Actors Who Partied Way Too Hard

Since the earliest days of Hollywood, there's been a correlation between movie stardom and debauchery. The more salacious tales of Tinseltown's past were detailed in Kenneth Anger's notorious book "Hollywood Babylon," bursting with alleged scandals from Old Hollywood involving the sex, drugs, alcohol, and wild partying that's been a part of the movie scene dating back to the early 1900s. Hard partying, in fact, is something that's never really gone out of style for actors, highlighted in bygone eras such as the Roaring '20s, the drug-fueled 1960s and '70s, the conspicuous consumption of the 1980s, and right on through to the present day.

Regardless of the decade, there have been certain thespians who've developed reputations for taking their love of a good time a bit too far. Those who weren't able to get their partying under control have often served as cautionary tales, with journeys that have included rehab, arrests, and jail sentences — or often all of the above. 

To be fair, who doesn't enjoy a party? On the other hand, knowing when to call it a night and wrap things up is also an essential component of maintaining one's well-being — albeit a foreign one for those who insist on keeping the revelry going for days, weeks, or even longer. To find out more about that particular breed of entertainer, read on for a look at some actors who partied way too hard.

Robert Downey Jr. knows a thing or two about redemption. These days, the "Iron Man" star is among the most respected and highly paid actors in the business, but back in the 1990s, Downey garnered endless notoriety as arguably the hardest-partying actor in Hollywood.

That lifestyle surrounded him since childhood; his father — underground filmmaker Robert Downey Sr. — introduced him to marijuana when he was just 6 and to cocaine not long after that. Ultimately, that set Downey off on a path that led to what's become his most scandalous episode: his 1996 arrest for trespassing, when he stumbled into a Malibu house he believed to be his (it was not) and passed out in a bedroom. Charged with possession of heroin, cocaine, and a .357 Magnum, he avoided jail time by being placed on probation but was eventually sentenced to three years behind bars after missing two court-mandated drug tests; he ultimately served 15 months. Within months of his release, he was arrested twice more on drug-related charges but was sent to rehab instead of jail. That finally propelled Downey to put his hard-partying ways behind him. 

Since then, Downey has thrived as an actor while maintaining his sobriety. His party-hearty past, however, remains a sore point — which the actor demonstrated during a cringe-inducingly awkward junket interview when a British journalist insisted on asking about that time in his life, leading Downey to abruptly walk out.

It's been said that anyone who remembers the 1960s didn't actually experience them, and Dennis Hopper could easily be the poster boy for that particular observation. After directing and starring in the counterculture classic "Easy Rider," Hopper's enjoyment of excessive partying became legendary, easily eclipsing his subsequent work as an actor and director.

Hopper admittedly spent much of the 1970s under the influence, particularly when portraying a jacked-up photojournalist in Francis Ford Coppola's "Apocalypse Now." According to George Hickenlooper — director of "Heart of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse," a documentary chronicling the making of the film — Hopper was in rough shape at the time. "Dennis recounted the story to me that Francis came to him and said, 'What can I do to help you play this role?' Dennis said, 'About an ounce of cocaine.' So he was being supplied by the film production drugs that he could use while he was shooting," Hickenlooper told The Independent.

While Hopper eventually embraced a life of sobriety, he revealed that at the peak of his partying he regularly consumed 28 beers and half a gallon of rum, chased with three grams of cocaine, on a daily basis. "It's not as hard as it sounds. If you mix the rum, like I used to, then you can drink it all day long, no problem," he told interviewer Piers Morgan in a Q&A for GQ. "I used to get thirsty, you got to have a beer or two if you get thirsty ..."

