I'd like to thank my bartender: Soaks of the silver screen

In the past couple of weeks, two Hollywood stars have had to admit that alcohol has got them again. I'm thinking of Mel Gibson and Robin Williams, 50 and 54, supermen in their times and enormously popular, men who have commanded audiences and felt that moment of power when our hushed response hangs on their next word. Isn't this always what they wanted to do? So why are they drinking?

Let's count the ways. Have you ever spoken in public, in front of 50 or 500 people? Were you nervous? Were you desperate about it for days in advance? Did you think of getting in a car and just driving away for ever? Can you imagine that nervous tension facing you every day? We call it stage fright, and sometimes the public regards it as rather comic. How can a professional actor have stage fright? Yet most of them do, at some point in their careers, and nearly all of them know what it is to feel fear, or adrenalin, building before a performance. But adrenalin is a juice, a liquid, a liquor and it exhausts the body. So sometimes before going on, an actor will take "a nip", "just a small one", "well, one glass of good wine" ... "where's the bottle?"

Where does that fear come from? From the nightmare that you will forget your words, move to open the door on stage and have the door handle break off in your hand, and from the never-ending dread that "they" may not like you. You see, before you even get a job as an actor, you have to prime yourself for an audition. That is a public event where you step forward out of the darkness when your name is called, when you plunge cold into some speech you've worked on, when you offer up your face, your body, your mind, your soul, and a bored voice cuts you off: "Thank you. We'll let you know." There are people who take a drink to survive that ordeal and then take half a bottle while they're waiting for the word to come back. And most actors miss more parts than they get. They're told, directly or indirectly, that they're not beautiful enough, not young enough, not sexy enough, not likeable enough. They're told they're boring.

And here we come to the very root of it all. John Barrymore, say, was called the great profile in his day - he was said to be uniquely handsome. He was allegedly the Hamlet of his day, the Richard III and the Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. He was, for a moment, the greatest actor in the world. But Barrymore knew the difference between himself when he had Shakespeare to say, or some great lines that a writer had taken months over, and what he could think of to say after: "Good evening, I'm John Barrymore." After that, he fumbles, he hesitates. That famous charm reported in the papers is not quite his. Because when he is left alone, as himself, he cannot think of what to say. Deep down, the reason he became an actor was because of how little there was of him there - how little charm, ideas, or words of his own. And perhaps a drink will help the charm flood in and let him talk like Shakespeare for a few seconds.

In the terrible war and bliss that was Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, drink was there all the time. From his youth, Burton had known booze could kill him, because he was vulnerable to it, because he binged. And now he was locked up in the fishbowl of attention with a woman who had the same problem, except that she could usually drink him under the table. Burton died at 58, on three bottles of vodka a day, utterly unimpressed by the assurance from friends and strangers alike that he was extraordinarily handsome, with the greatest voice; a superb actor and a very sensitive, intelligent man. All true - yet in every film and photograph you can see the drab scrim of depression, and you feel the drink trying to make up for the hideous, bogus life of the pretender!

There's something else, not to be laughed aside. Actors have eating problems. If your curtain goes up at 8pm, beware the early dinner - you may be bloated and breathing wrong for your performance. But if you're finished at 11, where can you eat then? And if you do eat, will you sleep? And don't forget that eating puts on pounds and you have to look slim. So you drink instead, drinking for your food. No doctor will support the regime. You know it's wrong, but it does actually suit the life of an actor better than regular meals. And sometimes actors are on stage at night and in the studio at day. Try working out a meal pattern for that.

So you snack and you sip, and you thank God you have no home life because that would mean family meals and people near and dear to you who know where you hide the bottles. If you live alone, you've no need to hide them.

Or not until your memory goes. Which reminds me of Don Birnham (Ray Milland) in The Lost Weekend (1945). He's put a bottle somewhere, but he can't remember where. He's such an alcoholic his memory has gone. So he pulls his flat apart - nothing - and collapses in a chair. And there's the great shadow of the bottle on the ceiling. He hid it in the light bowl!

I don't know why Mel Gibson drinks - or why he says he drinks. I've argued recently in this paper that it could be connected to the violence and cruelty in his films. I don't think he's a cruel man - nor do I think he's anti-Semitic. But he says those terrible things and he fills his pictures with violence because - I'd guess - he doesn't like himself.

I do know Robin Williams a little and I can see the life that some observers might regard as the best of lives - he's a success; he has a good family, and so on. But he is as taut as a drum and you can't tell why. The form it takes - and it seems helpless sometimes - is that he has to make you laugh. Whatever is said, he turns it to giggles. It's awful, chronic, and an interference with life. You feel he knows it, but doesn't know what else to do. Because he can't stand to be quiet and alone.

W C Fields, Buster Keaton and Dean Martin were three "entertainers" in the broadest sense who were experts at bringing delight to the public. Yet Fields believed life was a fraud and a misery. He made that belief the thrust of his humour - until you would have thought anyone could see he was in agony - and the public just laughed the more. Keaton had everything and then in the space of a few years he lost everything. Which meant he lost his audience. So he started to drink and he lost that delicate control of timing that was vital to his physical humour.

