Articles/Interviews

The scene is a smart restaurant in France, where the actor Oliver Reed is waiting with a friend to be served.

As the minutes tick past and there is still no sign of a waiter, Reed becomes irritable and suggests that they leave.

His companion persuades him to stay, but half an hour later they have still not been served.

"Right," says Reed to his friend, "I'll show you how to get some service." He picks up a chair and hurls it through a window and into the street.

Within seconds an irate manager and five waiters have surrounded the table. "Ah, yes," says Reed. "I'll start with the fish soup, please."

Oliver Reed was one of a quartet of actors who could be described as the most extraordinary and controversial film stars Britain ever produced; men who at their peak had the whole world at their feet and lived through some of the wildest exploits Hollywood has ever seen.

Reed, Richard Burton, Richard Harris and Peter O'Toole were men inextricably linked in the public mind - by their outrageous talent and their pure, unbridled excess.

Bound together by mutual rivalry and interlocking friendships, their story encompasses drunken binges of epic proportions, broken marriages, riotous brawls and wanton sexual conquests.

During their decades on the rampage, they got away with behaviour that today's sterile bunch of film stars can scarcely dream of, because of who they were and because the public loved them. But was their hellraising truly something to admire - or just desperately sad and self-destructive?

At the height of his fame during the Sixties, Richard Burton was knocking back three to four bottles of spirits a day, often in competition with his wife, Elizabeth Taylor, who according to some friends was the heavier drinker of the two.

"I had a hollow leg," she once said of those days. "I could drink everyone under the table and not get drunk. My capacity was terrifying."

During one of their legendary fights, Taylor chased Burton round a hotel room with a broken bottle of vodka in her hand. The bill for the damage to the room was �20,000.

Burton's friend and admirer Richard Harris habitually drank two bottles of vodka a day.

"That would take me up to seven in the evening, then I'd break open a bottle of brandy and a bottle of port and mix the two," he once explained.

"I adored getting drunk and I adored reading in the papers what I had done the night before."

Reed, who was once reported to have downed 126 pints of beer in a single 24-hour session, loved the sociability of drinking, claiming to prefer the friendships he made in pubs to those on a film set.

"You meet a better class of person in pubs," he said. His favourite tipple was "gunk", his own invention: an ice bucket with every drink in the bar poured into it.

Reed's habit of abandoning his clothing while under the influence was legendary. Michael Parkinson was once hosting a radio chat show with the American actress Elaine Stritch, and Reed was late arriving.

"I was talking to Elaine," Parky recalled, "when the door burst open and there he stood, absolutely drunk, naked except for a pair of green wellies. Elaine Stritch looked at him and said: 'My dear Oliver, I've seen bigger and better, quite frankly.'"

The last of the quartet, and its only surviving member, Peter O'Toole spent decades propping up bars in Dublin or London, nattering with saloon-bar poets and philosophers.

But as with the other three, there was often an undercurrent of violence to his drinking.

At his hell-raising peak, the gossip columns were filled with accounts of booze-fuelled fights: a brawl with paparazzi on the Via Veneto in Rome, fisticuffs with a French count in a restaurant, even beating up a policeman.

"I was silly and young and drunken and making a complete clown of myself," he said. "But I did quite enjoy the days when one went for a beer at one's local and woke up in Corsica."

All four played up to their madcap image.

"What that group of actors had was a fine madness, a lyrical madness," said Harris. "We lived our life with that madness and it was transmitted into our work.

"We weren't afraid to be different. So we were always dangerous. Dangerous to meet in the street, in a restaurant, and dangerous to see on stage or in a film."

Director Peter Medak recognised this element of danger.

"It was the same with all of them. You didn't know if they were going to kiss you, hug you or punch you right in the face."

Their notoriety came at a price. Burton's liver was shot by the time he reached 50; just one more drink would have killed him.

Insurance companies wouldn't touch Harris with a bargepole and his film career stalled for more than a decade.

O'Toole's drinking almost put him in the grave before his 43rd birthday, while Reed ended up dying prematurely at 61 after an arm-wrestling contest with a bunch of 18-year-old sailors on the eve of scoring his biggest ever triumph with the blockbuster movie Gladiator.

