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

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Equal parts funny and appalling, "Hellraisers" takes us back to the glory days of stage and screen actors Peter O'Toole, Richard Burton, Richard Harris and Oliver Reed.

Hope you enjoy it as much as I do, I haven't finished it yet but when I do, which should be soon, I'll be starting it from the beginning again.

As old Akbar of Afghanistan said "the man on hashish will be laughing and joking with you at the end of the night- the drunkard on wine will maybe even end up trying to kill you. This is the 'story' of four of the greatest actors of their generation; Richard Burton, Peter O'Toole, Richard Harris and Oliver Reed - told through the lens of alcohol. Sometimes the form of a piece so perfectly fits its content you can actually hear the angels of accordance purr. 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.

Just when you thought the behaviour of these thugs could not get any worse it often did and certainly got no better. 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. Robert Sellers is the author of Hellraisers, Bad Boy Drive, Hollywood Hellraisers and An A-Z of Hellraisers. One of the interesting things about these four actors and their drinking was how important its public dimension was.

The story begins at a London pub one sorry Christmas and is told through the eyes of Martin, a wannabe hellraiser sitting at the end of the bar alone, drinking himself into oblivion. Peter O’Toole’s drinking almost put him in the grave before his 43rd birthday, and Oliver Reed ended up dying prematurely. Burton, particularly, was both immensely talented and a global superstar — a sensation on Broadway in John Gielgud's celebrated 1964 production of Hamlet, and a hit onstage as King Arthur opposite Julie Andrews' Guenevere in Camelot a few years before. This book is about his legendary drunkenness, along with Richard Harris, Peter O'Toole and another favourite of mine, Oliver Reed. By using the Web site, you confirm that you have read, understood, and agreed to be bound by the Terms and Conditions.

It’s a bit of a running theme, other actors going down in flames and that not registering with any of our foursome as like, I dunno, perhaps a sort of hint. Perhaps that was possible because his drinking was simply an adjunct to a far deeper and more pervasive eccentricity: “I will not be a common man,” he wrote in a notebook while a teenager. The least likable is Oliver Reed, who was a violent chauvinist pig when drunk but a most generous man when sober.Richard Burton, Richard Harris, Peter O'Toole, and Oliver Reed: On screen they were stars, off screen they were legends.