oliver9184

You're onto something here. Maybe the reason movie characters were always drinking was that the actors were in real life were drinking! Like Richard Burton, who drank between two and three bottles of liqueur per day at one point, and couldn't act without it. That would explain his spectacular performance in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf. Or Humphrey Bogart, whose explanation for the reason he was the only member of cast and crew who never got sick during the African Queen shoot (in the real Africa) was that he never drank any water, preferring, of course, the spirits in his hipflask! These characters need to be drunkards because the actors were - these two examples prove beyond all doubt that drink need not lessen the workmanship of certain practitioners of one line of work, at least. I think that the same could be proved about musicians but I don't have specific evidence. Surely someone can cite something?