So why did they do it? Why take such risks with their lives and careers? Burton said it was "to burn up the flatness, the stale, empty, dull deadness that one feels when one goes off-stage".

O'Toole said: "I don't really know what I get out of it. What does anyone get out of being drunk? It's an anaesthetic. It diminishes the pain."

The first of the quartet to make the big time was Burton, after the Welshman was spotted in amateur productions at Oxford University.

He teamed up in London with his fellow countryman, the actor Stanley Baker, and the pair embarked upon a sexual rampage, notching up nurses, usherettes, shopgirls and actresses with equal abandon. Their appetites knew no sane boundary.

"This handsome young star with a Churchillian voice sent from Heaven could do no wrong," recalls his friend Euan Lloyd, then working as publicity manager for entertainment company the Rank Organisation.

"Every beauty in town, young and old, craved his company."

With booze spurring them on, Lloyd and Burton would sometimes find themselves fighting over the same woman.

"At a movie premiere, I met a gorgeous young starlet and was invited to call on her the next day," continues Lloyd. "All spruced up, cologne applied, I arrived on her doorstep at the appointed time and rang the bell.

"A long delay, some off-stage noises were heard, and eventually (but slowly) the door was opened. As I entered her hallway I caught a short glimpse of a male head lowering itself out of the kitchen window. It was Richard, the Welsh bull! Spotting me, he yelled: 'A try for Wales, I think!'"

In 1951, Burton was offered a three-film deal in Hollywood worth $150,000. For the son of an impoverished miner and a barmaid, it was success beyond his wildest hopes.

At a party with other young hopefuls, each had been asked to declare their ambitions. "I want to be the greatest Juliet since Ellen Terry," said one. "I want to play Hamlet as it has never been played," said another. "How about you Richard," they finally said. "What do you want to be?"

Burton's reply: "Rich."

In Hollywood, his sexual marathon continued apace, despite the fact that he was by now married to the pretty actress Sybil Williams, the first of his four wives.

The actor Raymond Massey was once asked in an interview if he thought there was any woman Burton had failed to win. "Yes. The actress Marie Dressler," said Massey.

"But she's dead," said the reporter. "Yes, I know," was his reply.

Burton's arrival in Hollywood was marked by a huge party thrown by Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, who had seen him on stage in London.

Bogart adored Burton and the feeling was mutual. They became lifelong friends, sharing many marathon drinking sessions.

"He was my kind of man," said Burton. "If you challenged him to put his hand through a plate-glass window, he'd do it - and keep on drinking with the other hand."

Bogart's penchant for alcohol was awesome. He once said: "I don't trust anyone who doesn't drink."

One story has Bogart losing his way home after an all-night drinking session. Finding himself in an unfamiliar Hollywood suburb as dawn rose, he spied a woman cooking breakfast in a house and peered in through the window.

"My God," she cried out to her husband. "It's Humphrey Bogart!"

"What about him?" her husband shouted back.

"He's in our front yard." "Well, invite him in." Bogart sat down for breakfast with the couple and their children, wolfing down bacon and eggs while mesmerising them with tales of Hollywood.

When he'd finished he stood up, said thank you politely and then walked out the way he'd come in.

Near the end of his days, Bogart reflected upon his life and declared that things had gone downhill after a single bad decision. "I should never have switched," he said, "from Scotch to Martinis."

While Burton hobnobbed with the stars in Hollywood, his fellow hell-raisers were launching their careers back home.

The friendship between O'Toole and Harris began in 1956, when they were cast together in George Bernard Shaw's Major Barbara at the Bristol Old Vic.

Harris described this period as "golden days". "We kept each other up half the night," he said. "We never slept. It was days of chat and yarn-spinning and great, legendary boozing."

During the show's run, Harris and O'Toole would nip out to a nearby bar in the interval, dashing back just in time for curtain up in the second half. One matinee they overstayed their welcome and a stage-hand burst into the bar screaming: "You're on!"

Both men leapt to their feet and made it back into the theatre in 15 seconds flat, O'Toole first.

Crashing into the wings, he hurtled past the backstage crew and tumbled on to the stage, almost falling head-first into the audience.

A woman in the front row smelled his breath. "My God, he's drunk!" she exclaimed. O'Toole lifted his head. "You think this is bad," he said. "Wait till you see the other fellow."

