of material by WikiLeaks and how it could be deterred.

More information: PBS

 The corruption in reporting starts very early.
It's like the police reporting on the police.

Julian Assange

'MADAMA BUTTERFLY', GIACOMO PUCCINI'S MASTERPIECE

Today, The Grandma has received the wonderful visit of one of her closest friends, Tina Picotes.

Tina loves opera and thay have been talking about Giacomo Puccini's Madama Butterfly, the opera that received its première at La Scala in Milan on a day like today in 1904.

Madama Butterfly is an opera in three acts (originally two) by Giacomo Puccini, with an Italian libretto by Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa.

It is based on the short story Madame Butterfly (1898) by John Luther Long, which in turn was based on stories told to Long by his sister Jennie Correll and on the semi-autobiographical 1887 French novel Madame Chrysanthème by Pierre Loti. Long's version was dramatized by David Belasco as the one-act play Madame Butterfly: A Tragedy of Japan, which, after premiering in New York in 1900, moved to London, where Puccini saw it in the summer of that year.

The original version of the opera, in two acts, had its premiere on 17 February 1904 at La Scala in Milan.

It was poorly received, despite having such notable singers as soprano Rosina Storchio, tenor Giovanni Zenatello and baritone Giuseppe De Luca in lead roles. This was due in part to a late completion by Puccini, which gave inadequate time for rehearsals. Puccini revised the opera, splitting the second act in two, with the Humming Chorus as a bridge to what became Act III, and making other changes. Success ensued, starting with the first performance on 28 May 1904 in Brescia.

Puccini wrote five versions of the opera. The original two-act version, which was presented at the world premiere at La Scala on 17 February 1904, was withdrawn after the disastrous premiere.

More information: PBS

Puccini then substantially rewrote it, this time in three acts. This second version was performed on 28 May 1904 in Brescia, where it was a great success, with Solomiya Krushelnytska as Cio-Cio-san.

It was this second version that premiered in the United States in 1906, first in Washington, D.C., in October, and then in New York in November, performed by Henry Savage's New English Opera Company, so named because it performed in English-language translations.

In 1906, Puccini wrote a third version, which was performed at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. In 1907, Puccini made several changes in the orchestral and vocal scores, and this became the fourth version, which was performed in Paris.

In 1907, Puccini made his final revisions to the opera in a fifth version, which has become known as the Standard Version and is the one which is most often performed around the world. However, the original 1904 version is occasionally performed, such as for the opening of La Scala's season on 7 December 2016, with Riccardo Chailly conducting.

Premieres of the standard version in major opera houses throughout the world include those in the Teatro de la Opera de Buenos Aires on 2 July 1904, under Arturo Toscanini, this being the first performance in the world outside Italy. Its first performance in Britain was in London on 10 July 1905 at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, while the first US performance was presented in English on 15 October 1906, in Washington, D.C., at the Columbia Theater.

The first performance in New York took place on 12 November of the same year at the Garden Theatre. The Metropolitan Opera first performed the work on 11 February 1907 in the presence of the composer with Geraldine Farrar as Cio-Cio San, Enrico Caruso as Pinkerton, Louise Homer as Suzuki, Antonio Scotti as Sharpless, and Arturo Vigna conducting.

Three years later, the first Australian performance was presented at the Theatre Royal in Sydney on 26 March 1910, starring Amy Eliza Castles.

Between 1915 and 1920, Japan's best-known opera singer Tamaki Miura won international fame for her performances as Cio-Cio-san. A memorial to this singer, along with one to Puccini, can be found in the Glover Garden in the port city of Nagasaki, where the opera is set.

More information: The Opera 101

Inspiration is an awakening,
a quickening of all man's faculties,
and it is manifested in all high artistic achievements.

Giacomo Puccini

FIGHT HUMAN & CIVIL RIGHTS, 'LLIBERTAT PABLO HASÉL!'

Pablo Rivadulla Duró (born 1988), aka Pablo Hasél, is a Catalan rapper.

He has been convicted for praising banned groups and insulting the monarchy, prompting a debate on freedom of speech in Spain.

Born in Lleida, Hasél took his artistic name from a revolutionary character in an Arabic short story.

