Richard Burton
Richard Burton CBE (/ˈbɜːrtən/; born Richard Walter Jenkins Jr.; 10 November 1925 – 5 August 1984) was a Welsh actor.[1]
For other people named Richard Burton, see Richard Burton (disambiguation).
Richard Burton
5 August 1984 (aged 58)
Old Cemetery ("Vieux Cimetière") of Céligny
Actor
1943–1984
3, including Kate Burton
Noted for his mellifluous baritone voice,[2][3] Burton established himself as a formidable Shakespearean actor in the 1950s and gave a memorable performance as Hamlet in 1964.[4] He was called "the natural successor to Olivier" by critic Kenneth Tynan. Burton's perceived failure to live up to those expectations[5] disappointed some critics and colleagues; his heavy drinking added to his image as a great performer who had wasted his talent.[3][6] Nevertheless, he is widely regarded as one of the finest actors of his generation.[7]
Burton was nominated for an Academy Award seven times but never won. He was nominated for his performances in My Cousin Rachel (1952), The Robe (1953), Becket (1964), The Spy Who Came In from the Cold (1965), Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), Anne of the Thousand Days (1969) and Equus (1977). He received numerous accolades, including a BAFTA Award, a Golden Globe Award and a Grammy Award. He received the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Musical for his portrayal of King Arthur in the Lerner and Loewe musical Camelot (1960).
In the mid-1960s, Burton became a top box-office star.[8] By the late 1960s, he was one of the highest-paid actors in the world, receiving fees of $1 million or more plus a share of the gross receipts.[9] Burton remained closely associated in the public mind with his second wife, Elizabeth Taylor. The couple's turbulent relationship, married twice and divorced twice, was rarely out of the news.[10]
Early life
Childhood
Burton was born Richard Walter Jenkins Jr. on 10 November 1925 in a house at 2 Dan-y-bont in Pontrhydyfen, Glamorgan, Wales.[11][12] He was the twelfth of thirteen children born into the Welsh-speaking family of Richard Walter Jenkins Sr. (1876–1957), and Edith Maude Jenkins (née Thomas; 1883–1927).[13] Jenkins Sr., called Daddy Ni by the family, was a coal miner, while his mother worked as a barmaid at a pub called the Miner's Arms in the village, where she met and married her husband.[14] According to biographer Melvyn Bragg, Richard is quoted saying that Daddy Ni was a "twelve-pints-a-day man" who sometimes went off on drinking and gambling sprees for weeks, and that "he looked very much like me".[15] Jenkins Sr. was badly burned in a mining explosion and his father Thomas had been confined to a wheelchair after a mining accident.[16]
Career
1943–1947: Early career and service in the RAF
In 1943, Burton played Professor Henry Higgins in a school production of another Shaw play directed by Philip, Pygmalion. The role won him favourable reviews and caught the attention of the dramatist, Emlyn Williams, who offered Burton a small role of the lead character's elder brother, Glan, in his play The Druid's Rest.[47] The play debuted at the Royal Court Theatre, Liverpool on 22 November 1943, and later premiered in St Martin's Theatre, London in January 1944. Burton thought the role was "a nothing part" and that he "hardly spoke at all". He was paid ten pounds a week for playing the role (equivalent to £469 in 2021), which was "three times what the miners got".[48] Alpert states that the play garnered mixed critical reviews, but James Redfern of the New Statesman took notice of Burton's performance and wrote: "In a wretched part, Richard Burton showed exceptional ability." Burton noted that single sentence from Redfern changed his life.[49]
Whilst an undergraduate at Exeter College, University of Oxford, Burton featured as "the complicated sex-driven puritan" Angelo in the Oxford University Dramatic Society's 1944 production of William Shakespeare's Measure for Measure.[e] The play was directed by Burton's English literature professor, Nevill Coghill, and was performed at the college in the presence of additional contributors to West End theatre including John Gielgud, Terence Rattigan and Binkie Beaumont. On Burton's performance, fellow actor and friend, Robert Hardy recalled, "There were moments when he totally commanded the audience by this stillness. And the voice which would sing like a violin and with a bass that could shake the floor." Gielgud appreciated Burton's performance and Beaumont, who knew about Burton's work in The Druid's Rest, suggested that he "look him up" after completing his service in the RAF if he still wanted to pursue acting as a profession.[51]
