[This is the sixth in an occasional series describing
British actors and performers who achieved fame in the theatre or in the
movies.]
Richard Burton (1925-84)
was a mega-film star, a greatly admired Shakespearean stage actor and an
intelligent man. Yet in many ways his early promise was not fully realised. His
life is an example of the perils and pitfalls of celebrity and I imagine he is
less well remembered by the current generation than his illustrious career
might have merited.
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| Richard Burton |
Burton’s background was certainly unpromising. He was the 7th
son of a Welsh coal miner who had 13 children and was born, Richard Jenkins,
into the Welsh-speaking village of Portrhydyfen in Neath Port Talbot. His
mother died in childbirth when Richard was 2 and he was taken in and looked
after by his adored sister Cecilia and her husband living in the
English-speaking town of Port Talbot. Richard’s father was a rough and much
absent parent – Richard declined to attend his funeral in 1957. Richard was
much helped and encouraged in his acting by his teacher, Philip Burton, and at
the local school he developed that love of and facility with words and language
which was to hold him in such good stead in later years. Eventually Philip
Burton became Richard’s guardian and Richard subsequently changed his own name
to Burton.
Richard was not notably academic but loved acting; he was a
promising athlete playing rugby well as a wing forward (a “flanker” in modern
parlance). Inevitably, Richard was imbued with the macho “boyo” culture of the
Welsh valleys in which the rowdy locals revelled but which can be somewhat
tiresome to outsiders. He was smoking from the age of 8, chased the far from
unwilling girls in his adolescence and, like many Welshmen, tried to prove he
was a heavier drinker than the famously bibulous and disreputable poet Dylan
Thomas. Richard met that challenge easily.
Taken in hand again by Philip Burton, he joined the local
dramatic society, performing in amateur plays and, as an RAF cadet in 1943,
spending 6 months under a wartime scheme at Exeter College, Oxford, much
involved in acting there. He made his
professional debut in Liverpool in 1944 in a play by Welsh dramatist and actor
Emlyn Williams. After his National Service, in 1947 Burton went to London to
seek his fortune and married actress Sybil Williams in 1949. He had small parts
including one in Gielgud’s highly successful The Lady’s not for Burning in the West End. His breakthrough came
in 1951 as Prince Hal in Henry IV Part 1,
his performance electrifying critics and audience alike. His voice and
virile bearing were astonishing.
Burton signed an Alexander Korda movie contract. He made his
Hollywood debut in My Cousin Rachel (1952) a mystery romance from
Daphne du Maurier, playing opposite Olivia de Havilland. He followed this with
the smash-hit The Robe, a biblical
epic with Jean Simmons and Victor Mature.
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| Burton and Simmons in The Robe |
He played in several sandals and breastplate epics, a genre he affected to dislike, like Alexander the Great (a flop) and of course later the wildly extravagant Cleopatra. In 1954, Burton established
his leading position in the Shakespearean stage by his Hamlet and, even better, his Coriolanus,
and was also a fine Othello and Henry V. He was hailed flatteringly by
Tynan as the natural successor to Laurence Olivier. Switching constantly
between the stage and screen, Burton was a good Jimmy Porter in the movie of
John Osborne’s Look back in Anger in
1958. He triumphed on Broadway with the role of King Arthur with Julie Andrews
in the Lerner and Loewe musical Camelot
in 1960 – he had won a prize as a boy soprano at an Eisteddfod years
previously!
He was entering his most successful period. His 1964 Hamlet on Broadway, directed by Gielgud
was the apogee of his stage career. He did not appear on stage again for
another 12 years. He had box-office success playing opposite Elizabeth Taylor
in The VIPs set in the exclusive
passenger lounge at Heathrow. Then fatefully he replaced Stephen Boyd as Mark
Antony in the epic Cleopatra whose
filming cost $40m and was in danger of busting 20th Century Fox. The
wayward diva behaviour of Liz Taylor
drove the director to distraction but the situation was made more explosive by
Burton’s enchantment with Taylor, the start of an affair which dominated the
gossip columns and fan magazines for years. Humiliated by their affair, Sybil
Burton fled the film-set for their home in Switzerland and divorce soon
followed.
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| Burton and Taylor, The Great Lovers |
Somehow the movie was completed and while it was
spectacular, it was decidedly boring; apparently Fox eventually recovered its
massive outlay. Burton and Taylor had become the The Great Lovers – marrying in
1965 (despite Richard’s friends advising him against). Yet the truth was even
sadder. Liz Taylor was a lush, like Richard, and a pill-popper too nursing all
manner of neuroses, no doubt exacerbated by her unreal Hollywood child star
upbringing. She loved diamonds and all material things – he famously paid $1.1m
for the so-called Taylor-Burton South African diamond, 64 carats and
pear-shaped.
They lived the stereotypical lives of kings and queens – Richard
had become the highest-paid actor in the world - but they quarrelled constantly
and violently, got divorced and then remarried. Ironically their marriage is
best depicted in Albee’s brilliant 1966 Who’s
afraid of Virginia Woolf? where a bickering university couple row fiercely
in front of younger academic guests. Burton and Taylor played the leads in the
movie, but it was too near the bone to be comfortable for them.
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| Liz and Richard in Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf? |
Richard still made decent films – The Night of the Iguana with Burton a whisky-priest trying to
seduce Ava Gardner, Sue Lyon and Deborah Kerr was well received as was his war
action movie Where Eagles Dare with
Clint Eastwood; his The Taming of the
Shrew with Liz Taylor in Zeffirelli’s colourful production was also
enjoyable. But there were several flops and Burton became less “bankable”.
With all their extravagance, he needed to work and he
appeared in third-rate movies. His heavy drinking had become alcoholism,
undermining his health. To film The
Klansman (1974) he was unable to stand and delivered his slurred lines
supported in a seat. He dried out in a clinic sufficiently later to make the
successful The Wild Geese (1978) but that was his movie box-office
swansong. He unexpectedly had a stage success in 1976 with Equus, later an admired film.
His great days over, the appalling Burton-Taylor marriage
finally ended in 1976; he married Suzi Miller, model ex-wife of racing driver
James Hunt; for his last three years he was married to Sally Hays, a make-up
artist. With severe back and spine problems, cirrhosis of the liver and kidney
problems, his formerly athletic body was ravaged and his arms became
matchsticks. He died of a stroke in Switzerland in 1984.
Richard Burton could and should have done much better. His
talent was immense but he was seduced by the flashy world of money, tinsel and
baubles. His alcoholism was a tragedy, much experienced in Celtic Britain among
the Welsh, Irish and Scots, which ruined him physically. He had lost his moral
compass and balance in life and paid a fearful price.
SMD
9.03.14
Text Copyright © Sidney Donald 2014
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