"Dashing" is a word that's been associated with Peter O'Toole ever since his breakout role as the title character in the cinematic epic "Lawrence of Arabia." Offscreen, though, the Irish actor generated a well-earned reputation for carousing. During his first appearance on Johnny Carson's "Tonight Show," for example, he'd been so inebriated he didn't even make it through an entire segment. Meanwhile, he was also reportedly three sheets to the wind at the premiere of "Lawrence" — which, thankfully, was overshadowed by his brilliance onscreen. In 1975, at the age of 43, O'Toole underwent emergency surgery on his stomach, with doctors revealing he'd so badly damaged his innards with liquor that even a small amount could kill him. 

Despite that medical warning about the fallout of his hard-partying ways, O'Toole's biographer, Alexander Larman, insisted that accounts of the actor's drinking had been exaggerated. "Of course he drank, and he drank to excess," Larman told The Guardian. "But I don't think that a lot of the stories about him are true. He liked to create these stories because it was much easier to play a part of a hell-raiser." That renown, exaggerated or not, also underpinned one of O'Toole's most iconic roles, swashbuckling — and permanently soused — movie star Alan Swann in the 1982 comedy "My Favorite Year." 

O'Toole died at age 81 in 2013. He went to his grave with eight Oscar nominations (but no wins), along with an honorary Academy Award he was presented in 2010.

Peter O'Toole was far from the only British actor who demonstrated a love of a good party while rocketing to stardom during the 1960s. When it came to drinking, though, Oliver Reed — known for his roles in the musical "Oliver!" and director Ken Russell's bonkers adaptation of The Who's rock opera "Tommy" — was in a league of his own (particularly when he got together with pal Keith Moon, The Who's party-monster drummer). The hard-drinking Reed's most notorious moment occurred in a British pub, where he reportedly drank 126 pints of beer within a single 24-hour period — and then celebrated his achievement by doing a handstand on the bar (although, as author Robert Sellers pointed out in his book "Hellraisers: The Life and Inebriated Times of Richard Burton, Richard Harris, Peter O'Toole, and Oliver Reed," the accuracy of that count is questionable, given the state of everyone involved).

In fact, stories of Reed's alcohol-fueled antics are legion, including the time he outdrank fellow actor David Hemmings. After passing out, Hemmings awoke to find himself dangling from a window six stories above street level, with Reed laughing maniacally while holding him by his ankles.

"You meet a better class of people in pubs," Reed once famously declared, via Difford's Guide for Discerning Drinkers — which also pointed out, not incorrectly, that Reed had been banned from more than his fair share of them over the years.

John Belushi was nicknamed "America's Guest" by his "Saturday Night Live" co-star and good friend Dan Aykroyd, for Belushi's habit of knocking on the doors of complete strangers, inviting himself in, and then raiding the refrigerator and making himself at home. As everyone now knows from Belushi's tragic death at age 33, his embrace of excess had no limits. That was certainly evident while filming "The Blues Brothers," when Belushi was partying so hard he could barely function — and was once found passed out on a stranger's sofa after vanishing from the set.

An eyewitness to Belushi's carousing was Eagles guitarist Joe Walsh — no slouch in the partying department himself. During an appearance on "The Late Show," Walsh told host Stephen Colbert that the comedian could be "scary" to hang with. For proof, he recounted the time they dined together at an iconic Japanese restaurant, where Belushi decided to take charge of preparing the meal while channeling an iconic "SNL" character. "I went to Benihana once with John Belushi and he decided he was going to be the cook," Walsh recalled. "He went full-on samurai. It was messy. Messy." Walsh also told Conan O'Brien about trashing a hotel room with Belushi. "We stayed up a couple weeks that night," he quipped, jokingly adding that more details could be found in the deposition.

To learn more about the legendary comedian, read our breakdown of John Belushi's tragic real-life story. 

There was a time, not all that long ago, when Charlie Sheen was the highest-paid actor on television. At his peak, Sheen earned $1.8 million per episode for portraying a sanitized sitcom version of himself in "Two and a Half Men" — until, in the ultimate irony, his real-life partying grew so extreme that it blew up what was arguably the sweetest gig he'd ever had.

