Richard Burton feared and loathed Winston Churchill: “My class and his hate each other”
At the age of 16, Winston Churchill made a remarkable prediction: “I can see vast changes coming over a now peaceful world,” he wrote, “great upheavals, terrible struggles, wars such as one cannot imagine; and I tell you London will be in danger—London will be attacked and I shall be very prominent in the defence of London.” Even as a young man, Churchill was already convinced that he’d been out on earth for one important reason: to his save his nation. The fact that he did, and that his achievement of this goal marked the fulfilment of an adolescent prophecy, has made Churchill a favourite subject among filmmakers. One of the most famous actors to portray the man himself was the great Richard Burton, a surprising casting choice given that the English actor “hated” Churchill and everything he stood for.
There’s certainly a lot to despise about Churchill. Indeed, only someone born at the very height of British imperial rule could have had such a profound sense of his own greatness. As a child of Empire, he held some very troubling views concerning race. As Priyamvada Gopal notes in her Guardian article, Why can’t Britain handle the truth about Winston Churchill?, the British Prime Minister openly praised “Aryan stock” and insisted that it was right and just for “a stronger race, a higher-grade race” to rule over indigenous peoples.
He is also reportedly believed to have thought that Black people were innately less efficient and capable than white people. “In 1911,” Gopal notes, Churchill banned interracial boxing matches so white fighters would not be seen losing to black ones” and once described anticolonial campaigners as “savages armed with ideas”. In the same way, Churchill regarded greatness as his god-given right, he seems to have viewed colonial powers such as the UK as innately superior.
Still, many actors have savoured the opportunity to play Churchill. Gary Oldman, for example, insisted on smoking genuine Cuban cigars during the making of Darkest Hour. During an appearance on The Graham Norton Show, the actor claimed he’d smoked a dozen $50 cigars a day for the entire 48 days of shooting. That’s $31,000 worth of authenticity right there.
Richard Burton didn’t pay too much attention to detail when he played Churchill in 1974’s The Gathering Storm. Burton refused to shave his head for the role, telling one American reporter that he didn’t care about how his performance came across because he’d always loathed Churchill, regarding him as the very embodiment of the English establishment. “Churchill and all his kind…have stalked down the corridors of endless power all through history,” he wrote in a New York Times article titled To Play Churchill Is To Hate Him. The son of a Welsh miner, Burton couldn’t understand why people were so keen to celebrate an enemy of the working class.
According to the actor, meeting Churchill had been like a “like a blow under the heart…. My class and his hate each other to the seething point”. But even Burton was struck by Churchill’s intense gravitas. “Whether Sir Winston Churchill was a genius, I don’t know,” he wrote, “but certainly he was one of the few people—two others are Pablo Picasso and Camus—who have frightened me almost to silence when we came face to face, a difficult task in my case…Churchill left me with the feeling that I was adjacent to a slow-effusing volcano. He had a kind of dynamic lethargy.”
