Richard Burton

Richard Burton was born Richard Walter Jenkins on November 10, 1925, in Pontrhydyfen, a small village in the Afan Valley of South Wales. He was the twelfth of thirteen children born to Richard Walter Jenkins Sr., a coal miner known locally as Dic Bach, and Edith Thomas Jenkins. His mother died in 1927, shortly after giving birth to her last child, when Richard was barely two years old. He was raised largely by his eldest sister Cecilia, known as Cis, in the nearby town of Port Talbot, while his father remained in Pontrhydyfen ^[1].

Welsh was the language of his early childhood, and the chapel culture, rugby fields, and working men's clubs of Port Talbot shaped his sense of identity for the rest of his life. He attended Port Talbot Secondary School, where he showed early promise in English and drama, though family finances forced him to leave school at fifteen to work as an outfitter's assistant at a local Co-operative store ^[2].

The decisive influence of his youth was Philip Burton, a schoolmaster and radio producer who recognized the boy's raw ability and arranged his return to school. Philip Burton coached him relentlessly in voice, diction, and dramatic literature, working to soften his valley accent into the resonant instrument that later filled theatres. Because Philip Burton was too young by a matter of days to adopt him legally, the teacher became his legal ward's guardian instead, and Richard Jenkins took the surname Burton in 1943 ^[1]. It was under that name that he won a scholarship place at Exeter College, Oxford, in a special wartime short course, before serving as a navigator in the Royal Air Force from 1944 to 1947 ^[3].

Burton's professional stage debut came in 1943 in Emlyn Williams's play The Druid's Rest, first in Liverpool and then in London. Williams, a fellow Welshman, had spotted him through an open audition call, and the small role gave the teenager his first taste of the professional theatre ^[2]. After his RAF service, Burton returned to acting, working in British films and radio while building a stage reputation. His performance in Christopher Fry's verse play The Lady's Not for Burning in 1949, alongside John Gielgud, brought him serious critical attention in both London and New York ^[1].

The seasons that made his classical name came at Stratford-upon-Avon and the Old Vic in the early 1950s. His Prince Hal and Henry V at Stratford in 1951 drew comparisons with the leading Shakespeareans of the day, and his 1953 Hamlet at the Old Vic, played when he was twenty-seven, confirmed him as the most exciting young classical actor in Britain ^[3]. Critics repeatedly singled out the stillness of his stage presence and a speaking voice of unusual depth and clarity.

Hollywood noticed quickly. Burton made his American film debut in My Cousin Rachel (1952) opposite Olivia de Havilland, earning his first Academy Award nomination, and a year later starred in The Robe (1953), the first film released in CinemaScope, which brought a second nomination ^[4]. Through the decade he moved between prestige British projects, such as the film of John Osborne's Look Back in Anger (1959), and American studio work, without yet becoming a top box-office draw ^[2].

Any account of Richard Burton achievements has to reckon with both the stage and the screen. In 1960 he starred as King Arthur in the Lerner and Loewe musical Camelot on Broadway, a performance that won him the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Musical in 1961 ^[5]. Three years later he played Hamlet on Broadway in a production directed by John Gielgud, performed in rehearsal clothes on a bare stage. It ran for 136 performances, then a record for the play in New York, and drew enormous crowds to the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre ^[4].

On film, the 1960s brought his richest work. The epic Cleopatra (1963) made him a global name for reasons that went beyond acting, but the years that followed produced performances of real substance: the martyred archbishop in Becket (1964), the burnt-out priest in The Night of the Iguana (1964), and the weary agent Alec Leamas in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965), a portrayal many critics count among his finest ^[3]. In Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966) he played the embittered academic George opposite Elizabeth Taylor, and in Anne of the Thousand Days (1969) he was Henry VIII; both roles brought Oscar nominations ^[4].

Burton was nominated for the Academy Award seven times, six for Best Actor and once for Best Supporting Actor, and never won, a record that made him one of the most nominated actors without a victory in the award's history ^[4]. He received a CBE in 1970. Late in his career he earned a final nomination for Equus (1977), reprising a role he had played on Broadway, where his run in the part won him a special Tony recognition ^[5]. Among the most cited Richard Burton facts is that his last screen role, the interrogator O'Brien in Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984), was released only after his death ^[6].

Burton married the Welsh actress Sybil Williams in 1949, and the couple had two daughters, Kate and Jessica. Kate Burton later became a successful stage and television actress in her own right. The marriage ended in 1963 after Burton began a relationship with Elizabeth Taylor on the Rome set of Cleopatra, an affair so publicized that the Vatican newspaper condemned it and paparazzi followed the pair across Europe ^[6].

Burton and Taylor married in Montreal in March 1964. For a decade they were the most famous couple in the world, starring together in eleven films, commanding enormous fees, and living a life of yachts, jets, and celebrated jewels, including the 69-carat diamond Burton bought for Taylor in 1969. They divorced in 1974, remarried in Botswana in October 1975, and divorced a second time in 1976 ^[1]. Burton later married Susan Hunt in 1976 and, after their divorce, married Sally Hay in 1983, who survived him ^[6].

He struggled with alcohol for much of his adult life, a battle he discussed with unusual candour and which repeatedly affected his health and his work. He was also a serious reader and a compulsive writer of private journals. His diaries, kept intermittently from 1939 to 1983 and published by Yale University Press in 2012, revealed a reflective, bookish man beneath the tabloid image, full of self-criticism, literary judgments, and devotion to Wales ^[7].

The 1970s were uneven. Burton appeared in a string of poorly received films, and heavy drinking brought him close to death in 1974, when doctors warned him that his kidneys and liver were failing. He achieved periods of sobriety and staged notable comebacks, most strikingly on Broadway in Equus in 1976, where his performance as the psychiatrist Martin Dysart restored his critical standing ^[5].

In 1980 he returned to Camelot for a demanding American revival tour, though ill health, including severe spinal problems that required surgery in 1981, forced him to leave the production. His final years brought two projects of note: the television miniseries Wagner (1983), in which he played the composer, and Nineteen Eighty-Four, filmed in the spring of 1984 ^[6].

Burton died of a cerebral haemorrhage on August 5, 1984, at the age of fifty-eight, after being taken to hospital in Geneva from his home in Céligny, the Swiss village where he had been based since 1957 ^[6]. He was buried in the old cemetery at Céligny, dressed, at his request, in red, with a copy of the poems of Dylan Thomas placed in his coffin, according to accounts from his family ^[1].

Burton's reputation rests on a paradox that every Richard Burton biography must confront: a classical actor of the first rank who spent much of his career in commercial cinema, and who was often said, not least by himself, to have squandered a talent that might have made him the successor to Olivier and Gielgud. Yet the surviving record is substantial. His recorded Hamlet, his film work of the mid-1960s, and his narration of Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood for BBC radio in 1954 remain touchstones of English-language performance ^[3].

In Wales he is remembered as the miner's son who carried the valleys onto the world stage. Swansea University holds the Richard Burton Archives, and his personal diaries and papers were placed there by his widow Sally Burton, making the collection a major resource for scholars of theatre and film ^[8]. Port Talbot, which also produced Anthony Hopkins and Michael Sheen, claims him as the founder of a remarkable acting lineage.

Biographies by Paul Ferris, Melvyn Bragg, and his brother Graham Jenkins, along with the published diaries, have kept his life under continual reassessment ^[7]. Nearly four decades after his death, his voice is still instantly identifiable, his best performances still studied, and his story still told as one of the great dramas of talent, fame, and self-destruction in modern acting ^[1].