When Sheen cratered his career in an explosion of porn-star "goddesses," tiger blood, and oh so much winning, he'd gained a rep as a hardcore party animal with a soft spot for sex workers — in 2013 alone, he reportedly spent more than $1.5 million to hire their services for his soirees. Sheen's former personal assistant told the Daily Mail just how wild those parties could get. "Yes there were porn stars, sometimes four at a time," that P.A., Steve Han, recalled. "I used to see him taking drugs in his room and in the party den and he drank scotch and chain smoked." 

When throwing a party, Sheen was reportedly an excellent host — so much so that he routinely checked on guests who had passed out, monitoring their breathing to ensure that they were still alive.

It's fair to say that Lindsay Lohan's transition from child actor to adult roles was a bumpy one. After experiencing early success in "The Parent Trap," "Freaky Friday," and then "Mean Girls," Lohan eventually became better known for her partying than her films. That included several arrests (for infractions ranging from DUI to drug possession to shoplifting), multiple parole violations, and a few jail sentences; luckily for her, overcrowding resulted in her one-day sentence on a cocaine bust ending in less than 90 minutes, and a 90-day sentence being reduced to two weeks. 

However, a particularly infamous chapter unfolded when Lohan threw herself a birthday party at Hollywood's famed Chateau Marmont. As recounted in Shawn Levy's book, "The Castle on Sunset: Life, Death, Love, Art, and Scandal at Hollywood's Chateau Marmont," Lohan and her guests racked up a bar bill of more than $2,500 by the end of the evening. Meanwhile, Lohan was also renting a suite and was apparently under the impression that the producers of her new TV movie "Liz & Dick" would be covering her expenses.

That didn't happen. At the end of her two-month stay, Lohan's tab had swelled to nearly $50K — which she didn't (or couldn't) pay. She was presented with an itemized bill and informed that the hotel would no longer be extending any credit to her — which, for all intents and purposes, led her to be kicked out and banned from the place altogether.

Jack Nicholson has become a reclusive figure in recent years, having come to fame during the 1960s and '70s, when Hollywood actors partied as hard as — if not harder than — the rock stars of the era.

Case in point: Three-time Oscar-winner Nicholson was well known for his love of a good time. Back in the day, Nicholson's Los Angeles mansion on Mulholland Drive was once the center of seemingly non-stop parties, fueled by all manner of substances; according to journalist Bob Woodward's John Belushi biography "Wired," though, Nicholson offered guests "downstairs" cocaine, but kept the "upstairs" variant — aka the good stuff — all for himself. 

In fact, in a 2019 interview with Vulture, the actor's longtime girlfriend, Anjelica Huston, claimed that Nicholson's use of the drug, despite assumptions, was never as extreme as people may have thought. "He was never a guzzler," she insisted. "I think Jack sort of used it, probably like [Sigmund] Freud did, in a rather smart way. Jack always had a bit of a problem with physical lethargy. He was tired, and I think probably, at a certain age, a little bump would cheer him up. Like espresso."

As the daughter of singer-actor Eddie Fisher and movie star Debbie Reynolds, Carrie Fisher was legit Hollywood royalty. When her role as Princess Leia in "Star Wars" made her a star in her own right, she fell in with a hard-partying Hollywood crowd. Everyone knows that Carrie Fisher partied too hard, of course, because she wrote all about it during her second act as a bestselling author — particularly in her novel "Postcards from the Edge," which was actually a thinly veiled, quasi-fictionalized, warts-and-all autobiography.

Flush with cash from "Star Wars" and its sequels, Fisher was known for hosting wild, star-studded parties in her Laurel Canyon home. Then, there was the time when she rented a house from Monty Python's Eric Idle while she was filming "The Empire Strikes Back." As she recalled in a 2017 interview with the Daily Beast, Idle — who had returned from Tunisia, where he'd been working on a Python project — called her up to reveal that the Rolling Stones had arrived (all of them!), and were ready to party. "I called [co-star] Harrison [Ford] and said, 'Get over here! This is ridiculous!'" she said. Despite having an early call time the next day, Fisher and Ford caroused with the Stones all through the night. "I remember that we never went to sleep, so we weren't hungover — we were still drunk when we arrived in Cloud City the next day," Fisher recounted. "We don't really smile a lot in the movie, but there we're smiling."

