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

Product Information

Burton, Harris, O’Toole and Reed were four of the great actors to emerge in postwar British stage and cinema; they also were legendary drunks, who not only pursued their avocation -- it surely was more than a recreation -- in public and without regrets. Immensely repetitive, but then again it appears their lives were much the same: only so many ways you can get drunk over the course of an entire lifetime. Personally, I wish that there was more info regarding what happened on specific films (only two bloody paragraphs on The Spy Who Came In From The Cold?

Sellers takes us on a well humoured walk through the decades of their drunken debauchery, of their successes and of their failures.

amounts to an unapologetic celebration of the plastered and the damned in our sanctimonious 'Oprah' age of public confession and easy redemption. Told through the eyes of Martin, a wannabe hellraiser, we begin our tale in a typical London pub at Christmas time. 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.

There was a time when I felt like a perpendicular cuckoo clock, popping up and down in pulpits saying: ‘Fear no more the heat o’ the sun. Hellraisers" takes an inside look at the wild and boozy careers of four of England's greatest actors.Like the rejuvenating martinis and blurry haze of cigarettes in 'Mad Men, ' Robert Sellers's nostalgic Hellraisers. Hellraisers is the story of four of the greatest boozers who ever walked - or staggered - off a film set and into a pub: Richard Burton, Richard Harris, Peter O'Toole and Oliver Reed.

The book itself tells us that yes, these men had one or two extraordinary performances but the rest of the films they made essentially were garbage. In her case the showing off was spurred on by deep-seated feelings of inadequacy and a desperate need for approbation. Raise a glass to the story of four of the greatest actors—and boozers—of all time: Richard Burton, Richard Harris, Peter O'Toole, and Oliver Reed.And God bless Richard Harris for giving us his son Jared, who was so great as Lane Pryce on "Mad Men. When they were at their peaks, these men "had huge responsibility on their shoulders as the star of a film," Sellers acknowledges. 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. A portrait of four profoundly flawed yet awesome leading men, as well as a window into a time when glamour was sacrosanct and when stardom was achieved rather than manufactured. This book is about his legendary drunkenness, along with Richard Harris, Peter O'Toole and another favourite of mine, Oliver Reed.

All four of them were well known for being very drunk a lot of the time, difficult to work with, violent, womanising, impossible to live with (ask their ex wives), but geniuses in their art. He'll Play This Bout First: Peter O'Toole starred as Hamlet in an Old Vic production directed by Laurence Olivier in 1963. The men were more than actors; they were legends, and they never let anyone forget it for an instant. By the 1990s, people were in awe of O'Toole and Harris, less so of Reed because he was unemployed and damn near broke. I’ve recently been reading through the work of Michael Hartnett, a wondrously gifted Irish poet, all but unknown outside his native island though revered by his contemporaries.If you're a fan of old movies or in the acting business and appreciate this era of greats, I would still recommend it, though.