IN THE 1960s few people in the West had heard of Dean Reed. But on the other side of the Iron Curtain, where the Beatles and the Rolling Stones were frowned upon, the American rock star with left-wing views was a living legend.

Now, 18 years after Reed drowned in mysterious circumstances near his home in East Berlin, his life is to be the subject of a Hollywood film produced by Tom Hanks.

The actor is fascinated by the story of the farm boy from Colorado who was hailed as the “Red Elvis”. As part of his research Hanks even interviewed Egon Krenz, the former East German Communist party leader, in his jail cell.

DreamWorks, the production company partly owned by Steven Spielberg — who plans to co-produce the film with Hanks — has bought the rights to Comrade Rockstar, a book about Reed’s life by Reggie Nadelson, a London-based writer. Last month members of Reed’s family signed contracts to work on the production and they are helping scriptwriters to piece together details of his life.

“Hanks has an intense fascination with my father,” Reed’s son Alexander said last week. “He has gone to great lengths to try and get inside my father’s mind and understand what it was like to be an American free spirit who became a household name in the communist East.”

Reed’s unlikely rise to Soviet stardom began at the age of 20 in 1958. Bored with working on his father’s farm in Wheat Ridge, a town of 28,000 people near Denver, he bought a white convertible, packed his guitar and headed for the West Coast.

His lucky break came within days when he gave a ride to a tramp who claimed to know a record producer in Hollywood. The story turned out to be true and despite Reed’s mediocre singing he was given a recording contract.

Two years later, after a screen test, the country boy with cinematic good looks was signed up by Warner Bros and sent for acting lessons. It was there that he made friends with the Everly brothers and the actress Jean Seberg and came under the influence of left-wing activists.

“He was simply a product of his time, “ said Nadelson. “Full of idealism, revolutionary zeal and a naive belief that he could help change the world.”

In 1962 Reed had his first hit when his song Our Summer Romance topped the charts — in Chile and Argentina. “He packed his bag and followed his hit,” said Nadelson. “And one thing simply led to another.”

Influenced by meetings with radical poets such as Pablo Neruda and the revolutionary Daniel Ortega, who was to become president of Nicaragua, Reed became a fervent anti-capitalist. Then in 1965 he was spotted playing in a Helsinki park by Boris Pastukhov, a leader of Komsomol, the Soviet youth league.

Pastukhov, in Finland for a meeting of the Russiansponsored World Peace Conference, was delighted to discover that Reed espoused Marxism-Leninism. Hurrying back to the conference, he pushed the young American onto the stage and ordered him to sing. After telling the middle-aged delegates to hold hands, Reed performed We Shall Overcome. By that evening he was on a train to a new life in Moscow.

Concert tours, record contracts and film roles poured in. In Romania and Italy Reed shot spaghetti westerns, one of them starring Yul Brynner, and raged against American imperialism. In all he made more than 20 films that were dubbed and distributed throughout the Soviet bloc. Even today many eastern Europeans still sing along sentimentally to his songs.

“For us girls he was a god,” said Ingrid Mehler, 50, from Berlin. “We had his records and posters, we knew where he lived, the size of his cowboy boots and hat, and we’ll never forget him.”

Fame made Reed a rouble millionaire. He indulged himself with the Russian groupies who chased him everywhere, eventually settling in East Germany with his third wife, the film actress Renate Blume.

It all ended on a bright June morning in 1986 when Reed left his home in East Berlin. Five days later his body was dredged from a nearby lake.

Erich Honecker, the East German leader, personally declared Reed’s death to be the result of an accident. Conspiracy theories of CIA and KGB involvement were fuelled by Reed’s appearance on American television shortly before his death, when he likened President Ronald Reagan to Stalin.

According to friends, Reed was concerned that his looks and voice were fading — prompting speculation that he may have taken his own life.

Alexander Reed, himself an actor, is delighted that his father’s story will at last be shown on screen. “Hanks is a man of real insight and could play the role perfectly,” he said.

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