While today every cough and sneeze of the current
A-list finds its way into the gossip columns, back when celebrity meant something it was only the spectacular and the extraordinary which captured the public's imagination.

Following the success of his last book Hellraiser, which chronicled the hard-drinking exploits of Peter O'Toole, Oliver Reed and Richard Burton, Leeds-born Sellers has once again turned his attention to the actors who became known as much for their off-screen activities as they did for their films.

Bad Boy Drive examines the lives of four of Hollywood's mischief-makers at the height of their careers in the 1970s: Jack Nicholson, Warren Beatty, Marlon Brando and Dennis Hopper.

"I wanted to find a group of friends who had much more in common than just acting," says Robert.

"Marlon and Jack were neighbours on Mulholland Drive for 20 years. In fact, Marlon used to regularly break into Jack's fridge.

"His battle with yo-yoing weight is well documented and he used to tell his housekeeper to lock all the food cupboards. No matter how much he tried to persuade her, she was on strict instructions not to give him the key.

"Of course after about half an hour he would start panicking. The housekeeper was always good to her word, so Marlon would head next door to see what Jack had in his kitchen. In return he would leave his underpants in the fridge which, even by Hollywood standards, is an odd calling card."

Brando and Nicholson were soon joined on Mullholland Drive by Warren Beatty, the infamous casanova of Sunset Boulevard. Robert's book opens with a rolecall of Beatty's conquests. It's complete, but none the less it reads like a A-list phone book.

"Beatty didn't really drink and he didn't do drugs," he says. "He was a health freak, but that's not to say he didn't have his own vices. He was an unashamed sex addict. Often he would stop at traffic lights and if there was a blonde in the car next to him, by the time the lights turned green she would have given him her telephone number.

"Basically if you were young and pretty and turned up in Hollywood as a waitress, within a couple of weeks you would have probably been approached by Beatty. There's a story of when he once went to a restaurant with Natalie Wood. She came back from the toilet and found he had disappeared with a buxom cloakroom attendant. The pair of them weren't seen for three days.

"Then there was the time he was being photographed by Linda Eastman, later Mrs McCartney. As she crouched down to take his picture it became fairly obvious that she wasn't wearing any underwear. That was the last anyone ever saw of them for a fortnight."

While Brando, Beatty and Nicholson were hedonists, Dennis Hopper made them look like amateurs. Having found fame, along with Nicholson in Easy Rider, Hopper's lifestyle became one endless round of drugs and alcohol. The fact he managed to make any films at all during the 1970s was some feat.

"At the peak of his addiction Hopper was drinking half a gallon of rum, 28 beers and taking three grammes of coke a day," says Robert.

"That's enough to fell a horse. He used to say the only reason he took drugs was to sober him up so he could drink more.

"In 1982 he had a complete breakdown in a Mexican hotel room. He began hearing voices and was convinced his family and friends were being tortured in the room next door. He ran out of the hotel completely naked and eventually turned up at the police station, asking the officers to shoot him dead.

"They did eventually get him back on a plane to Los Angeles. Given he thought the wing was on fire, it was a pretty eventful trip and he ended up in an asylum being pumped full of drugs. His friends rescued him and he has been clean ever since.

"Hopper himself said that he should have been dead 10 times over and people who knew him in the 1970s are genuinely surprised he managed to survive."

While it's these kind of stories which have ensured the four's reputation as Hollywood legends, they were also, according to Robert, blessed with genius. They may have been drunks, womanisers and drug addicts, but they also made some of the era's finest films.

"A friend of mine was once interviewing Hopper and he asked him to explain method acting," he says. "Hopper looked at the coffee table and began tracing rings on it with his finger. Suddenly he began to cry. A few minutes later he just snapped out of it and said he had been remembering his father. To be able to summon that kind of raw emotion is a real talent."

There may have been a dark side to all the actors he has written about, but he says their sense of the extraordinary made them irresistible.

"We all know about today's binge drinking culture," he says. "These guys behaved a lot worse, but they did it in style. When you hear how Richard Burton once rode into a restaurant on a horse, there's a sense of opera about it. It's hardly Amy Winehouse falling out of a nightclub.

"I don't pretend there wasn't an element of sadness to their lives. After Hellraiser came out, someone wrote to say that they were an alcoholic and reading the book had prompted them to get clean. I'm sure if Burton had been around today we would have grown tired of seeing pictures of him worse for wear, but it was a different age and I honestly don't think we will see their like again."

To launch Bad Boy Drive, Robert Sellers will be in conversation at the Cubby Broccoli Cinema at the National Media Museum
in Bradford at 6pm tomorrow. Tickets are £6, which includes the screening of Chinatown at 8.15pm. Call 0870 7010 200 or visit www.
nationalmediamuseum.org.uk