From the Welsh valleys to the Hollywood hills: The remarkable career of Richard Burton
It takes a truly once-in-a-lifetime talent to become known as one of the greatest actors of their generation and one of the United Kingdom’s finest stage and screen exports while also being accused of failing to maximise their potential, but that was Richard Burton to a tee.
In 99 out of 100 cases, any performer who so effortlessly mastered many of William Shakespeare’s most towering works, accrued seven Academy Award nominations, won a Bafta from three nods, scooped two Golden Globes from eight nominations, and even won a Grammy would be celebrated as having conquered their chosen profession, but Burton was that solitary outlier.
He was a phenomenal actor, but many of his colleagues and contemporaries maintained the belief that if he hadn’t become so enamoured by the jet-setting Hollywood lifestyle, the celebrity status, and his crippling decades-long battle with alcoholism, he could have achieved a great deal more than he did. Again, this was hardly flash-in-the-pan stuff, considering that his career spanned more than 50 years and left him with a trophy cabinet fuller than most.
Not that he could have envisioned himself thriving under the bright lights of Hollywood when he was born as the 12th of 13 children to a barmaid mother and a coal miner father in the tiny village of Pontrhydyfen in Wales, though, especially when his childhood was often less than stable.
Marked out as a potent force treading the boards as far back as the early 1940s, Burton continued rising up the theatrical ranks and appearing in British films before he made his American debut in 1952’s My Cousin Rachel, which earned him an Oscar nomination for ‘Best Supporting Actor’ and a Golden Globe prize for ‘New Star of the Year’.
By the end of the decade, he was in the position to turn down 20th Century Fox boss Darryl F. Zanuck’s offer of a seven-year and seven-picture contract worth a million dollars, which he declined partly because he wanted the freedom to flit between the UK and the US to balance his time between theatre and movie work.
Any other star would have seized the opportunity with both hands, but Burton instead opted to take £150 per week for performing at London’s Old Vic, which was the first notable display of a rebellious streak that would often get the better of him in the years to come. The tabloid frenzy over his long-lasting love affair with Elizabeth Taylor became part of Hollywood folklore for better and worse, but the final years of his career before his death in 1984 at the age of 58 were blighted by his alcohol addiction, reducing him to a shell of the powerhouse performer he’d once been.
Always a proud Welshman, Burton may have burned faster, brighter, and for a significantly shorter period than many imagined when he first broke through, but his remarkable life and legacy has secured him a well-earned place in cinema history.