In late 1944, Burton successfully completed his six-month scholarship at Exeter College, Oxford, and went to the RAF classification examinations held in Torquay to train as a pilot. He was disqualified for pilot training because his eyesight was below par, and was classified as a navigator trainee.[52] He served the RAF as navigator for three years,[53] during which he performed an assignment as Aircraftman 1st Class in a Wiltshire-based RAF Hospital[54] and was posted to the RAF base in Carberry, Manitoba, Canada, to work as an instructor.[55] Burton's habits of drinking and smoking increased during this period; he was involved in a brief casual affair with actress Eleanor Summerfield.[56][f] Burton was cast in an uncredited and unnamed role of a bombing officer by BBC Third Programme in a 1946 radio adaptation of In Parenthesis, an epic poem of the First World War by David Jones.[57][59][g] Burton was discharged from the RAF on 16 December 1947.[53]
Personal life
Burton was married five times, twice consecutively to Taylor.[344] From 1949 until 1963, he was married to Sybil Williams, with whom he had two daughters, Kate (born 1957) and Jessica Burton (born 1959).[200]
Burton's marriages to Taylor lasted from 15 March 1964 to 26 June 1974 and from 10 October 1975 to 29 July 1976. Their first wedding was at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Montreal.[345] Of their marriage, Taylor proclaimed, "I'm so happy you can't believe it. This marriage will last forever."[346] Their second wedding took place 16 months after their divorce, in Chobe National Park in Botswana. Taylor and Eddie Fisher adopted a daughter from Germany, Maria McKeown (born 1961), who was re-adopted by Burton after he and Taylor married. Burton also re-adopted Taylor and producer Mike Todd's daughter, Elizabeth Frances "Liza" Todd (born 1957), who had been first adopted by Fisher.[243][347]
The relationship Burton and Taylor portrayed in the film Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was popularly likened to their real-life marriage. Burton disagreed with others about Taylor's famed beauty, saying that calling her "the most beautiful woman in the world is absolute nonsense. She has wonderful eyes, but she has a double chin and an overdeveloped chest, and she's rather short in the leg."[348] In August 1976, a month after his second divorce from Taylor, Burton married model Suzy Miller, the former wife of Formula 1 Champion James Hunt;[349] the marriage ended in divorce in 1982. From 1983 until his death in 1984, Burton was married to freelance production assistant Sally Hay.
In 1974, between his divorce from and remarriage to Taylor, he was briefly engaged to Princess Elizabeth of Yugoslavia.[350]
In 1957, Burton had earned a total of £82,000 from Prince of Players, The Rains of Ranchipur and Alexander the Great, but only managed to keep £6,000 for personal expenses due to taxation imposed by the then-ruling Conservative government. As a result, he consulted his lawyer, Aaron Frosch, who suggested he move to Switzerland where the tax payment was comparatively less. Burton acceded to Frosch's suggestion and moved with Sybil in January 1957 to Céligny, Switzerland, where he purchased a villa.[351] In response to criticism from the British government, Burton remarked: "I believe that everyone should pay them — except actors."[175] Burton lived there until his death.[352] In 1968, Burton's elder brother, Ifor, slipped and fell, breaking his neck, after a lengthy drinking session with Burton in Céligny. The injury left him paralysed from the neck down. His younger brother Graham Jenkins speculated that guilt over this may have caused Burton to start drinking very heavily, particularly after Ifor died in 1972.[353]
In a February 1975 interview with his friend David Lewin he said he "tried" homosexuality. He also suggested that perhaps all actors were latent homosexuals, and "we cover it up with drink".[354] In 2000, Ellis Amburn's biography of Elizabeth Taylor suggested that Burton had an affair with Olivier and tried to seduce Eddie Fisher, although this was strongly denied by Burton's younger brother Graham Jenkins.[355]
Burton was a heavy smoker. In a December 1977 interview with Sir Ludovic Kennedy, Burton said he was smoking 60–100 cigarettes per day.[356] According to his younger brother, as stated in Graham Jenkins's 1988 book Richard Burton: My Brother, he smoked at least 100 cigarettes a day.[357] After his father died from a cerebral haemorrhage in January 1957 at age 81, Burton declined to attend his funeral.[358][359]
