In good spirits: why actor Oliver Reed was always drunk but never bored

What Fresh Lunacy is this? The authorised biography of Oliver Reed

As Athos, in the film The Three Musketeers, Oliver Reed spoke a line that summed up his personal philosophy. “Life is so much more rosy when seen through the bottom of a glass of ale.”

Reed was born in 1938, into “a household that might have looked to the casual observer to be residing in an Edwardian time warp. There was a man downstairs who was the family’s dogsbody, gardener, car washer and so on, and upstairs a nanny who looked after both children, to all intents and purposes so that Marcia [their mother] didn’t have to,” his brother says.