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

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Web icon An illustration of a computer application window Wayback Machine Texts icon An illustration of an open book. So wonderfully captures the wanton belligerence of both binging and stardom you almost feel the guys themselves are telling the tales.

This is the story of four of the greatest thespian boozers who ever walked - or staggered - off a film set into a pub. 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.

One, most of us could never hope to consume 2-3 bottles of vodka a day for six months (Harris, Burton) or drink 126 pints of beer in a 24 hour period (Reed). Still, what can you say about a guy who, momentarily sober, asks to see his wife and is informed that she’d left him some years before. The anecdotes pretty much follow one basic form: Person X got really drunk, did something stupid, doesn't remember it, doesn't regret it. My choices are therefore mostly fictional; they all, I think, provide some sort of context for their characters’ boorish behaviour. His illustrations appear in the bestselling Mighty Book of Boosh and the intergalactic manual How To Speak Wookiee, and have been published in the NME, the Times, Esquire and Time Out, among many others.

Harris openly mocked Hugh Grant, and once told Bruce Willis politely to "fuck off, I am talking to my ex-wife".Sellers’s other subjects, he perfected a cavalier panache that allowed him to glide through life delivering boozy bon mots, thus eclipsing certain unpleasant realities. Women were treated like shagging material and casually cast aside in their scores when they had served their brief purpose. And on those occasions when they do sober up, a couple of them complain that drunks are annoying bores. What makes them awesome is not the amount of liquor they can drink or the women they can bed, but that they can function not only like human beings but like talented actors.

If you know anything about the history of these four they were, to put in a mild form, drinkers of phenomenal stamina. 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.I’m sure the subjects of this book would think me a terrible joyless bore, but ultimately I found this book rather sad. reading about the hellraising times of four of the screens best known boozers: Peter O'Toole, Oliver Reed, Richard Harris and Richard Burton. This inventive graphic work seamlessly weaves their four biographies into one fast-paced adventure of drunken binges, orgies, parties, and fun.