The actor was one of a generation of hard-drinking stars who gloried in their wild exploits and lost weekendsNews: Peter O'Toole dies aged 81

Peter O'Toole was the last of the hell-raising actors who ushered in the swinging 60s and was almost as famous for his drinking as for his dazzling eyes.

As with his peers and sometime drinking buddies Richard Burton, Richard Harris and Oliver Reed, much of his best work seems to have been done under the influence.

"We heralded the 60s," he once said. "Me, Burton, Richard Harris – we did in public what everyone else did in private then, and does for show now. We drank in public, we knew about pot."

Both Burton and O'Toole won Oscar nominations for Becket but said they were drunk throughout most of the shooting.

While shooting The Lion in Winter, O'Toole cut off the top of his finger in a boating accident. He dropped the finger in some brandy before pushing it back into place and wrapping with a bandage. Removing the bandage weeks later he found he'd put it back the wrong way round.

Rising with a new generation of actors, O'Toole's drinking buddies included men who would go on to become acting legends in their own right. Michael Caine was his understudy for the 1959 play The Long and the Short and the Tall at the Royal Court Theatre. One night after the show O'Toole invited the then unknown actor out for dinner.

"Was there a wildest weekend that you remember?" chat show host Jay Leno once asked Caine. "There was a wildest weekend that I don't remember," Caine replied, referring to what followed.

Caine said that after the dinner he had woken up in a strange flat. The last thing he remembered was eating a plate of eggs and chips. "What time is it?" asked Caine. "Never mind what time it is," said O'Toole. "What fucking day is it?" It turned out that it was five o'clock in the afternoon two days later.

Back at the theatre, the stage manager informed the pair they had been banned from the restaurant for life. Caine wondered what they had done. "Never ask what you did. It's better not to know," said O'Toole.

O'Toole and Peter Finch, the Australian actor and another heavy drinker, were once refused a drink in a pub in Ireland because it was after closing time. The stars wrote out a cheque to buy the pub. The landlord never cashed it and the three became friends.

After the landlord's death O'Toole and Finch were invited to the funeral and stood sobbing as their friend was lowered into the ground only to realise that they were at the wrong funeral – their friend was being buried 100 yards away.

Even before he was famous, O'Toole was generating classic drinking tales. As a drama student he lived on a barge which sank after too many people came to one of his parties.

In later life the star had to give up drinking due to ill health but the greatest acting triumph of his later years was playing another notorious drunk, and O'Toole drinking buddy, Spectator columnist Jeffrey Bernard in Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell.

"I loved the drinking, and waking up in the morning to find I was in Mexico," O'Toole said in Robert Sellers' book Hellraisers: The Life and Inebriated Times of Richard Burton, Richard Harris, Peter O'Toole and Oliver Reed. "It was part and parcel of being an idiot."

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• News: Peter O'Toole dies aged 81