What is it like to be married to Charlie Sheen, star of Platoon, and a man with a former drink and drug problem? Brooke Mueller, 29, an attractive real estate investor, will find out today about the inner Sheen when she is set to marry him. Born Carlos Irwin Estévez, the son of Martin Sheen, he was an avid baseball player whose skills did not transfer into the classroom and he was expelled from Santa Monica High School for poor attendance and bad grades.

Nicknamed the Machine, he gave proof of the size of his ego when he claimed to have slept with more than 5,000 women during the trial of Heidi Fleiss, a Hollywood madam who was spilling the beans on celebrities' sex lives. He did, however, refuse to name names during this trial.

For past history she might turn to Denise Richards, his most recent ex-wife. According to Richards, Sheen is addicted to gambling and has an explosive temper, particularly when he has lost money. It seems that he keeps a gun under the coffee table for security reasons despite an incident several years ago in which he accidentally shot his former fiancée Kelly Preston in the arm. Towards the end of their marriage, she was applying for restraining orders and he was sending her deeply unpleasant messages.

Such a far cry from 2004 when, still happily married, Richards claimed in an interview that only Sheen's obsessive tidiness threatened to cast a shadow over their perfect union.

Sheen, 42, while commanding huge sums for big screen roles until the mid-1990s, has done terrible damage to his credibility over the years. As a teenager he was arrested for marijuana possession and credit card fraud, and apparently lost his virginity to a Las Vegas prostitute, whom he paid using his father's credit card.

In certain respects Sheen and Richards were a love match well suited to each other. She was named the “Worst Bond Girl of All Time” by Entertainment Weekly for her performance in The World is Not Enough. But her career slide was almost certainly accelerated by her marriage to Sheen, with whom she has had two children. While there were attempts to patch up the marriage, it was difficult for Sheen to settle down to quiet married life.

Further evidence of Richards's volatile inner life came when she confronted two photographers and threw their two laptops over a balcony. One laptop struck an 80-year-old woman in a wheelchair.

And while Sheen successfully rebranded himself as a comic actor to middling acclaim on TV, Richards had decided that roles in films called Whore and Blonde and Blonder were no longer fulfilling. She now has her own reality television show with her children, ten dogs, four house-pet pigs and three cats. For once in his life, general opinion has sided with Charlie Sheen.

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