“I was so flustered”: the only actor who left Al Pacino starstruck
Being starstruck is quite a peculiar thing when you think about it. People are just people, no matter how much money they’ve got or how many films they’ve been in.
We all buy our pants at Marks and Spencer, and we all have to pathetically clasp a mug of Lemsip when we get a cold. But that doesn’t stop folk falling to bits when they get to meet a hero – even if you happen to be Al Pacino, one of the greatest actors of all time.
Let’s be honest, Pacino is someone that the majority of actors would get starstruck by, so he must be used to people turning to jelly when they first meet him. But as we started off by remembering, Pacino is just a person too, which is why in the early 1980s, when he headed backstage in a New York theatre to be presented with Richard Burton, the Welsh actor and star of films like Cleopatra and Where Eagles Dare, he proceeded to lose the plot.
Burton, who was in the very late stages of his career by then, was starring in a production of the King Arthur tale Camelot when Pacino got the chance to meet him. And true to reputation, he was apparently as smooth and charming as ever, suggesting to the younger man that they have dinner and swapping phone numbers.
But it seems Pacino wasn’t quite so chill about the meeting to say the least, recalling: “I loved his voice, his presence… He was charming. I was so flustered, I gave him my autograph.”
Pacino, in his defence, would have had every right to do so, given he was coming off the back of a decade in which he had risen to the very top of his industry, making some of the greatest films of all time and delivering some of the most accomplished performances in cinema history, from The Godfather to Serpico.
While Pacino was more method-led in his training, Burton, on the other hand, came from the theatres of Britain during World War II, his skills honed by years on stage, fulfilling Shakespearean roles and being touted as a successor to Laurence Olivier. He was seven-time Oscar-nominated during his career, but struggled with alcohol consumption his whole life and often found himself hounded by the press over his relationship with Cleopatra co-star Elisabeth Taylor.
He would often go from earning millions of dollars per film in Hollywood to accepting a few hundred pounds to appear at the Old Vic in a production, and would also appear in BBC television series in the early 1960s. It was in that decade that he first appeared in Camelot on Broadway, which did so well that it ran for an unprecedented three years and led to Burton being crowned ‘The King of Broadway’.
Although Burton would find the majority of his success with films alongside Taylor, including 1966’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, to many he is best remembered for his stiff upper lip style war movies, like The Wild Geese, The Longest Day and Breakthrough with Robert Mitchum.
He passed away aged just 58 in 1984, not long after that meeting with a starstruck Pacino.
