Billy Bob Thornton and late rocker Warren Zevon knew they'd be friends for life when they first met - because they bonded instantly over their obsessive compulsive disorder.

Thornton and Zevon, who lost his battle to lung cancer in September (03), met in the 1980s while living in the same apartment building in West Hollywood.

But it was their condition which really made them pay attention to each other.

Thornton recalls, "I went to my mailbox one day, opened the thing up, and I took my mail out, put it back in, closed it, pulled it out again, closed it... I did it like three times in a row. And Warren was standing next to me watching me do this thing and he says, 'You have that too!' And I said, 'Yeah.'

"He says, 'Well do you do this?' and he showed me something. And I said, 'Yeah, but do you do this?' We started having this sort of war with each other about who had the worst OCD."

But the war of symptoms didn't end there: "We were sitting in his apartment one day and we weren't even talking about OCD and he just looked at me and goes, 'Do you have it with guns?' And I said, 'You win!'"

13/01/2004 08:57