In a March 2018 interview, Hasél said he was unable to find work due to his criminal convictions that disqualified him from the public sector for ten years, and that his last work had been grape picking in France.

In October 2011, Hasél was arrested and bailed for a song titled Democracia su Puta Madre in which he praised Camarada Arenas, a convicted member of the GRAPO.

In April 2014, he was given a two-year prison sentence for ten songs in praise of GRAPO, ETA the Red Army Faction and Terra Lliure. This sentence was suspended for three years in September 2019, on condition that he not reoffend.

In May 2014, Hasél was arrested again for being part of a group that attacked another which it believed to be linked to the far-right Platform for Catalonia.

In June 2016, Hasél pushed and sprayed washing-up liquid at a TV3 journalist. He received six months in prison and a fine of €12,150 in June 2020.

In the same month, he received a 2​1⁄2-year sentence and €2,500 fine for another assault and obstruction of justice, namely the beating of a witness in the October 2017 trial of a policeman who was eventually acquitted of assaulting a minor.

In March 2018, Hasél was sentenced to two years in prison for praising terrorism and insulting King Juan Carlos I on Twitter.

In early 2021, he was ordered to voluntarily enter prison to serve a nine-month sentence for this conviction. He publicly refused this order, and was eventually arrested on 16 February after barricading himself in the University of Lleida.

Hasél's freedom was supported by Amnesty International and a letter signed by 300 Spanish artists including Pedro Almodóvar and Javier Bardem.

More information: Twitter

Das asilo a mi dolor kamikaze.

You give asylum to my kamikaze pain.

Pablo Hasél

THE HUMAN GENOME, NUCLEIC ACID SEQUENCES (DNA)

Today, The Grandma has received the wonderful visit of one of her best friends, Joseph de Ca'th Lon. They have been talking about the human genome.

 

The first draft of the complete human genome was published in Nature on a day like today in 2001 and Joseph has explained her lots of things about it.

 

The human genome is a complete set of nucleic acid sequences for humans, encoded as DNA within the 23 chromosome pairs in cell nuclei and in a small DNA molecule found within individual mitochondria.

These are usually treated separately as the nuclear genome, and the mitochondrial genome.

Human genomes include both protein-coding DNA genes and noncoding DNA.

Haploid human genomes, which are contained in germ cells (the egg and sperm gamete cells created in the meiosis phase of sexual reproduction before fertilization creates a zygote) consist of three billion DNA base pairs, while diploid genomes (found in somatic cells) have twice the DNA content.

While there are significant differences among the genomes of human individuals (on the order of 0.1% due to single-nucleotide variants and 0.6% when considering indels), these are considerably smaller than the differences between humans and their closest living relatives, the bonobos and chimpanzees (~1.1% fixed single-nucleotide variants and 4% when including indels).

The first human genome sequences were published in nearly complete draft form in February 2001 by the Human Genome Project and Celera Corporation.

More information: Human Genoma Project Information Archive

Completion of the Human Genome Project's sequencing effort was announced in 2004 with the publication of a draft genome sequence, leaving just 341 gaps in the sequence, representing highly-repetitive and other DNA that could not be sequenced with the technology available at the time.

The human genome was the first of all vertebrates to be sequenced to such near-completion, and as of 2018, the diploid genomes of over a million individual humans had been determined using next-generation sequencing. These data are used worldwide in biomedical science, anthropology, forensics and other branches of science.

Such genomic studies have led to advances in the diagnosis and treatment of diseases, and to new insights in many fields of biology, including human evolution.

Although the sequence of the human genome has been (almost) completely determined by DNA sequencing, it is not yet fully understood. Most (though probably not all) genes have been identified by a combination of high throughput experimental and bioinformatics approaches, yet much work still needs to be done to further elucidate the biological functions of their protein and RNA products. 

Recent results suggest that most of the vast quantities of non-coding DNA within the genome have associated biochemical activities, including regulation of gene expression, organization of chromosome architecture, and signals controlling epigenetic inheritance.

Prior to the acquisition of the full genome sequence, estimates of the number of human genes ranged from 50,000 to 140,000, with occasional vagueness about whether these estimates included non-protein coding genes.

