Reed is said to have drunk 126 pints of beer in 24 hours, it’s highly unlikely that anyone really bothered to keep the numbers straight. View image in fullscreen Albert Finney as Arthur Seaton in the 1960 film version of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. I was repulsed the most about Oliver Reed whose tense David Letterman show appearance is on Youtube and deserves a look.

Readers will want to be advised that Sellers, perhaps as a stylistic tic, perhaps as an ill-advised attempt to suggest the drinkers’ milieu, rather too frequently resorts to slang and vulgarity. Robert Sellers's book on the drunken exploits of Burton, Harris, O'Toole and Reed often reads like a series of jokes and punchlines--probably because of Sellers's past as a standup comic.The tales of their carousing have grown over the years until they've become legend — which is why, Sellers says, it was particularly rewarding to track down those who could give firsthand accounts of outrageous stories you'd think must have been embellished.

Alas, despite a few walk on roles, the world has been spared his acting, which is perhaps all for the best. My life has been enriched now that I know that Peter O'Toole once smuggled a pair of valuable earrings out of Egypt in his foreskin. Harris and Burton were always heroes of mine growing up, and the book also tells little tales on the equally exciting Roger Moore, Rex Harrison and John Wayne, oh and even Steve Mcqueen. So he narrowed his focus, picked these four titans, wove a narrative — "so it's almost a story," as he puts it. 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.If you know anything about the history of these four they were, to put in a mild form, drinkers of phenomenal stamina.

If there was a Mount Rushmore for drunks, these guys would be on it, probably along with Liz Taylor. And yet … Foreman’s book is strongly feminist; on every other page is evidence of the ludicrous power imbalance between men and women. Set in New York in the summer of 1959, it’s a cross between Dashiell Hammett and John Franklin Bardin, with a twist of Aleister Crowley thrown in. 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.I was interested when Richard Harris got cross on a chat show after someone describing him and his friends as drunks, arguing that there was more to their accomplishments than that. Now accompanied by a mysterious companion, who spurs him on, he decides to put this happy facility to use – resulting in gargantuan feats of debauchery, alongside the “cutting off” of religious rivals. By the 1990s, people were in awe of O'Toole and Harris, less so of Reed because he was unemployed and damn near broke. Their names are included up there with the acting greats and these boys spent quite a bit of time behaving badly.

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.Going into it, I liked Harris the best but learned that he could be equally dangerous and unaccountable. Anyone horrified by the reckless abandon of “Hellraisers” should know what its ultimate effect turns out to be.