Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com

Average Customer Rating:

Boozy fun

Customer Rating:

Don't get this expecting a high-brow biography of a bunch of thespians. Or even a serious book dissecting the lives of these actors, all the films that they were in etc etc. The clue to this is the title. It's a series of tales and anecdotes about these four drinkers (plus the occasional aside about some of their drinking buddies) interwoven against the background of the films / plays that they were appearing in and their sex lives. It's entertainment, pure and simple. I devoured this in a couple of days and had to stop myself laughing out loud many times over. The only possible downside is that there is a certain amount of rose tinted nostalgia in this too. Admittedly there are some bland actors around now (as there were back in those days), but there are still a few hell raisers out there today.

Mine's a large one

Customer Rating:

If you used this book as a drinking game, matching drink for drink, you would be dead by page 7. This entertaining read brings together the four legendary actors, Burton, O'Toole, Harris and Reed. This is not a serious study of their craft, but a drink by drink account of their lives and more outrageous binges. If you have ever felt guilty about drinking too much, then take solace in this. If I have two tiny criticisms (hence 4 stars instead of 5), you don't quite get the sense of their talent (and sometimes wasted talent). Is it just the force of their personalities that set them apart as actors? What is clear that they all made some very bad movies as well, and the book is nicely balanced in this respect. The other is that the author's style occasionally strays into the `blokey' - when his subjects' anecdotes hardly need any additional commentary. How do you add superlatives to four lives of total boozy surfeit? But these are two small flies in a quadruple vodka of a read. Thoroughly recommended to all out there. Hic!

great tales	Customer Rating:
these are the ultimate theatrical characters - and this is a great new way to look at them. It darts around at a bit of a pace but then so did they. it is a bit sad to see the damage they did to those around them as well as to themselves. But it's a great record of a wilder age - and shows that booze and britain go back a very long way ....

A good idea needing a better writer

Customer Rating:

This book is badly let down by the matey style of prose employed by the author. It's as if you were hearing the boastful tales of drunken excesses relayed to you in a bar by a football hooligan, complete with slang and expletives. But it's a refreshing reminder of the sixties and the way things were then - no sipping skinny lattes for this lot. However some of the accounts stretch your credulity beyond the limit, and were probably incapable of verification the day after, let alone some 40 years later. Some of it is frankly ridiculous and the amounts of booze allegedly sank on occasions would leave the most hardened toper in a hospital with alcohol poisoning. It's a fair enough concept - switching between the four subjects as you go along, not giving you time to get too bored, but as we move through the book the subjects' antics become increasingly sad and pathetic and you feel like saying for God's sake grow up and move on. Maybe if they hadn't treated their partners and friends so appallingly somebody could have saved them from themselves. Yes, they all had talent. And yes, they all wasted it. Particularly Burton.

REAL actors	Customer Rating:
Love this book - instantly readable, full of information, these were real actors living hellishly wonderful lives - not like today's talentless soap stars. Highly recommended.