Kiefer Sutherland has been known to enjoy a party and has occasionally paid the price for it — evidenced by his numerous arrests, five of which were for driving under the influence.

However, no incident has epitomized the "24" star's celebratory spirit like the time when, in the midst of an on-camera interview, he spontaneously decided to tackle one of several Christmas trees on display in a hotel lobby. Why? As he later revealed, the whole thing was simply the capper on a highly enjoyable evening of partying with pals.

"The Christmas tree was just after a very funny night," Sutherland later confessed during a radio appearance on "The Chris Moyles Show." "People were offended that I had attacked the Christmas tree. I thought it was hysterical." According to Sutherland, his sole intent in wrestling the tree to the ground was simply to induce laughter from his friends — a mission he accomplished, even if he didn't immediately recall it. "I sadly didn't quite remember it the next day," he said of his yuletide tree takedown. "That took a few whiskies — commitment and whisky."

These days, Drew Barrymore has successfully carved out a niche within the ultra-competitive daytime talk genre. It was decades earlier, however, during her childhood and adolescence, that the pint-sized star of "E.T. The Extra Terrestrial" became a major celebrity, even hosting "Saturday Night Live" at the age of 7 — the youngest-ever host. 

That was just the tip of the iceberg. Despite her tender age, Barrymore became a fixture on the celebrity party scene; accompanying her mother to NYC's Studio 54 when she was 9, the youngster was exposed to behavior and substances far beyond the scope of her age. While most children went to bed early so they could awaken for school, Barrymore was nightclubbing with her mom several nights each week — and celebrated her 10th birthday in a bar. By the time she was 13, all that partying had taken a toll. "My life was not normal. I was not a kid in school with normal circumstances. There was something very abnormal, and I needed some severe shift," Barrymore told The Guardian. 

That shift was brought about by a stint in rehab, exposing her to a level of parental-style discipline that had been absent from her upbringing. "It was a very important thing to experience for me. It was very humbling, very quieting," she said of that time, revealing she learned she could still enjoy herself without mind-altering substances. "I came out in a very different way ... but I still was me," she said.

While Richard Harris ended his career as beloved Hogwarts headmaster Albus Dumbledore in the "Harry Potter" movies, fans of an older vintage will recall him as one-quarter of a pantheon of hard-partying British actors alongside Oliver Reed, Richard Burton, and Peter O'Toole. 

Like those others, stories about Harris and his imbibing are not hard to find. Among the most notable was chronicled in the book "Hellraisers: The Life and Inebriated Times of Richard Burton, Richard Harris, Peter O'Toole, and Oliver Reed."  As author Robert Sellers wrote, Harris was enjoying himself in a pub when closing time arrived, and he was told in no uncertain terms to get out. Adamant about keeping the party going, Harris came up with a genius idea: He boarded a train with a bar car that allowed him to keep drinking. 

There was, however, one detail he'd overlooked: He had no idea where the train was going. When he arrived in Leeds in the middle of the night, the inebriated actor stumbled around until finding a house with the lights on. He knocked on the door and introduced himself to the couple who owned the place, who were only too happy to invite a drunken movie star into their home. However, the bloom soon came off that particular rose as Harris continued drinking and never sobered up. Eventually, the woman of the house telephoned Harris' wife and declared, "I've got your husband." Replied the actor's spouse: "Good, keep him."

If you or anyone you know needs help with addiction issues, help is available. Visit the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration website or contact SAMHSA's National Helpline at 1-800-662-HELP (4357).