Harris delighted in his friendship with O'Toole. They shared a passion for rugby and went to Twickenham whenever they could. "O'Toole was a poet and a warrior," said Harris. "I loved every moment with him."

At one point, the two men were competing for the affections of the same woman. After a night of drinking, they went their separate ways, only to bump into each other 20 minutes later outside the girl's block of flats.

A deal was struck. O'Toole would try to smooth-talk his way in over the intercom, while Harris would climb the drainpipe up to the sixth floor and try to attract her attention that way. The first to get to the bedroom would be the winner.

"I nearly killed myself with my mountaineering efforts," Harris later recalled, "but eventually reached her balcony and peered in. Peter had that moment walked into the room to claim his prize. As they headed to the bedroom, he looked back and saw my dishevelled figure and winked. I nearly fell to the ground just from laughing."

Like Burton, none of the other three saw acting as a great vocation. "We didn't want to be the best actors in the world," said Harris. "We didn't want to be the best King Lear or the new Olivier. What a boring ambition."

Instead, they wanted to experience everything that life had to offer and have as good a time as they could.

Their drinking and revelling were a two-fingered salute to the middle-class acting establishment. This was a new breed, putting a landmine under the Olivier and Gielgud generation, and nothing like them had been seen before.

The period in British cultural history that gave birth to the hellraisers was a fascinating one.

All four had shared the experience of being war babies, of being bombed, of being evacuated, of facing compulsory military service.

"It's one of the most incredible experiences in the world, being bombed," O'Toole commented. "You play this mad, demented, passive role. I tell you, if you haven't been bombed, you haven't lived."

Then there was wartime rationing: no meat, no food - and no booze. "Our drinking was liberation from the fear and the restrictions of the war years," said O'Toole.

"The frivolity and the fun had gone. Booze was a way of recapturing it. We certainly had a bloody good time."

O'Toole liked to quote the often repeated line that if you could remember the Sixties, you weren't really there.

"Well, we were doing that in the Fifties. I can remember how the decade started, and how it ended but, sadly, nothing in between."

As students and young actors, O'Toole and his contemporaries had no money but had youth and stupidity in abundance, so often would save on heating by having parties on the Circle line on the London Underground.

It was warm, there were chairs and they'd take a battery-operated gramophone and play each other's records. Did they drink?

"Of course we did, baby," says O'Toole. "We'd get off at Sloane Square, pop out to the pub, get some more booze and get back on again. Great fun!"

Unlike Harris's friendship with O'Toole, the start of his relationship with Oliver Reed was not an auspicious-one.

Working as an extra at Elstree Studios, Reed had a few lines in the 1961 Tony Hancock comedy The Rebel. At one point he went searching for his drinking pal, the actor Ronald Fraser, working at the same studio.

He knocked on his dressing-room door only for it to be opened by Harris. "What do you want?" the Irishman snarled.

Reed asked if Fraser was there. "Yes, he is," said Harris and slammed the door in Reed's face.

Their paths did not cross again for another decade, when they began a mock-macho rivalry with each other, exchanging provocative letters, insulting each other's competence when interviewed by the media and threatening when they eventually met again to knock seven bells out of each other.

It was a curious relationship, as they had never socialised with each other. Matters came to a head one night in Los Angeles when Harris answered a phone call.

"Harris!" said a voice at the other end of the line. "When I see you I'm going to kick the s*** out of you and I'm going to stamp on your face and break both your arms."

Harris guessed it was Reed. "Where are you?" he demanded.

Reed named an LA bar. "Don't move," said Harris. "I'll be right over." The big encounter had come at last.

"Do I start with you," Harris asked a muscle-bound minder who'd come to stand next to Reed, "or do I begin with Oliver?" "You begin with me," said Reed, waving away his aide.

Onlookers gasped as the two stars squared up and glared at each other. Then all of a sudden Reed asked politely: "Drink?"

"Don't mind if I do," replied Harris courteously. Both men shook hands and gave each other a massive bear hug before getting down to some serious drinking. "Sober, he was a great guy," said Reed of Harris. "Drunk, he was even better."