And Dean Martin pretended for years to be a stage drunk, and everyone said: "Oh, he's not really drunk." "Oh yes, I am," he said, and he was, and after his son died in a plane crash, he sat alone and waited to die.

It becomes an exquisite act in which they hardly know whether they are watching or performing. A few years ago, Peter O'Toole came to the Telluride Film Festival. That town is at nearly 9,000ft and it can be tough on many health problems. O'Toole said he would take it easy, and when he arrived he announced that his doctor had said he could have just one drink an evening.

Well, later on that first evening, a loyal fan observed that O'Toole seemed to have broken the rule. This must be number three or four? Not at all, said O'Toole - and here is the great charm of the boozer - different doctors, one drink each. Of course, O'Toole is 74 now and still with us, still defying every sensible warning. He must have the constitution of a fish.

You may be asking, what about drugs? Doesn't the younger generation do drugs? Yes, by all means. In the addict's life every storm is a home, even port. The addiction can serve itself up with sex, money, young people, admiration, betrayal - as in a betrayal a day keeps the doctor away. How do you like that one? But professionals in the acting trade know that drugs will likely wipe you out quicker than liquor. With drink you can go on for ever so long as you just keep topping yourself up. Joan Crawford married a chief executive at Pepsi-Cola late in life and her scolds said it was because you could add anything to a Pepsi without it showing.

I know, it is a sad story, and it is a misery to see a talent like Burton's engaged in self-destruction. So Elizabeth Taylor joined in the drinking. There was a great agent, Myron Selznick, brother to the great producer David Selznick. And Myron loathed himself. No one knew why. He was handsome, brilliant, funny. But David was creative and all Myron could make was money. He was dead in his forties, looking 20 to 30 years older. He'd been to the best doctors and hospitals. He'd been told it was an illness, not to be ashamed of. But he had clung to the shame, because he hated himself, the world and the public.

If there's an answer to it all it is in that strange relationship with strangers, the thing we call the performer and the public. The "If you'll like me, I'll like you" bargain, a white lie that sometimes rests in a dark vision. Errol Flynn was famous as a ladies man - oh, the girls sure like Errol, and he gives back in kind. And he was dead at 59, alcoholic, and looking like 70. On screen he had Robin Hood's smile. Off screen, he acquired that dreadful lost look, the one that can't remember where he hid the bottle.

Just one last thing - one for the road, old man - don't think this story is told for sympathy. Don't think there's an explanation to it all. No, it's just the weird compensation when you've had the misfortune to be someone everyone else thought they wanted to be. Actors dread that they are empty vessels, no matter that they bring imaginary people to life. So they need to fill their emptiness up. And if you like acting, leave well enough alone. Don't think to cure them - they can turn ugly.

Spirited performances

By Simon Usborne

* RICHARD BURTON

Burton, the son of a Welsh miner, became a true master of stage and screen and in his heyday ruled Hollywood. But he became notorious for his turbulent private life and capacity for drink and cigarettes (five packs a day by some counts). He once said: "I have to think hard to name an interesting man who does not drink." A brain haemorrhage sealed his fate at 58 in 1984.

* BUSTER KEATON

Nicknamed The Great Stone Face for his deadpan delivery, Keaton made his debut aged three with his parents in The Three Keatons, a vaudeville act which included a young Buster being tossed around by his alcoholic father. Drink haunted him and after a successful career in silent film, peaking with The General in 1926, he turned to the bottle when his marriage failed. In 1933, he suffered what he called an "alcoholic blackout", during which he married his nurse. She got half his estate in the divorce three years later. In 1940, he married a girl 23 years younger than himself. He died of lung cancer in 1966, aged 70.

* W C FIELDS

After a poor childhood in Pennsylvania, Fields turned to juggling and became one of America's best-loved comedians. He was rarely seen without a drink and incorporated alcohol into his act, often playing on rumours that alcoholism had caused his red, bulbous nose. A famous misanthrope, he hated children, dogs and women but was fixated on drink, once saying: "I never drink anything stronger than gin before breakfast." Illness was brought on by alcoholism and he died of stomach bleeding on Christmas Day 1946, aged 66.

* ERROL FLYNN

Los Angeles' favourite Tasmanian, Flynn epitomised Hollywood excess from the 1930s to the 1950s, earning a reputation as an ladies' man. As prolific a drinker as he was a womaniser, he once shared a Malibu villa with David Niven that became known as Cirrhosis by the Sea. Flynn died of a heart attack in Canada in 1959 aged 50 and supposedly shares his California coffin with six bottles of whisky.

* DEAN MARTIN

Born into an Italian family, Martin was always the epitome of cool. On his way to film stardom, he worked as a boxer, a croupier and became a celebrated singer with hit such as "Volare". But his good looks and gift for comedy with Jerry Lewis scored on screen. After they broke up, he starred in dozens of films, and was a founder-member of Frank Sinatra's Rat Pack. His Dean Martin Show on television from 1965 till 1973 was popular and he nearly always performed glass in hand. He once said: "I'd hate to be a teetotaller. Imagine getting up in the morning and knowing that's as good as you're going to feel all day."