Past Time: Richard Burton - Revolution Watch

By the age of 25, Welsh-born actor Richard Burton (1925-1984) was hailed as the new Laurence Olivier. At 36, his role as King Arthur in Moss Hart’s musical Camelot (1960) saw him acclaimed as “the King of Broadway”. In 1961, while filming Cleopatra, he and Elizabeth Taylor became the most celebrated Hollywood lovers of all time. When Olivier cautioned his friend by telegram: “Make up your mind, dear heart. Do you want to be a great actor or a household name?”, Burton cabled back “Both!” But when the actor died in 1984, his unfulfilled potential was blamed on compromising bad film choices for fees, alcoholism and the soap opera surrounding his jet-set life with Taylor.

Richard Burton on stage as King Arthur in the Broadway musical ‘Camelot’, 1960 (Photo by Archive Photos/Getty Images)

The son of a Welsh miner and a barmaid, Richard Jenkins was the twelfth of 13 children and was brought-up by his sister Cecilia (Cis) after his mother died and his “twelve-pints-a-day-man” father absented himself on gambling and drinking sprees. He would later say: “I am so much my father’s son that I give myself the occasional creeps.” The actor would also admit: “I would rather have played for Wales at Cardiff Arms Park than Hamlet at the Old Vic.” Schoolmaster Philip Burton nurtured the young man’s interest in drama and helped to develop the mellifluous baritone voice once it had broken. Changing his name by deed poll, Richard Burton became his schoolmaster’s legal ward.

As an RAF cadet scholar at Exeter College, Oxford, Burton performed in Measure for Measure in front of an audience that included actor Sir John Gielgud, playwright Terence Rattigan and West End Producer Binkie Beaumont. After three years as an RAF navigator, Burton was discharged in 1947 and moved to London where Beaumont put him under contract. While filming his first role in 1949 The Last Days of Dolwyn, Burton met Sybil Williams who he married. Under the patronage of British film legend Alexander Korda, Burton was judged by The Observer as “having all the qualities of a leading man that the British film industry needs at this juncture: youth, good looks, a photogenic face, obviously alert intelligence and a trick of getting the maximum of effort with the minimum of fuss.”

Portrait of Richard Burton taken in the 1970s (Photo Getty Images)

An Actor’s Life

Comparisons with the great Olivier were made when Gielgud directed Burton in The Lady’s Not for Burning co-starring Claire Bloom in the West End and on Broadway. As Bloom wryly put it: “He was recognisably a star… a fact he didn’t question.” Performances as Prince Hal in Henry IV Part 1 and 2 at the Festival of Britain seemed to confirm Burton as a great Shakespearean actor. But, just as Olivier had found limited success in Hollywood and was eclipsed by his wife Vivien Leigh, so Burton would be eclipsed by Taylor.

Richard Burton as a young Prince Hal in a scene from Shakespeare’s Henry IV at Stratford (Photo by © Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images)

His first American film was a starring role in George Cukor’s My Cousin Rachel with Olivia de Havilland but his breakthrough was in the Biblical epic The Robe (1953) – the first film shot in CinemaScope – of which Burton would say: “The Robe was lousy but an almighty hit. I was dulled as ditch water and an almighty flop.”

Richard Burton as Roman soldier Marcellus Gallio and Jean Simmons as Diana in the biblical epic film ‘The Robe’, 1953 (Photo by Silver Screen Collection/Getty Images)

Burton was caught between the lure of Hollywood money and the legitimacy of the stage. Humphrey Bogart told him: “I never knew a man who played Hamlet who didn’t die broke.” Twentieth Century Fox chief Daryl F. Zanuck offered him a seven-year, seven-picture, $1 million contract. Burton decided to play Hamlet and Coriolanus at the Old Vic before returning to LA to make a series of flops including Alexander the Great, The Rains of Ranchipur and an execrable romantic comedy with Joan Collins called Sea Wife. A film version of John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger in 1959 co-starring Claire Bloom was a success, as was Burton’s triumph on Broadway with Julie Andrews in Camelot.

Richard Burton play the lead in the film “Alexander the Great” pictured in London in front of a bust of Alexander (Photo by Popperfoto via Getty Images/Getty Images)

Endless love

Taylor and Burton had met before he was cast as Antony in the 1961 epic Cleopatra that Twentieth Century Fox was hoping would save the ailing studio. She had thought him arrogant. Despite both being married (he to Sybil and she to Eddie Fisher), Taylor and Burton began an all-consuming, very public affair that would be played out in purchases of fabulous jewels through two marriages and two divorces finally ending in 1976. While still making Cleopatra, Taylor gifted Burton a yellow-gold, automatic Patek Philippe watch with a woven gold bracelet and champagne-coloured dial. It is inscribed on the back with the words “Rwy’n dy garu di” – “I love you” in Welsh – and was sold at Christie’s South Kensington in 2002 for £10,000.

During their time in Rome, Burton and Taylor were known for giving each other lavish gifts of jewellery and watches