Oliver Reed was definitely what is known as a ‘man’s man.’

The legendary hell-raiser and world-class actor died a proper man’s death too – suffering a heart attack on the floor of a pub in Malta after drinking three bottles of rum and arm-wrestling 18-year-old sailors.

Although he was an accomplished boozer who memorably sank over 100 pints in a single weekend he also possessed a sensitive side and when sober could be remarkably sensitive.

A biography of this Jekyll and Hyde man, What Fresh Lunacy Is This? by Robert Sellers makes for fascinating though occasionally tedious and gruelling reading.

The pattern rarely changed.

Man gets up, meets up with his mates, gets fantastically drunk, gets into fight, trashes hotel, wakes up, somehow manages to perform his actorly duties and the whole sequence starts over and over again.

The curious thing about Reed was that he never tired of his self-destructive behaviour, though his long-suffering pals, girlfriends and family must have.

A photographer friend of mine, Phil Callaghan, met him once more than 20 years ago in a South Yorkshire pub where he was boozing with his mates from the ultra-blokey Stones bitter commercial – Wherever you may wander there’s no taste like Stones.

Phil told me it was a memorable evening and the only two things I can recall are these:

One, my publishing photographs of Oliver with cigarettes up his nose on the front page of the Thorne Advertiser – it was one of his many party tricks.

Two: him almost throwing £20 around the pub and shouting: “Come on you northern pigs, have a drink.”

Few could match his stamina and even friends would avoid his company because of the inevitable unpleasantness that would result once the drink started flowing.

Of course there were those that tried to keep up.

A bit like those wannabe hellraisers who tried valiantly to keep up with the Rolling Stones only to find themselves attempting the impossible and ending up with an unwanted drug and drink addiction.

Physical injury was also an ever present danger once Oliver lost control.

A powerful man, he loved nothing better than a good brawl.

In a review of the biography the actor Gabriel Byrne tells how one terrifying night he was mistaken by a drunken Reed for the boxer Barry McGuigan.

After lunging blindly at him he collided with a table. Byrne had to heave Reed’s great girth through a door before he could   recover  on a sofa himself.

And in a telling anecdote he writes: “In one gargantuan evening he and 36 friends reputedly ‘drank 32 bottles of Scotch, 17 bottles of gin, four crates of wine and a Babycham.’

“People expect that sort of thing from you when you are a hell-raiser,” he once said to me with a mixture of despair and sadness.”

As Byrne says the miracle was that he lived so long.

He died “in action” aged 61.