More information: DDW

As genome sequence quality and the methods for identifying protein-coding genes improved, the count of recognized protein-coding genes dropped to 19,000-20,000. However, a fuller understanding of the role played by sequences that do not encode proteins, but instead express regulatory RNA, has raised the total number of genes to at least 46,831, plus another 2300 micro-RNA genes.

By 2012, functional DNA elements that encode neither RNA nor proteins have been noted and another 10% equivalent of human genome was found in a recent (2018) population survey. Protein-coding sequences account for only a very small fraction of the genome (approximately 1.5%), and the rest is associated with non-coding RNA genes, regulatory DNA sequences, LINEs, SINEs, introns, and sequences for which as yet no function has been determined.

In June 2016, scientists formally announced HGP-Write, a plan to synthesize the human genome.

Although the 'completion' of the human genome project was announced in 2001, there remained hundreds of gaps, with about 5–10% of the total sequence remaining undetermined.

The missing genetic information was mostly in repetitive heterochromatic regions and near the centromeres and telomeres, but also some gene-encoding euchromatic regions. There remained 160 euchromatic gaps in 2015 when the sequences spanning another 50 formerly-unsequenced regions were determined. 

Only in 2020 was the first truly complete telomere-to-telomere sequence of a human chromosome determined, namely of the X chromosome.

More information: The New York Times

Even if we never cure a single disease,
the Human Genome Project and other ventures
will have been worth it.

Sam Kean

YOUTUBE, A GREAT WEB TO SHARE VIDEOS, IS LAUNCHED

The Grandma uses Youtube videos every day to create her posts. It is an incredible and useful tool to share information and leisure.

Youtube was created on a day like today in 2005 and The Grandma wants to pay homage to this web talking about it and its history.

YouTube is an American online video-sharing platform headquartered in San Bruno, California.

The service, created in February 2005 by three former PayPal employees -Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim- was bought by Google in November 2006 for US$1.65 billion and now operates as one of the company's subsidiaries. YouTube is the second most-visited website after Google Search, according to Alexa Internet rankings.

YouTube allows users to upload, view, rate, share, add to playlists, report, comment on videos, and subscribe to other users. Available content includes video clips, TV show clips, music videos, short and documentary films, audio recordings, film trailers, live streams, video blogging, short original videos, and educational videos.

Most content is generated and uploaded by individuals, but media corporations including CBS, the BBC, Vevo, and Hulu offer some of their material via YouTube as part of the YouTube partnership program. Unregistered users can watch, but not upload, videos on the site, while registered users can upload an unlimited number of videos and add comments. Age-restricted videos are available only to registered users affirming themselves to be at least 18 years old.

More information: Youtube

As of May 2019, there were more than 500 hours of content uploaded to YouTube each minute and one billion hours of content being watched on YouTube every day.

YouTube and selected creators earn advertising revenue from Google AdSense, a program that targets ads according to site content and audience. The vast majority of videos are free to view, but there are exceptions, including subscription-based premium channels, film rentals, as well as YouTube Music and YouTube Premium, subscription services respectively offering premium and ad-free music streaming, and ad-free access to all content, including exclusive content commissioned from notable personalities. Based on reported quarterly advertising revenue, YouTube is estimated to have US$15 billion in annual revenues.

YouTube has faced criticism over aspects of its operations, including its handling of copyrighted content contained within uploaded videos, its recommendation algorithms perpetuating videos that promote conspiracy theories and falsehoods, hosting videos ostensibly targeting children but containing violent or sexually suggestive content involving popular characters, videos of minors attracting paedophilic activities in their comment sections, and fluctuating policies on the types of content that is eligible to be monetized with advertising.

YouTube was founded by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim, who were all early employees of PayPal. Hurley had studied design at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, and Chen and Karim studied computer science together at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign.

Karim said the inspiration for YouTube first came from Janet Jackson's role in the 2004 Super Bowl incident when her breast was exposed during her performance, and later from the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. Karim could not easily find video clips of either event online, which led to the idea of a video sharing site.

