Oliver Reed sadly passed away over the weekend. Some wonderful quotes from the Online Telegraph sum him up rather nicely...
He once summarised his career as "shafting the girlies and downing the sherbie".
A prodigious drinker, he spent much of his later life being escorted from various pubs and hotels after initiating what he regarded as "tests of strength".
In one celebrated incident in 1974, Reed invited 36 rugby players to a party at his home.
Between Saturday night and Sunday lunchtime, they managed to consume between them 60 gallons of beer, 32 bottles of Scotch, 17 bottles of gin, four crates of wine and a lone bottle of Babycham.
The entertainment concluded with Reed leading the players on a nude dawn run through the Surrey countryside.
In 1974, Reed made a convincingly doughty Athos in The Three Musketeers. On one occasion during filming in Spain, the police were summoned to Reed's hotel to arrest him for dancing naked in a giant goldfish tank. "Leave me alone," shouted, Reed. "You can't touch me! I'm one of the Four Musketeers."
Reed's notoriety increased yet further in 1985 when he married Jospehine Burge; she was then 21, but had been his companion since she was a 16-year old schoolgirl. At his stag party, which lasted two days, Reed claimed to have downed 136 pints of beer.
But to the surprise of many, the marriage proved a success, although in 1986 Reed was forced to dig up nine acres of his back garden after forgetting where he had buried his wife's jewellery when drunk.
In 1991, Reed appeared on the late-night Channel 4 discussion programme After Dark (popularly known as After Closing Time).
The subject was violence, and Reed was determined not to disappoint.
Drinking wine from a half-pint glass, he freely expressed his views on the subject, periodically falling off his chair before kissing a surprised feminist author and announcing "Right, I'm off to have a slash."
Channel 4 took the programme off the air after 20 minutes; when it returned, Reed terminated the discussion with the words: "Look, I'll put my plonker on the table if you don't give me a plate of mushy peas."