Their mercurial acting talent and love from the press and the public allowed them to get away with the kind of behaviour that today’s film stars could scarcely dream of. What you’ve got in this book is an incredibly entertaining series of anecdotes, interspersed with unpretentious and conversational interviews -- all about drinking. 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. View image in fullscreen Violent, vainglorious … Robert Carlyle as Begbie in the 1996 film of Trainspotting.

From O'Toole getting arrested for wooing an insurance building, Reed dropping his pants in public to show off his "mighty mallet," Harris attacking cars in Italy, to Burton urinating onstage, it is laid out in hilarious detail by Sellers.Each of them wound up taking execrable acting jobs just to stay afloat, especially after a new wave of filmmakers in the 1970s made their Shakespearean mannerisms look badly out of date. Images Donate icon An illustration of a heart shape Donate Ellipses icon An illustration of text ellipses. And it was covering a local horse race — and this is God's truth — and the camera zoomed into the crowd and Peter O'Toole was actually in the crowd. Harris openly mocked Hugh Grant, and once told Bruce Willis politely to "fuck off, I am talking to my ex-wife".

This book was funny, interesting and entertaining and can make you feel as though you yourself are a bit boring! Set in Edinburgh at the fag end of the Thatcher era, the anomie and despair of the central characters, though never preached, is clear. 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.

It's criminal, Sellers thinks, that they never won, though O'Toole did pick up a lifetime-achievement award in 2002. Just when you thought the behaviour of these thugs could not get any worse it often did and certainly got no better. Most purchases from business sellers are protected by the Consumer Contract Regulations 2013 which give you the right to cancel the purchase within 14 days after the day you receive the item. They got away with their destructive behaviour - smashing up restaurants and hotels was their forte - because of the adulation, amounting to a societal disease, that we accord to those we deem to be celebrities. When they were at their peaks, these men "had huge responsibility on their shoulders as the star of a film," Sellers acknowledges.

I'd also like to see Castaway as the trailers look like an art film but is hard to find on DVD in the USA. However, the superficial book occasionally caused me to laugh out loud which was what I was looking to achieve. But that’s not the point of Hellraisers, which comes from the POV that all of this (tanked careers, failed relationships, physical ruin) was worth it if it was a laugh. One of life’s oddities is how often a series of genuinely comedic incidents congeals into, if not tragedy, then tragic loss. Robert Sellers, the author, had trawled the biographies, autobiographies of the four and interviewed close friends and colleagues to lay out their careers and the insanity that drink had on it all.We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others.

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. Maybe someday in the future people will see the comparable cultures of the Rake and the Rope and see - alcohol definitely leads to a path of self- and social-destruction.Sometimes the form of a piece so perfectly fits its content you can actually hear the angels of accordance purr. 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. Also, less than a month ago, I saw a brief interview with the old Richard Harris in which the alcoholic said he didn’t regret even one drop of what he’d done in his life.