Richard Burton’s hilarious Shakespearean advice for Michael Caine
For all of his iconic film and theatre roles, his tumultuous relationship with Elizabeth Taylor, and endless tales of partying excess, Richard Burton remains in the minds of most as predominantly a thespian, if not the ultimate thespian. It seems fitting, then, that his first encounter with a young Michael Caine – though Burton knew nothing of it at the time – was from the stage of the Old Vic during a performance of Hamlet.
It was Burton’s first outing in the lead role of the Shakespearean tragedy, but one that set in motion a route to one of his career defining moments. He would go on to crystallise Hamlet for a generation in his filmed and theatrically released performance in 1964 at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre in New York, which produced some of the most iconic images of both Burton and the dastardly Hamlet persona.
Caine’s path to witnessing the formative performance of 28-year-old Burton, however, was far from straightforward. As a young man of modest means living in south London, seeing Hamlet at the Old Vic was no small occasion. Frustrated with having previously stared at the tops of actors’ heads from his seats in the gods, Caine decided that this time, he wanted to do it right.
“I went to see Richard Burton in Hamlet,” says Caine, “He was very young, and he was at the Old Vic, which is in south London, where I come from. I didn’t want to sit in the cheap seats, but I didn’t have a lot of money, so I saved up and bought a seat in the stalls.”
Even as a 20 year old, Caine knew that Burton deserved to be seen from up close, as the world would see it a decade later in the John Gielgud directed 1964 version. But a seat in the stalls also meant rubbing shoulders with another unexpected Hollywood star: “I was sitting next to an American movie star called Greer Garson,” Caine recalls.
Unsurprisingly, sitting next to an actor who at that point had starred opposite Lawrence Olivier, Clark Gable, and, that same year, as Calpurnia alongside Marlon Brando’s Marc Antony in Julius Caesar, left a lasting impression on the young Caine. Coincidentally, Burton had turned down the role of Marc Antony to do this production of Hamlet. Not to fact-check the great Michael Caine, but Garson was in fact English, being born in London in 1904, but she had certainly made a career in American films, so I guess we’ll let him off.
Caine and Burton didn’t meet that night, but it lived long in his mind. “Many years later, I got to know Richard Burton, and I said to him, ‘You were the fastest Hamlet ever.’ And he said, ‘You have to remember, Michael, the pub shut at half past ten.'”
If there is a more typically Richard Burton thing to do than race through Hamlet in two hours in order to make last orders, then I’ve never heard it. Alcohol played a difficult role in Burton’s life, ultimately contributing to his early death at 58, but the sharpness of his wit, on and off stage never faltered.
And maybe, just maybe, Burton’s words ran through Caine’s mind in that moment of improvised brilliance in The Italian Job. When Caine yells, “You’re only supposed to blow the bloody doors off!” maybe it’s because he knew that resetting the pyrotechnics would take hours and might jeopardise their pint at the end of the day.
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