7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Their Own Worst Enemies!, January 10, 2010
This review is from: Hellraisers: The Life and Inebriated Times of Richard Burton, Richard Harris, Peter O'Toole, and Oliver Reed (Hardcover)
Over the years, the British acting community has included a number of very talented individuals who also happened to be hellacious pubcrawlers. At the top of the heap were Richard Burton, Peter O'Toole, Richard Harris and Oliver Reed. Author Robert Sellers traces the life and crimes of those gifted yet flawed men in this warts-and-all biography published in 2008.
Burton, Harris, O'Toole and Reed were blood brothers almost from birth. Most had childhoods marked by poverty, less than stellar parents and family histories of alcoholism. Those childhood scars shaped each man, producing a Jekyll-and-Hyde man-child. Throughout the book, reminiscences by family, friends and colleagues describe wonderful, sensitive, gentle, incredibly talented men who turned into blotto drunks noted for wrecking pubs, punching out whomever they chose, treating women like floor mats and so on. The Brits apparently enjoyed such hellraising since none of the four ever did serious jail time for their misdeeds but usually received a slap on the wrist.
HELLRAISERS is the kind of book where you don't know whether to laugh or cry. Some of the stunts those gents pulled were silly, stupid, childish and occasionally rather funny. Others would have gotten 'Joe Average' sent away for hard time if he had done the things Oliver Reed, for example, did. Ultimately you end up just shaking your head. Such great potential, such a great waste. And, ironically, what all four men were seemingly aiming for - to create an exciting life filled with memories - was scuttled by their very own actions. Time and again, the comment is made that so-and-so can't remember meeting someone or trashing a particular pub or what he did in the 1970s(!), etc. Some memorable life.
In the end, I found HELLRAISERS a fascinating read. At times, I admit wondering about the accuracy of some of the events. After all, who can verify that Reed knocked down 126 pints in 24 hours!?! In any case, by the end of the roller-coaster ride, I certainly had gotten an education on the dark side of all four actors. I hope they enjoyed the lives they led. They certainly paid a heavy price for it. Recommended.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
13 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Save Your Time and Money & Keep Your Ankles Out of the Gutter., April 11, 2010
This review is from: Hellraisers: The Life and Inebriated Times of Richard Burton, Richard Harris, Peter O'Toole, and Oliver Reed (Hardcover)
Robert Sellers' "Hellraisers: The Blah-Blah-Blah" is one of the worst pieces of pathography to come down the pike in a while. Normally, one has to go to the check-out aisle in the grocery store to find this brand of tripe.
The author couldn't be bothered to include interview notes or book references in this 4 - in - 1 hatchet job. You'd expect, at the least, a list of the television, screen, and stage work performances of each subject. It's not there. Who knows if what he writes is true, false, or somewhere in between? Yes, I know what you're thinking: You read the title of the book, you saw that chapter titles, the clever ones, like "The Plastered Fifties", "The Soused Sixties", and "The Sozzled Seventies" (all clearly the result of a great deal of contemplative effort about his subjects; my god, to come up with chapter titles like that, he must have truly and deeply immersed himself not only in the lives of those he writes about but the times in which they lived -- not), you knew what the book was about. You've no one but yourself to blame.
Perhaps. And perhaps I hoped this was a serious biography about four very complex, often troubled people who all rose from the same generation to become legends of stage and screen and were, in large measure, undone by their success. None of them tried in any way to hide or cover up their exploits; in fact, just the opposite, and Butcher Boy Sellers seems to have simply copied down and regurgitated each and every tall story, any story, as long as he accomplished his goal: to put all four into the worst light possible, to make them look bad. They didn't need Mr. Sellers' help with this, as they left legacies that people will still be talking about for a very long time. It would be a great deal of serious work by a well-informed and talented writer to do justice to their lives and the times in which they lived and worked. There is no justice in this book. This isn't biography; this is the stuff of the tabloid journalism. And if that's your bag, well, you'll love this book.
He does what minor critics do: Sellers goes to the battlefield *after* the battle and bayonets the wounded. Or, in this case, he bayonets one wounded and three casualties (Mr. O'Toole is still with us as of this writing; one hopes he's beyond caring about this kind of "writing".). The reader won't be surprised to learn that Mr. Sellers went to drama school, had ambitions to be a stand-up comedian, and ended-up writing about film and actors rather than, say, making films or acting. One imagines he might be a happier person had a refused to give up on his dreams.
If you want to learn about Richard Burton's life, his career as an actor, his love-hate relationship with booze, his talent as a writer, try "Richard Burton -- A Life" by Melvyn Bragg.
Richard Burton: A Life Bragg was given access to some of the many journals and diaries Burton kept, and, along with a three dimensional portrait of Burton and those in his life, Bragg gives you an insight into the man that Sellers will never simply be able to capture, certainly not by this maligning third-rate prose about those who (again, with the exception of O'Toole) are dead and can no longer even defend themselves.
]ust consider for a moment someone who presumably sets out to write serious biography, in this case four inter-related biographies, and resorts, in his own work, to including curse words as a part of the book, not the quotes of others but his own robust and bracing prose. I've nothing against curse words. One of my favorite books is called "The F Word"
The F-Word , but Sellers tries so hard to sound like "one of the guys" that it smacks of a desperate attempt to gain credit with the reader by propping up his tabloid prose with curse words. It suggests to me a ferocious lack of self-esteem, both as a writer and a person. His profiles come off like some teenage scrawl written by a Hemingway Wannabe. In fact, Mr. Sellers has done to Burton, O'Toole, Reed, and Harris what Kenneth Lynn did to Ernest Hemingway, but that's another review for another time. Like Lynn, Mr. Sellers clearly did not like his subjects.
Please, if you're thinking about buying this book, let me repeat: This is a vicious hatchet job by mean-spirited hack. It's really that simple. Do yourself a favor and watch some of their movies, from "Camelot" (Harris) to "Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf?" (Burton) to "The Ruling Class" (O'Toole) to "The Curse of the Werewolf" and "Women in Love" (Reed). There's also "Becket" (Burton and O'Toole) and "Gladiator" (Harris and Reed). And that's just for starters.
Anything but this sad mix of innuendo, character assassination, pathography, and tabloid nastiness. Mr. Sellers, my guess is that, when the time comes, these four gentlemen will be waiting for you at the gates of Hell. If you're lucky, you'll spend Eternity serving them drinks as they look back on their remarkable lives.
This is all my opinion, clearly and without a doubt. If you want truly salacious tales, try "The Twelve Caesars" by Seutonious.
The Twelve Caesars He writes well about rumor and innuendo and excess, since such writing, if done properly, is an art.
If I can save you the time and money involved in enduring "Hellraisers", then my time here will have been well spent. Should you read it, though, I urge you to think about yourself or someone you love, and how you'd feel if a biography was written soley from the point of view of a problem or issue: perhaps the issues is eating too much, drinking, drugs, gambling, infidelity, depression, anxiety, etc. If someone wrote about you in such a one-dimensional fashion, do you think it would honestly convey your life, or that of a loved one, as it truly is or was?
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
