Hellraisers: The Life and Inebriated Times of Richard Burton, Richard Harris, Peter O'Toole, and Oliver Reed

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Gonzo antiheroes … Benicio Del Toro and Johnny Depp in the film version of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. It’s a wonderful story, but if you’re a bit familiar with the literature of postwar British theater, you’ve read it before -- though never involving Burton. I did quite enjoy the days when one went for a beer at one’s local in Paris and wake up in Corsica,” Mr. The Plastered Fifties", "The Soused Sixties", "The Sozzled Seventies", "The Blotto Eighties", and "The Pickled Nineties".

Bought this for my mum to read as she loves reading biographies of actors, she said it has been a compelling read and would highly recommend it. Reed, for instance: Filming the 1973 adventure The Three Musketeers in Madrid, the cast and crew were staying in an expensive hotel with an ornate fishpond in the dining room, full of koi — the overgrown goldfish often seen lazing about in ponds in Japanese gardens and public parks. On the surface it’s a roughly chronological group biography, but really it’s an anthology of anecdotes.Harris died in 2002, Burton in 1984, Reed in 1999 — during the filming of Gladiator, another Best Picture winner for the man who never made it big in Hollywood. Robert Sellers is a former stand-up comedian and the author of biographies of Sting, Tom Cruise, two appreciations of the work of Sean Connery and the definitive book on The Pythons: Always Look on the Bright Side of Life. It's a celebratory catalogue of their miscreant deeds, a greatest-hits package, as it were, of their most breathtakingly outrageous behavior, told with humor and affection. Sellers rather grandly describes the 77-year-old O’Toole, recently an Oscar nominee for his work in “Venus,” as “the last surviving British reprobate. Still, except for Burton -- the tormented son of a Welsh miner -- the carousing seemed for these artists an adjunct of their performance: a self-destructive performance art.

Just about what I thought it would be: capsule reviews of the lives of four of the British Isles' greatest actors and drinkers. It is not an academic book by any means but it certainly provides one with the great stories and overview of the actors and they're mad stories. Hellraisers is the story of four of the greatest boozers of all time: Richard Burton, Richard Harris, Peter O'Toole and Oliver Reed.One of the interesting things about these four actors and their drinking was how important its public dimension was. If you remember the bygone times when people had fun , without giving a s*** about what the rest of the world thought , then this is the book for you . The book served it's purpose well - to tell us about the Hellraisers - but after a while I felt like I was just reading about the same drunken brawl, over and over and over, looping into eternity.

It's an entertaining read but it leaves you feeling as if you just enjoyed driving past a horrendous traffic accident. Women were treated like shagging material and casually cast aside in their scores when they had served their brief purpose. It may be, in fact, that he just loves a great series of stories about fascinatingly intelligent and preternaturally talented men behaving in utterly outrageous ways.

At his height in the 1950s, Burton could consume a fifth of brandy and still play Hamlet with little or no ill effects. The lives of some incredibly talented (and incredibly stupid) people chronicled here-all the carousing and comparatively uncivilized things rich drunken sots can get up to are chronicled here.

But if that was the case and doctors told me I had to stop, I’d like to think that I would be brave enough to drink myself into the grave. It's a tale of drunken binges, parties, orgies, broken marriages, riots and wanton sexual conquests. His illustrations appear in the bestselling Mighty Book of Boosh and the intergalactic manual How To Speak Wookiee, and have been published in the NME, the Times, Esquire and Time Out, among many others. These men make today's tabloid faces seem pallid indeed: their tales trivialize any and all subsequent film stars' off-screen antics to the point of resembling kindergarten pranks.

It starts to feel like an audience with Rowley Burkin, the muttering souse from The Fast Show who ends all his anecdotes with “I was very, very drunk. The sprightly smash 'n dash of the prose so wonderfully captures the wanton belligerence of both bingeing and stardom you almost feel the guys themselves are telling the tales (and moaning and toasting all the while. There are several actions that could trigger this block including submitting a certain word or phrase, a SQL command or malformed data. This is the story of four of the greatest thespian boozers who ever walked — or staggered — off a film set into a pub.