O'Toole might have said exactly the same thing of Burton, whom he saw as a soulmate. The two actors lived round the corner from each other in Hampstead, North London, for many years and were friends long before they ever worked together.

"He'd come to my place or I'd go to his," said O'Toole. "And then we'd carry each other home."

When they were cast together in the 1964 film Becket, their reputations were notorious, and the crew was expecting the worst. Surprisingly, both were seen holding nothing but cups of tea for the first ten days.

Finally, Burton said to O'Toole, putting on an Irish accent: "Peter, me boy, I think we deserve a little snifter."

They drank for a day and two nights and then tried to film a scene where the king places a ring on Becket's finger, making him Chancellor of England.

Luckily, there was no dialogue, but O'Toole had a dreadful time putting the ring on. "It was rather like trying to thread a needle wearing boxing gloves," Burton recalled.

One evening in 1972, during the filming of The Assassination Of Trotsky, the assistant director, Norman Priggen, received a phone call from Elizabeth Taylor explaining that Burton would not be working the next day.

"Why's that?" asked Priggen. "Well, you'd better get back to our hotel and look in the bar and see for yourself," replied Taylor.

Priggen drove quickly to the hotel and found Burton and Peter O'Toole, drunk as lords, lying on the floor, fondly embracing each other and singing Happy Birthday. They had been there since lunchtime.

Burton was furious at being interrupted and it took a number of staff to carry him to his suite. Priggen was certain the actor would be in no state to work the following day. Yet, the next morning Burton gave what many considered his best performance and best day's work during the whole shoot.

The death knell for the long friendship between the two men was sounded by Elizabeth Taylor later that year. Finding himself in the same hotel in Rome as Burton and Taylor, O'Toole tried telephoning his friend, but couldn't get beyond the bodyguard or secretary who invariably answered the phone.

For two days, Burton didn't return his call, and then one of his staff came with a message and led O'Toole to the corner of a dark bar tucked in the back of the hotel, where his friend was waiting for him.

"Elizabeth does not approve of us racing around together," said Burton.

"And that was it," said O'Toole. "Goodbye. I didn't see him again for many years, poor soul."

But when O'Toole got a pasting from the critics for his performance as Macbeth in 1980, it was his old friend who phoned to commiserate. "I hear you've had a bit of stick from the critics," said Burton.

"Yes," O'Toole replied. "How are the houses?" Burton asked.

"Packed," said O'Toole. "Just remember, my boy, you are the most original actor to come out of Britain since the war and f*** the critics."

"Thank you," said O'Toole, extremely touched.

"Goodnight, Peter," said Burton. "Don't give in, and I love you."

"I won't," said O'Toole. "And it's mutual."

By the Seventies and Eighties, the excesses of the past decades were beginning to take their toll. "It's been a great 30 years, but we've all paid the price in our different ways," said Harris.

As they set out for Africa to star together in the 1978 mercenary action movie The Wild Geese, he and Burton knew they must urgently cut down on alcohol.

Harris had his own method of fighting off his cravings.

"Whenever you feel like a drink," he said to Burton one day on location, "do like I do, jump up and down." For the rest of the production the pair were seen hopping like kangaroos.

"Both had been told by their doctors to ease up on the booze," says John Glen, the film's second unit director. "In Burton's case, it was essential because he was really very ill, his liver was absolutely gone. All that fame, it has a price, doesn't it?"

All went well until two-thirds of the way through filming when the stunt men invited the whole cast to dinner.

"The third assistant knocked at my door soon after shooting had commenced the next day," says Euan Lloyd, who produced the film. "The boy looked very upset when he asked if I could see Mr Harris urgently on the set.

"I drove into the bush at once and found Richard sitting silently on an exposed root of a tree, head in his hands. With great trepidation, I approached and stood over him.

"Slowly he turned his head to gaze at me. 'Richard,' says I, 'are you ill? What's the trouble?' He rose and whispered: 'Guv, I was a bad, bad boy last night. I was out with the lads and somehow I fell off the wagon. But I promise you, and this I mean to keep, it won't happen again, ever.'

"I was convinced he meant it. I said this incident would be a secret between us, and so it was. Thereafter, he went from strength to strength in the role."

