A gifted actor who rose to fame due to a combination of raw sex appeal, talent, and his grand romance with Elizabeth Taylor. Richard Burton was ruggedly handsome and blessed with a mellifluous baritone that could make the reading of a dictionary sound like poetry. Many critics lamented the fact that he didn’t live up to his potential. Nonetheless, he managed to garner six Oscar nominations during the course of his Hollywood career, the first as early as 1952 for Best Supporting Actor for My Cousin Rachel (1952). Later, he received Best Actor nominations for The Robe (1953), Becket (1964), The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965), Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), and Anne of the Thousand Days (1969).
Born Richard Walter Jenkins, he was the 12th of 13 children of a Welsh miner. Raised in dire poverty during the depression, he took a job as a haberdasher’s apprentice. Thanks to his dedicated teacher, Philip Burton, he won a scholarship to Oxford. In tribute to the man who educated him, Richard took his mentor’s last name when he embarked on his stage career, which began in 1943 with his performance in a Liverpool production of Druid’s Rest.
Military service in the Royal Air Force during the years 1944–47 interrupted his early career, but he quickly returned to acting in 1948. In that year he made his film debut in The Last Days of Dolwyn, revealing his propensity to flit back and forth between the stage and the screen, never fully giving himself to one or the other during the rest of his life.
Despite his burgeoning film career, his reputation was made in the theater. He starred in The Lady’s Not for Burning in London in 1949 and Hamlet at the Edinburgh Festival in 1953. Later, in 1960, he starred in the stage musical Camelot. While working on the boards, he starred in English films such as The Woman with No Name (1950) and Green Grow the Rushes (1951). He arrived in Hollywood in 1952 to star in My Cousin Rachel. Other leading roles followed in films such as Prince of Players (1955) and Alexander the Great (1956), but he was hardly a movie star during the 1950s and early 1960s. That soon changed.
Richard Burton’s much ballyhooed affair with Elizabeth Taylor during the making of Cleopatra (1963) turned him into an international sex symbol. He was Mark Antony to Taylor’s Cleopatra, and the press went wild with the story. Until then, Richard Burton was considered the heir to Olivier as England’s greatest actor. In fact, Olivier sent a wire to Richard Burton on the set of Cleopatra stating: “Make up your mind, dear heart. Do you want to be a great actor or a household word?” Richard Burton’s reply was, “Both.”
Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor were each married at the time, he to his first wife, Sybil Williams, and she to her fourth husband, Eddie Fisher. They soon divorced their respective spouses and wed in what became the longest-running and most publicized Hollywood romance of all time. They later separated, divorced, and remarried, only to divorce again. Richard Burton joined Elizabeth Taylor in a number of movies throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, including The V.I.P.s (1963), The Sandpiper (1965), The Comedians (1967), Boom! (1969), and Hammersmith Is Out (1972). Their best collaborations, however, were in The Taming of the Shrew (1967) and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966).
Richard Burton became a very wealthy man during the 1960s, he and his wife earning staggering sums of money to appear in movies together. Few of the films were good; despite the dual star appeal, moviegoers finally stopped buying tickets.
In the meanwhile, alcoholism began taking its toll on Richard Burton and, perhaps even more insidiously, his disregard for his craft began to tell. He cared little for his movie projects except for the cash they might earn him, a fact he readily acknowledged. Yet, despite his many mediocre movies, his appeal as an actor was undeniable, and he did occasionally soar in a few of his later movies, particularly in The Assassination of Trotsky (1972) and Equus (1977), though neither film was a financial success. Otherwise, he plodded through such poorly scripted films as Villain (1971), Bluebeard (1972), Jackpot (1975), Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977), The Medusa Touch (1978), Tristan and Isolde (1980), and Wagner (1983). He died suddenly in 1984 of a cerebral hemorrhage.
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