On October 9, 2006, Google announced that it had acquired YouTube for $1.65 billion in Google stock. The deal was finalized on November 13, 2006.

Google's acquisition launched new newfound interest in video-sharing sites; IAC, which now owned Vimeo after acquiring CollegeHumor, used its asset to develop a competing site to YouTube, focusing on supporting the content creator to distinguish itself from YouTube.

In May 2013, YouTube launched a pilot program for content providers to offer premium, subscription-based channels within the platform.

In February 2014, Susan Wojcicki was appointed CEO of YouTube. In November 2014, YouTube announced a subscription service known as Music Key, which bundled ad-free streaming of music content on YouTube with the existing Google Play Music service.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, when most of the world was under stay-at-home orders, usage of services such as YouTube grew greatly. In response to EU officials requesting that such services reduce bandwidth as to make sure medical entities had sufficient bandwidth to share information, YouTube along with Netflix stated they would reduce streaming quality for at least thirty days as to cut bandwidth use of their services by 25% to comply with the EU's request.

YouTube later announced that they will continue with this move worldwide, We continue to work closely with governments and network operators around the globe to do our part to minimize stress on the system during this unprecedented situation.

More information: Business Insider

I've always liked the format of YouTube,
sharing things for free,
which is a nice exchange between people.

Bo Burnham

OLIVER REED, MACHO IMAGE & HELLRAISER LIFESTYLE

Today, The Grandma is relaxing at home. She has decided to watch some films, and she has chosen one of his favourite actors, Oliver Reed, an incredible actor with a controversial life, who was born on a day like today in 1938.

Robert Oliver Reed (13 February 1938-2 May 1999) was an English actor known for his upper-middle class, macho image and hellraiser lifestyle.

Notable films include The Trap (1966), playing Bill Sikes in the Best Picture Oscar winner Oliver! (1968), Women in Love (1969), Hannibal Brooks (1969), The Devils (1971), portraying Athos in The Three Musketeers (1973) and The Four Musketeers (1974), playing a Teddy Boy in Tommy (1975), The Brood (1979), Lion of the Desert (1981), Castaway (1986), The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988), Funny Bones (1995) and Gladiator (2000).

For playing Antonius Proximo, the old, gruff gladiator trainer in Ridley Scott's Gladiator in what was his final film, Reed was posthumously nominated for the BAFTA Award for Best Actor in a Supporting Role in 2000. At the peak of his career, in 1971, British exhibitors voted Reed 5th most popular star at the box office.

An alcoholic, Reed had issues with drink that were well publicized, from appearances on chat shows to a high-profile friendship with drinking partner and The Who drummer Keith Moon, whom he met while working on Tommy.

Reed was born on 13 February 1938 at 9 Durrington Park Road, Wimbledon, to Peter Reed, a sports journalist, and Marcia.

When he got out of the army, Reed began his acting career as an extra in films. He appeared uncredited in Norman Wisdom's film The Square Peg (1958). Uncredited television appearances included episodes of The Invisible Man (1958), The Four Just Men (1959) and The Third Man. He appeared in the documentary Hello London (1958).

More information: A Podcast on Film

Reed's first break was playing Richard of Gloucester in a six-part BBC TV series The Golden Spur (1959). It did not seem to help his career immediately: He was not credited in the films The Captain's Table (1959), Upstairs and Downstairs (1959), directed by Ralph Thomas, Life Is a Circus (1960), The Angry Silence (1960), The League of Gentlemen (1960) and Beat Girl (1960). He played a bouncer in The Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll (1960) for Hammer Films with whom he would become associated; the director was Terence Fisher. Reed was then in The Bulldog Breed (1960), another Wisdom film, playing the leader of a gang of Teddy Boys roughing up Wisdom in a cinema.

Reed got his first significant role in Hammer Films' Sword of Sherwood Forest (1960), again directed by Fisher. He went back to small roles for His and Hers (1961), a Terry-Thomas comedy; No Love for Johnnie (1961) for Ralph Thomas; and The Rebel (1961) with Tony Hancock.

