Richard Burton

RICHARD BURTON

Mr Richard Burton, CBE, who has died at the age of 58, was an actor
who began his career as a performer of fine promise on the classical
stage and progressed to become an international star, the details of
whose private life came, alas, to command almost more attention than
his very great gifts.

Richard Burton was born in Ponrhydfen, a mining village in South
Wales, on November 10, 1925. He was educated at Port Talbot Secondary
School and Exeter College, Oxford, but he spent a year between the end
of his school life and the beginning of his brief university career on
the stage.

He first acted in public in November, 1943, as Glan in Emlyn
Williams's "The Druid's Rest" at the Royal Court Theatre, Liverpool
and then, in January, 1944, at the St. Martin's Theatre, in London.
After three months of the play's London run, he relinquished his part
to go up to Oxford, where his stay was cut short by National Service,
which occupied him until 1947.

He found time while at University to achieve an impressive performance
as Angelo in "Measure for Measure", the OUDS production of 1944.

In less than ten years after his return to the stage he had built up
not only a great reputation but also a power and authority which made
it seem that he was destined for the commanding heights of his
profession in spite of occasional forays into the cinema.

In February, 1948, he appeared as Mr Hicks in "Castle Anna", but moved
from that into his first film, "The Last Days of Dolwen". During 1949
and 1950 he was seen in the then excitingly original plays of
Christopher Fry, as Richard in "The Lady's Not for Burning", Cuthmen
in "The Boy with a Cart" and Tegeus in a "Phoenix too Frequent". "The
Lady's Not for Burning" took him to his first appearance in New York,
when its run ended he stayed there to play in "Legend of Lovers". Back
in London in 1952, he played the title role in "Montserrat" at the
Lyric, Hammersmith, and then joined the Old Vic Company for the season
of 1953 and 1954 in what can perhaps justly be remembered as the last
of the Old Vic golden ages before the creation of the National Theatre
Company.

With John Neville, an actor of equal force and intelligence but
entirely different in temperament, he alternated the roles of Othello
and Iago. In London and at the Edinburgh Festival he was seen as
Hamlet, incisively intelligent, richly emotional though hardly
irresolute. The bastard Philip Faulconbridge in "King John" was a role
which he fitted exactly, and his Coriolanus was acting of violence and
authority if hardly of patrician disdain. Sir Toby Belch offered him a
rare opportunity to show his gifts of humour, and his Caliban was both
ferocious and pathetic. His acting compared to John Neville's as a
sabre to a rapier; the two exactly complemented each other and won the
devotion of Old Vic audiences, particularly of a vociferously
appreciative gallery audience of young enthusiasts. Tempted to
Hollywood to be the Antony to Elizabeth Taylor's Cleopatra in the
spectacular film epic of "Cleopatra" (it seemed to his admirers that
Shakespeare's Antony could give him far more than a very luscious film
had to offer), he began to concentrate on film roles, working in the
theatre only intermittently.

In New York he was the King Arthur of the original production of
Lerner and Loew's "Camelot" in 1960, and in 1964 he played Hamlet in
Sir John Gielgud's controversial production of the play. The
production and Burton's acting both received a great deal of
attention, commentary and analysis; both were, the commentators
suggest, tensely exciting and moving, but both, apparently, were
visibly flawed.

Two years later, as an act of homage to Oxford, and the OUDS, both
Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, his second wife, played there in
Marlowe's "Doctor Faustus". His subsequent film of the play, based on
the Oxford production, failed altogether to do him justice,
sacrificing both his own performance and the play itself to visual
cliches of almost ineffable bad taste. The breakdown of Burton's first
marrriage, to Sybil Williams, and his subsequent marriage to Elizabeth
Taylor, had given the press of Great Britain and the United States a
modern romance of which the press made as much as it could, and the
luxury of their later life - the fruits of the success in the cinema,
was widely reported; they never for long managed to escape the public
eye. For all that, Burton kept a certain natural simplicity, an
obvious love of his native country and the people in the mining
village in which he had grown up. The partnership with Miss Taylor,
however, bore fruit in several films in which he discovered how to
project the force of his stage personality through the lens of a
camera, and if "Doctor Faustus" was a disaster and "The Taming of the
Shrew", directed by Franco Zefirelli, a colourful romp in which
neither Burton nor his wife was ideally cast, so that the best was not
made of Shakespeare's play, in the film of Edward Albee's "Who's
Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" the Burton-Taylor duet was powerful in
purely cinematic terms, sourly-comic in a way new to Burton's acting,
finely drawn and moving.

Without Taylor, Burton played the title role of "Becket" opposite
Peter O'Toole, was an unfrocked priest in "The Night of the Iguana"
and an intelligence agent in John Le Carre's "The Spy Who Came in from
the Cold". There were also film records of his by nnow rare stage
appearances, such as "Hamlet" directed by John Gielgud.

During the 1970s Burton seemed, professionally, to lose his way. He
was no longer able to hold out for huge salaries in the cinema and his
work was less distinguished. He settled for mainly routine adventure
films with, now and then something more challenging, such as playing
Trotsky for Joseph Losey or repeating his stage role as the
psychiatrist in Peter Shaffer's "Equus". There was sadness that his
talent was being under-used, not only in films but in the theatre,
where apart from "Equus" his only venture in more than ten years was
the musical, "Camelot".

Plans to play "King Lear" came to nothing. In 1977 he narrated a
26-part BBC radio series about British monarchs, produced to mark the
Queen's Silver Jubilee. His private life continued to fill the gossip
columns. His marriage to Elizabeth Taylor ended in separation and
divorce; they briefly remarried and divorced finally in 1976. IN the
same year he married his fourth wife, Mrs Susan Hunt, former wife of
the racing driver James Hunt, a marriage which also ended in divorce.

From the mid 1970s, his career was, threatened by a serious - and
admitted - drinking problem. He married fifthly in 1983, Sally Hay.
For all that, and for his appearance in many films where, without Miss
Taylor, he played no less effectively than he did in the duet which
seems to be the high-point of his art as a film actor, it is not
possible to think of Richard Burton except as a bitter loss which the
theatre sustained when it could ill-afford to lose an actor of
presence, personality and controlled energy. At a time when he was
still developing unusual natural gifts, he all but abandoned the
stage. Like Olivier an extrovert actor, brilliant in technique and
with an apparently infallible instinct for theatrical effect, he never
reached the summit of what promised to be a great stage career.

Like many highly intelligent actors, he had a rooted distrust as well
as love of the stage, and by the 1950s he was ready from time to time
to discuss in public the possibility of a future career in which
acting played no part; in 1969, for example, he talked of settling for
some time to teach in Oxford with a temporary fellowship. But for all
that he will be remembered as a stage actor physically and
temperamentally built for great heroic and tragic roles, with the
vocal range and colour (as a number of gramophone records testify)
such roles demand. Together with these went a swift stage
intelligence. What he achieved was both moving and powerful; it
promised an unachieved greatness which must always be lamented.

END