The making of that film proved a sobering experience for Harris, quite literally. In January of the following year, he woke up one day and declared: "This is it. I'm stopping drinking for life."

His wife Ann laughed: she'd heard it all before. But Harris was serious this time. For one thing, his hangovers were getting worse. "Sometimes they would last for three days," he said.

But mostly it was because of Burton. On the set of The Wild Geese, Harris had seen a man full of courage in his battle to stop drinking.

"But there was agony and pain in his abstinence. I thought, well, I was as bad as him in the early Seventies, so why carry on and get that way again?"

Talking on location, the Welshman had regaled Harris with tales of three previous meetings; Harris could remember only one of them.

"And the stories he tells about the other two meetings are hilarious and totally unprintable. What's the point of doing things that only other people get a kick out of?

"That's not leading a life at all. After all, your life is your memories. So what life have I had?"

Some of the crew on Geese had also worked with Harris on Mutiny On The Bounty and were saying things like: "Remember the day you and Marlon Brando did so and so?" Or: "Remember when you and Trevor Howard went to such and such a place?"

Harris didn't remember any of it. "That shocked me. They were hilarious-stories and I didn't even have the joy of remembering my own exploits."

In January 1979, Harris walked into a bar to celebrate a year off the booze - "and I drank myself stupid".

Contrition swiftly followed. "It taught me a lesson," he said. "I couldn't get out of bed for two days after that."

O'Toole gave up drinking in 1975 after suffering near-fatal stomach problems. Years later, he stressed that he quit not because of his near-death experience but out of fear that he might one day become addicted and unable to stop. He'd watched that happen to too many of his friends.

"To be honest," said Harris during an interview in the Nineties, "I'm surprised O'Toole and I are still alive. The last time we met, we spent all evening talking about the miracle of still being alive."

For a while, during their boozing heyday, the two men had decided not to see each other "because if we did, we'd kill us both," said Harris. "We always brought out the worst in each other."

Only Oliver Reed never turned his back on drink, although in 1987 doctors warned him to give it up or he'd be dead within two years.

He announced he'd rather die than stop boozing. "Now Richard Harris and Peter O'Toole have stopped drinking they don't look nearly as robust as they used to," he said. "I certainly preferred them in their stamping days."

Harris was surprisingly sensitive about his drink-sodden image. In 1995, he read an interview in which his contemporary Michael Caine referred to Burton, O'Toole and himself as "drunks".

Harris fired back with a letter that referred to Caine as "a fat, flatulent windbag". "If only he had indulged in a few trips to his local boozer instead of breezing past the common man in his Rolls-Royces," he raged, "he might have achieved a modicum of immortality."

During an interview, when Harris was asked what he thought of Caine, he broke wind noisily.

"I don't care what he says," Harris insisted. "But don't characterise Burton, O'Toole and me as drunks as if that's all we've achieved in our life, because he could live 20 f***ing lives and he couldn't achieve as much as we three have achieved."

The Irishman was once asked what the difference was between the stars of today such as Tom Cruise and those of his own generation.

"I said there is a great difference. Look at a photograph of me from the old days and I'm going to one of my film premieres with a bottle of vodka in my hand. Tom Cruise has a bottle of Evian water. That's the difference."

It has been claimed over the years that Burton and O'Toole, and to a lesser extent Harris and Reed, squandered their genius for fame, Hollywood and the bottle. They fiercely denied it - and the persistent suggestion that their boozing hid inner darkness or despair.

"O'Toole, Burton and I all drank to excess not because we had problems, but because we loved it," said Harris. "We liked to wonder what sort of trouble we could get into today. For us, Alcoholics Anonymous was a joke. Can you imagine any of us at an AA meeting?"

Burton was once asked to look back over his life and sum it up. "Much of it has been a circus," he admitted, "played out in full view of the public. And, to be honest, I've loved every terrible minute of it."

Defiant talk, but as I will reveal on Monday, the bluster and bravado of the hellraisers could be a mask for crippling insecurity, self-doubt - and even thoughts of suicide.

Extracted from Hellraisers: The Life And Times Of Burton, Harris, O'Toole & Reed by Robert Sellers, published by Preface on May 29 at �16.99. � Robert Sellers, 2008. To order a copy for �15.30 (p&p free), call 0845 606 4206