Personal views
In November 1974, Burton was banned permanently from BBC productions for writing two newspaper articles questioning the sanity of Winston Churchill and others in power during World War II. Burton reported hating them "virulently" for the alleged promise to wipe out all Japanese people on the planet.[360] The publication of these articles coincided with what would have been Churchill's centenary, and came after Burton had played him in a favourable light in A Walk with Destiny, with considerable help from the Churchill family. Politically Burton was a lifelong socialist, although he was never as heavily involved in politics as his close friend Stanley Baker. He admired Democratic Senator Robert F. Kennedy and once got into a sonnet-quoting contest with him.[361]
In 1972, Burton played Leon Trotsky in The Assassination of Trotsky. The next year, he agreed to play Josip Broz Tito in a film biography, since he admired the Yugoslav leader. While filming in Yugoslavia he publicly proclaimed that he was a communist, saying he felt no contradiction between earning vast sums of money for films and holding left-wing views since "unlike capitalists, I don't exploit other people".[362]
Burton caused controversy in 1976 when he wrote an article for The Observer about his friend and fellow Welsh thespian Stanley Baker, who had recently died from pneumonia at the age of 48; the article upset Baker's widow with its depiction of her late husband as an uncultured womaniser.[363]
Melvyn Bragg, in the notes of his Richard Burton: A Life, says that Burton told Laurence Olivier around 1970 of his (unfulfilled) plans to make his own film of Macbeth with Elizabeth Taylor, knowing that this would hurt Olivier because he had failed to gain funding for his own cherished film version more than a decade earlier.
On his religious views, Burton was an atheist, stating: "I wish I could believe in a God of some kind but I simply cannot."[364]
Burton admired and was inspired by the actor and dramatist Emlyn Williams. He employed his son, Brook Williams, as his personal assistant and adviser, and he was given small roles in some of the films in which Burton starred.[365]
Health problems
Burton was an alcoholic most of his adult life. According to biographer Robert Sellers, "At the height of his boozing in the mid-70s he was knocking back three to four bottles of hard liquor a day."[366]
After nearly drinking himself to death during the shooting of The Klansman (1974), Burton dried out at Saint John's Health Center in Santa Monica, California. Burton was allegedly inebriated while making the movie, and many of his scenes had to be filmed with him sitting or lying down due to his inability to stand upright. In some scenes, he appears to slur his words or speak incoherently.[367] Burton later said that he could not remember making the film. Co-star O. J. Simpson said "There would be times when he couldn't move".[368]
According to his diaries, Burton used Antabuse to try to stop his excessive consumption of alcohol, which he blamed for wrecking his marriage to Taylor. Burton himself said of the time leading up to his near loss of life, "I was fairly sloshed for five years. I was up there with John Barrymore and Robert Newton. The ghosts of them were looking over my shoulder."[6] He said that he turned to the bottle for solace "to burn up the flatness, the stale, empty, dull deadness that one feels when one goes offstage".[366] The 1988 biography by Melvyn Bragg provides a detailed description of the many health issues that plagued Burton throughout his life. In his youth, Burton was known for being exceptionally strong and athletic.[369]
By the age of 41, he had declined so far in health that by his own admission his arms were thin and weak. He suffered from bursitis, possibly aggravated by faulty treatment, arthritis, dermatitis, cirrhosis of the liver, and kidney disease, as well as developing, by his mid-forties, a pronounced limp. How much of this was due to his intake of alcohol is impossible to ascertain, according to Bragg, because of Burton's reluctance to be treated for alcoholism. In 1974, Burton spent six weeks in a clinic to recuperate from a period during which he had drunk three bottles of vodka a day. Health issues continued to plague him until his death.
Honours
For his contributions to cinema, Burton was inducted posthumously into the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2013 with a motion pictures star located at 6336 Hollywood Boulevard.[372] For his contributions to theatre, Burton was inducted into the Theatre Hall of Fame.[373]