Reed's first starring role came when Hammer cast him as the central character in Terence Fisher’s The Curse of the Werewolf (1961). Hammer liked Reed and gave him good supporting roles in the swashbuckler The Pirates of Blood River (1962), directed by John Gilling; Captain Clegg (1962), a smugglers' tale with Peter Cushing; The Damned (1963), a science fiction film directed by Joseph Losey; Paranoiac (1963), a psycho thriller for director Freddie Francis; and The Scarlet Blade (1963); a swashbuckler set during the English Civil War, directed by Gilling, with Reed as a Roundhead.

During this time he appeared in some ITV Playhouse productions, Murder in Shorthand (1962) and The Second Chef (1962), and guest-starred in episodes of The Saint. He also had the lead in a non-Hammer horror, The Party's Over (made 1963, released 1965), directed by Guy Hamilton.

Reed's star rose further as a result of playing Bill Sikes in Oliver! (1968), alongside Ron Moody, Shani Wallis, Mark Lester, Jack Wild and Harry Secombe, in his uncle Carol Reed's screen version of the successful stage musical. It was a huge hit, winning the Academy Award for Best Picture, with Reed receiving praise for his villainous performance.

He was in the black comedy The Assassination Bureau (1969) with Diana Rigg and Telly Savalas, directed by Basil Dearden; and a war film for Winner, Hannibal Brooks (1969).

More successful than either was his fourth film with Russell, a film version of Women in Love (1969), in which he wrestled naked with Alan Bates in front of a log fire. In 1969 Interstate Theatres awarded him their International Star of the Year Award.

Take a Girl Like You (1970) was a sex comedy with Hayley Mills based on a novel by Kingsley Amis; The Lady in the Car with Glasses and a Gun (1970) was a thriller directed by Anatole Litvak. The following year, Reed appeared in the controversial film The Devils (1971), directed by Russell with Vanessa Redgrave.

An anecdote holds that Reed could have been chosen to play James Bond. In 1969, Bond franchise producers Albert R. Broccoli and Harry Saltzman were looking for a replacement for Sean Connery and Reed, who had recently played a resourceful killer in The Assassination Bureau, was mentioned as a possible choice for the role, with Timothy Dalton and Roger Moore as the other choices. Whatever the reason, Reed was never to play Bond. After Reed's death, the Guardian Unlimited called the casting decision, One of the great missed opportunities of post-war British movie history.

More information: The Quietus

He had great success playing Athos in The Three Musketeers (1973) and The Four Musketeers (1974) for director Richard Lester from a script by George MacDonald Fraser. Reed had an uncredited bit-part in Russell's Mahler (1974), was the lead in Blue Blood (1973), and And Then There Were None (1974), produced by Harry Alan Towers. His next project with Ken Russell was Tommy where he plays Tommy's cruel stepfather, a 1950s Teddy Boy, based on The Who's 1969 concept album Tommy and starring its lead singer Roger Daltrey.

Reed was a villain in Disney's Condorman (1981) and did the horror film Venom (1981).

He was in Terry Gilliam's The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988), as the god Vulcan; The Lady and the Highwayman (1989) with Hugh Grant; The House of Usher (1989); The Return of the Musketeers (1990) with Lester and Fraser; Treasure Island (1990) with Charlton Heston; A Ghost in Monte Carlo (1990); Hired to Kill (1990); Panama Sugar (1990); The Revenger (1990); The Pit and the Pendulum (1991); Prisoner of Honor (1991) for Russell; and Severed Ties (1993).

Reed was in Return to Lonesome Dove (1993); Funny Bones (1995); Russian Roulette-Moscow 95 (1995); Luise knackt den Jackpot (1995); Die Tunnelgangster von Berlin (1996); The Bruce (1996); Jeremiah (1998); The Incredible Adventures of Marco Polo on His Journeys to the Ends of the Earth (1998); and Parting Shots (1998).

His final role was the elderly slave dealer Proximo in Ridley Scott's Gladiator (2000), in which he played alongside Richard Harris, an actor whom Reed admired greatly both on and off the screen. The film was released after his death with some footage filmed with a double, digitally mixed with out-take footage. The film was dedicated to him.

More information: The Guardian

I'm not a villain, I've never hurt anyone.
I'm just a tawdry character who explodes now and again.

Oliver Reed