TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/caps/84/84bur42

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                                                                                August 20, 1984

The Mellifluous Prince of Disorder

Richard Burton:  1925-1984


The magnificent baritone was not merely a voice. It was an
orchestra of enormous range and power, and when it was silenced
last week, its graceful sound seemed to linger on for millions
who had heard it on film and stage. Homer must have known
someone very much like Richard Burton. Describing Odysseus'
effect on an audience in a faraway land, the poet wrote:  "He
ceased; but left so pleasing on the ear his voice, that
list'ning still they seemed to hear."

Burton was not the greatest actor of his generation, although
many of his peers were convinced that he could have been. Nor
was he the greatest success at the box office, although 20 years
ago he was almost certainly the highest-paid actor in the world.
But for the better part of the '60s and '70s the years of his
romance with and marriages to Elizabeth Taylor -- the
Elizabethan years, as he later called them -- he was one of the
most celebrated men on the planet. Amplified by the resources
of modern media, the lovemaking and the battles of Liz and Dick
echoed across oceans. Many critics thought him the greatest
Hamlet of the era, and he received seven Academy Award
nominations for his parts in such films as Becket, The Spy Who
Came in from the Cold and Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf?  But
his greatest role was the one that both he and his audience
seemed to enjoy best:  Richard Burton, the romantic and joyous
spirit. When he died of a cerebral hemorrhage at the
comparatively youthful age of 58, it was as if some clumsy
stagehand had missed his cue and dropped the curtain before the
performance had really come to an end.

He had been touched by the finger of God, Actor Hume Cronyn
observed, and there was in fact something miraculous in his
becoming an actor at all. His father, Richard Jenkins, was a
coal miner in the Welsh steel town of Pontrhydyfen; Burton was
the twelfth of 13 children, and his mother died when he was two.
An ambition to be not only an actor but a superb actor was
somehow ignited, and when he was in his teens he attached
himself to Philip Burton, who taught literature and drama in a
local school. "He had a very coarse, rough voice then, with a
heavy Welsh accent," says the senior Burton, who became his
legal guardian, giving him a new home and a new surname. "We
would go to the top of a mountain, and I would teach him to
recite Shakespeare to me without shouting. He wanted to speak
standard English, without the Welsh accent, and I had him read
the part of Henry Higgins in Pygmalion."  Young Burton probably
had more in common, however, with Alfred Doolittle, the
free-living dustman in the play, who, as Higgins said, had "a
certain natural gift of rhetoric."  That gift took Burton to
Oxford during World War II, and in 1948, after a mandatory stint
in the Royal Air Force, to London's West End, where he soon
established himself as a logical successor to the reigning
monarchs of the stage:  Laurence Olivier, John Gielgud and Ralph
Richardson. Coriolanus, he thought, was his greatest role, and
others agreed. "Nobody else can ever again play Coriolanus
now," said Olivier. Added Critic Kenneth Tynan:  "We though he
could be another Edmund Kean, that he was going to be the
greatest classical actor living."

Burton believed so too. When he discussed his work years later,
he talked almost exclusively about the stage, rarely about
films. "He had the most extraordinary, magical stage presence,"
says Philip Burton. "Sometimes there is a mystical interaction
between an audience and an actor, and it is that that
distinguishes the great from the very talented."  Even his
silences were magnetic. Claire Bloom, who appeared with him
more than 30 years ago in Christopher Fry's The Lady's Not for
Burning, remembers a moment when "he simply washed the floor,
quietly on the side, while John Gielgud and Pamela Brown were
having some great scene at the front of the stage. But nobody
could take his eyes off Richard."  When he broke that silence
and pumped up the organ behind those golden vocal cords, the
theater was his. Says Director Franco Zeffrelli:  "You could
hear his voice around and inside you."

