Special Guest Blogger: Oliver Reed

I came from relatively normal roots, with no formal acting training, and became one of the most highly recognized British actors of his time and for being a hellraiser.
My childhood was nothing out of the ordinary though my early years might have been mundane, at the age of nine, my life was forever altered when i was sent to boarding school, the first of 14 schools i was expelled from for being a thug so i was ideal for the Army where i met a few actors and thought that looks easy so decided to give acting a try and my break was playing Richard of Gloucester in the six-part BBC TV series The Golden Spur.
It was then that i made a drunken promise to a stranger in a bar that i would buy him a house in Scotland once i became famous.
I was then was cast in the Hammer horror film The Curse of the Werewolf which lead to greater success in my acting career and with women.
Pretty soon i had a slew of celebrity lads to go drinking with like Keith Moon and Robert Newman, one time i met up with American movie star Steve McQueen and we went on on a marathon pub crawl.
I got a role in The Three Musketeers as Athos, and got stabbed accidentally in the throat and was centimeters away from dying but i was now a household name in British films and hit the big time as Bill Sykes in Oliver.
I also made good on that drunken promise and bought that bar-room stranger a property in Scotland. When i was was 42 i dated a 16 year old, she was 26 years younger than me! Back of the net, and I was now famous enough to turn down roles such as The Sting and Jaws as i didn't fancy travelling all the way to America to film them.
As my reputation for drinking and brawling grew, my film career began floundering and was getting cast less and less and I ended up spending lots of his time doing TV show appearances and TV producers soon realized that getting me tipsy was a surefire method of prime entertainment and i often arrived plastered or on some occasions, pretending to be plastered to play up to my bad boy image but it did cost me the role of James Bond and they cast Sean Connery instead because I was  too far from the Bond image at that point.
In one TV interview, i said i wanted to go by overdrinking, 'in a bar of a heart attack'  which turned out to be eerily correct.
It was no surprise that my health deteriorated as i got older, especially with my heavy drinking. In December 1987, by now overweight and dealing with gout, I became extremely sick with kidney issues as a result of my alcoholism.
At the age of 60, i landed a role as an elderly trainer named Proximo in Ridley Scott’s Gladiator but i never got on with Russel Crowe and challenged him to a fight and i took a break and ended up in a bar challenging some sailors to a drinking contest.
I fell ill during the drinking competition and collapsed on the floor and was quickly rushed to the hospital, but unfortunately it was too late, dead in a bar from a heart attack.