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

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What you’ve got in this book is an incredibly entertaining series of anecdotes, interspersed with unpretentious and conversational interviews -- all about drinking.

The trouble with Hellraisers is that all those anecdotes are much of a muchness, and after 200 pages of it I was left almost as amnesiac as Harris was about most of his life.Published in 1953, subtitled Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict, this is the first book written by William Burroughs, using his mother’s maiden name. I do find factual accounts such as these dispiriting to read at any length (with the exception of Olivia Laing’s) because one is always conscious of the sometimes fatal waste of life and dissolution of talent, and the very high collateral damage. On May 2, 1999 while filming Gladiator in Malta, Oliver Reed was leaving a pub when he spotted a group of Royal Navy sailors.

amounts to an unapologetic celebration of the plastered and the damned in our sanctimonious 'Oprah' age of public confession and easy redemption. He quotes the actor, who still keeps Shakespeare’s sonnets -- which he has committed to memory -- by his bedside, as musing: “The common denominator of all my friends is that they’re dead. They got away with the kind of behavior that today's film stars could scarcely dream of, because of their mercurial acting talent and because the press and public loved them. Hellraisers is the story of drunken binges of near biblical proportions, parties and orgies, broken marriages, riots, and wanton sexual conquests. It's also relentless and, at times repetitive, if Oliver Reed displays his private parts once in public he did it daily - and although funny at first it wears thin.

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. In the dead of night one evening, Oliver Reed came down and stole the fish from the ornamental pond," Sellers says. If you want an entertaining escape into lives so outrageous that they seem to recognise no limits then this is the book to provide it.

While they claim to love life, they were so drunk that they did not remember much of theirs, and caused a great deal of distress to many people around them both known and unknown. Just about what I thought it would be: capsule reviews of the lives of four of the British Isles' greatest actors and drinkers.

Next morning, Reed arrives in the dining room and says "Good morning" to everybody — and then he dove into the pond and started eating what the diners thought were live fish. All four men had talent to burn and very interesting lives and if there's one thing this book can be accused off is to make them sound quite boring after a while. And on those occasions when they do sober up, a couple of them complain that drunks are annoying bores.

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