Peter O'Toole: Raise a glass to those beloved hellraisers Left to his own devices, O'Toole would routinely scale buildings, set fire to himself while sleeping, and explode cookers. United with a fellow rabblerouser such as Finch, he could achieve still more. During one of their sessions in Sixties" Ireland, they were refused a drink because it was after closing time. They resolved that the only course of action was to purchase the pub, and duly wrote a cheque for it (revoked next morning). The pair remained friends with the landlord and were invited to his funeral. Both knelt at the graveside, sobbing histrionically. Alas, their erstwhile comrade was being buried in a neighbouring plot. Yet, as ever with acolytes of the cult of Dionysus, the lust for Bacchic lunacy was accompanied by a passion for the most eloquent of language. Burton may have referred to his beloved Elizabeth Taylor as the disparaging "Miss Tits," yet his description of their first encounter suggests the theatrics these men expected in life as on stage: "She is famine, fire, destruction, and plague, she is the Dark Lady of the Sonnets, the onlie true begetter... Her breasts were apocalyptic, they would topple empires down before they withered... She was lavish. She was a dark unyielding largesse. She was, in short, too bloody much. Great heroes of this ilk attracted great heroines: the likes of Taylor, and the still more vixenish Vivien Leigh, lover of Finch. Such giants could run roughshod over the mere mortals in their path. As Joseph L Mankiewicz, the director of Burton and Taylor's Cleopatra, remarked: "When you are in a cage with two tigers, you don't let them see you are terrified." Still, there was also colossal charm: a tired and emotional Leigh or O'Toole remained two thousand times more entertaining than a sober anyone else. Besides, this generation earned their right to celebrate. As O'Toole himself explained: "We were young people who'd been children throughout the war - well, you can imagine what it felt like in 1945 to be free - not to be bombed, not to be rationed, not to be restricted. There was a tremendous amount of enthusiasm. We weren't solitary, boring drinkers, sipping vodka alone in a room. No, no, no: we went out on the town, baby, and we did our drinking in public! The only thing today's stars seem content to drink in public are kale, chia seed and aloe vera smoothies. The nearest to hellraising achieved by Johnny Depp is his amiable "Keef" Richards impersonation in Pirates of the Caribbean. Pretty boy Brad Pitt cultivates a girlish beard and obsessively adopts offspring, while Tom Cruise makes do with a religion that manages to be more oppressively uptight than the established versions. Hollywood Babylon it ain't. There may be the odd infidelity rumour, or talk of occupying the closet, but Hanks, Reynolds, Damon, Smith, DiCaprio, Clooney and the like are nothing if not manicured, pedicured and cured of all possible lawlessness. To be sure, a few unhappy cases die young - a Heath Ledger or Cory Monteith - but, in the main, Tinseltown lacks the stamina to live up to past legends. Robert Downey Jr showed some initial potential. Witness my favourite Oscars ceremony gag when he declared: "Visual effects: they enable us to see aliens, experience other universes, move in slow-motion, or watch spiders climbing high above the city landscape... For me, just a typical weeknight in the mid-Nineties." However, he has since smartened up his act sufficiently to make a comeback as a superhero, with control freak Gwyneth Paltrow as love interest. Come back Burton and Taylor, your audience needs you. In contrast, even O'Toole's renunciation of drink in the face of death in 1975 lacked any hint of prissiness: "The time has come to stop roaming. The pirate ship has berthed. I can still make whoopee, but now I do it sober. Of the old days, he regretted not one moment: "I loved the drinking, and waking up in the morning to find I was in Mexico. It was part and parcel of being an idiot. And what an idiot. I witnessed O'Toole in his last stage performance in 1999, embodying his old drinking partner in Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell, the role for which he was born. One would not have begun to imagine that this was a man who had been sober some quarter century. The love and warmth of the audience was palpable: for the performance, for the part, for the man himself - for epic wasters everywhere. Burton, Reed, Finch, O'Toole - we will not see their like again, these purple-prosed poets who lived, loved, acted, and saw things as they were, despite the double-vision. Read also: Peter O'Toole: the 10 best stories