His voice reached as far as California, and when Hollywood
beckoned in 1952, Burton jumped, like many another British actor
before and since. He made several big films, like The Robe, but
he did not become an international star until 1960, when he
returned to the stage as King Arthur in Lerner and Loewe's
Camelot. Arthur himself could not have been more virile and
vibrant, and the play's final words, sung as an elegy by the
King, took on an almost unbearable poignancy in the days after
John Kennedy's assassination. Jacqueline Kennedy recalled that
she and Jack had loved listening to the words before going to
bed:  "Don't let it be forgot, that once there was a spot, for
one brief shining moment that was known as Camelot."

Broadway had turned him into a box-office attraction and in 1961
20th Century-Fox, exercising its rights under an old contract,
took away his stage crown and shipped him off to Rome to play
Mark Antony in a sprawling screen epic called Cleopatra, with
Elizabeth Taylor in the title role. Gossip about the two stars
quickly spread:  "Elizabeth and Burton are not just playing
Antony and Cleopatra," declared Director Joe Mankiewicz. The
world professed to be shocked at candid shots of them cavorting
in bathing suits, like teen-agers rather than great celebrities.
"He was like Prince Charming kissing the sleeping princess,"
said Taylor, who at the time was still married to Singer Eddie
Fisher. A revenge of sorts was achieved by Fisher when he
appeared on a Manhattan stage with Juliet Prowse, who purred
provocatively, "I'm Cleo, the nympho of the Nile."

Even after they shed their spouses and legalized their union,
Liz and Dick were denounced by the pious. Everywhere they went
the paparazzi trailed behind; following their soap-opera romance
became almost a necessary diversion for a world wearied by wars
and assassinations. The pair made millions and spent millions,
traveling with an entourage that would pauper a Saudi prince,
taking over entire floors of famous hotels. Like Henry VIII,
a part he played with gusto in Anne of the Thousand Days, Burton
lavished jewels on his consort: the 33-carat Krupp diamond, the
69-carat Cartier diamond and the lustrous Peregrina pearl that
King Philip II of Spain gave Mary Tudor in 1554. Liz and Dick
made a couple of good movies together, including Virginia Woolf
and The Taming of the Shrew, and some fine glitzy
entertainments, like The V.I.P.s, but for the most part their
professional collaboration was disastrous, resulting in
embarrassments like Hammersmith Is Out and The Sandpiper.

Burton loved to brag about how much he could drink, but his
bouts with booze caused Taylor to divorce him in 1974. Fourteen
months later they remarried in Botswana, with two rhinos and a
hippo among the witnesses; but a second divorce soon followed.
He married, divorced and married again. His fourth wife Sally
was with him last week when he was stricken at their modest
villa in the Swiss village of Celigny, where dressed in red, the
Welsh national color, he was also buried. The services included
the familiar words of Dylan Thomas and the strains of a Welsh
rugby song.

In the post-Elizabethan years he finally gave up the bottle, did
a few good plays and movies, notably Equus, and many bad ones,
such as The Klansman and The Wild Geese. "I've done the most
unutterable rubbish, all because of money," he confessed a few
years ago. "I didn't need it. I've never needed money, not
even as a child, though I came from a very poor family. But
there have been times when the lure of the zeros was simply too
great."  It may have been those seductive zeros that reunited
him with Taylor last year in a national tour of Noel Coward's
Private Lives; each reportedly was paid $70,000 a week.
Grotesquely miscast, Liz and Dick endured perhaps their ultimate
humiliation.

He was a born actor who chose a "rather mad way of throwing away
his theater career," said Gielgud last week. Burton's friends
had been telling him that for years. It was advice he did not
want to take. "I rather like my reputation, actually," he said
when he turned 50. "That of a spoiled genius from the Welsh
gutter, a drunk, a womanizer. It's rather an attractive image."
Some measure out their lives with coffee spoons; Burton like
his friend and fellow Welshman Dylan Thomas, poured his out by
the bucketful until, at last, there was nothing left.

--By Gerald Clarke