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

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Peter O’Toole’s drinking almost put him in the grave before his 43rd birthday, and Oliver Reed ended up dying prematurely.

Read more about the condition New: A new, unread, unused book in perfect condition with no missing or damaged pages. At his height in the 1950s, Burton could consume a fifth of brandy and still play Hamlet with little or no ill effects. A story of four of the greatest thespian boozers who ever walked - or staggered - off a film set into a pub; of drunken binges of near biblical proportions, parties and orgies, broken marriages, drugs, riots and wanton sexual conquests.

The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. 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. The author clearly loves the subjects of this book, but though I enjoyed it, I started to wonder if their allure would hold in this day and age. His iconic work for the Prodigy on the Fat of The Land LP brought him to the attention of an international audience.

On the surface it’s a roughly chronological group biography, but really it’s an anthology of anecdotes. Books on hellraisers often focus on “creatives” such as Robert Sellers’ Hollywood Hellraisers: the Life and inebriated times of [actors] Burton, Harris, Reed and O’Toole. Robert Sellers' outrageously entertaining history proves that today's celebrities don't have much on Richard Burton, Peter O'Toole, Richard Harris and Oliver Reed. 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 . There are several actions that could trigger this block including submitting a certain word or phrase, a SQL command or malformed data.

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. 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. Like the rejuvenating martinis and blurry haze of cigarettes in Mad Men, Robert Sellers's nostalgic Hellraisers .

An incredibly entertaining series of anecdotes, interspersed with unpretentious and conversational interviews--all about drinking. One by one, they take this disillusioned soul on a personal tour of their lives, their tumultuous childhoods, rise to stardom and chaotic personal lives. How they really knew how to have a good time, while their wives stayed home looking after the kids, who according to one anecdote didn’t even recognise his own father because he was never there. I’m sure the subjects of this book would think me a terrible joyless bore, but ultimately I found this book rather sad.The stories collected in it make you wonder how they made any art at all between drinking binges, pub crawls and pub brawls, public scenes of ribaldry and all-around boorishness. 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. Stories that make you regard the four men mentioned within , more as naughty schoolboys having a giggle than a menace to society . In the dead of night one evening, Oliver Reed came down and stole the fish from the ornamental pond," Sellers says. Sadly at the time of the writing, the only one still alive was Peter O'Toole (sadly also now passed), and after going on the adventure with them throughout the pages, I admit sadness at their premature ends detailed here.