Richard Burton

• 1. Introduction

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  Richard Burton, the Welsh actor born Richard Walter Jenkins Jr., once received a cable from Laurence Olivier. Olivier was shocked by Burton's affair with Elizabeth Taylor, and his message was blunt. It read: “Make up your mind, dear heart. Do you want to be a great actor or a household word?” Burton answered with a single word. “Both.”

  That reply captures a career pulled between two ambitions. One was the Shakespearean stage, where the young actor earned comparisons to Olivier himself. The other was a fame so loud that it followed him into every newspaper. Burton had a baritone voice that critics called mellifluous, and he used it on stage, on film, on radio and on record.

  Where did that voice come from? Who turned a coal miner's son into an actor? What did it cost him to chase Hollywood money while the theatre world watched? And could any actor really be both?

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• 2. A Miner's Son

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  Richard Walter Jenkins Jr. was born on the 10th of November 1925 at 2 Dan-y-bont, a house in Pontrhydyfen, Glamorgan. He was the twelfth of thirteen children in a Welsh-speaking family. His father, Richard Walter Jenkins Sr., was a coal miner whom the family called Daddy Ni. His mother, Edith Maude, had worked as a barmaid at the Miners Arms, the village pub where she met her husband. They married at Neath Register Office on the 24th of December 1900, without her parents' approval.

  Biographer Melvyn Bragg quotes Burton describing Daddy Ni as a “twelve-pints-a-day man.” The father sometimes disappeared for weeks on drinking and gambling sprees. Burton added that “he looked very much like me.” Daddy Ni had once been badly burned in a mining explosion, and his own father, Thomas, used a wheelchair after a mining accident.

  On the 31st of October 1927, Edith died, six days after giving birth to Graham, the family's thirteenth child. Richard was barely two years old. Postpartum infections killed her. Richard believed the cause was “hygiene neglect.” Biographer Michael Munn offered a different account. He wrote that Edith was “fastidiously clean,” but that dust from the coal mines led to her death.

  An elder sister named Cecilia, whom Richard affectionately called Cis, stepped in. She and her husband Elfed James, also a miner, raised him until he was seventeen. Their three-bedroom terraced cottage at 73 Caradoc Street in Taibach, a district of Port Talbot, also held their daughters Marian and Rhianon. Bragg describes the town as “a tough steel town, English-speaking, grind and grime.” Burton said Cis became “more mother to me than any mother could ever have been.” Daddy Ni only occasionally visited the homes of his grown daughters and was otherwise absent.

  Ifor, a brother 19 years older, was another towering figure. A miner and rugby union player, he “ruled the household with the proverbial firm hand.” Ifor also nurtured the boy's love of rugby. Richard played cricket, tennis and table tennis too, but Bragg notes that rugby was his greatest interest. Burton later said he “would rather have played for Wales at Cardiff Arms Park than Hamlet at The Old Vic.” The Welsh centre Bleddyn Williams believed Richard “had distinct possibilities as a player.”

  From the age of five, Richard attended the Eastern Primary School, and he moved to its boys' section at eight. His speaking and singing voice was excellent from childhood, and he won an eisteddfod prize as a boy soprano. He loved poetry and read English and Welsh literature. For pocket money he ran messages, hauled horse manure and delivered newspapers.

  In March 1937 he passed the scholarship exam for Port Talbot Secondary School, becoming the first in his family to attend secondary school. Biographer Hollis Alpert notes that Daddy Ni and Ifor both regarded his education as “of paramount importance.” They hoped to send him to the University of Oxford.

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• 3. The Schoolmaster

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  In 1939, a certificate from a local eisteddfod at Maesteg Town Hall left Richard hungry to win again. He chose Sir Arthur Sullivan's “Orpheus with his Lute,” a piece Alpert thought difficult. He asked his schoolmaster, Philip Burton, for help. During their practice sessions his voice cracked, and that failure began the most important relationship of his life. Philip later recalled, “His voice was tough to begin with but with constant practice it became memorably beautiful.”

  Richard's first step into theatre was a minor role in his school's production of George Bernard Shaw's The Apple Cart. By the end of 1941 he had decided to leave school and work as a miner, like Elfed. Instead he took a job he came to dislike intensely, as a draper's assistant in the menswear department of the Taibach Co-operative store. War-time rationing limited what the department could sell. He weighed other futures too, including boxing, the ministry and singing. In this period he also took up smoking and drinking while still underage.

  Philip reappeared when Richard joined Port Talbot Squadron 499 of the Air Training Corps, part of the Royal Air Force. Philip was its commander. Richard also joined the Taibach Youth Centre, a youth drama group founded by Meredith Jones and led by Leo Lloyd. Lloyd, a steel worker and keen amateur actor, taught him the fundamentals of acting. Richard played an escaped convict in Lloyd's play The Bishop's Candlesticks, adapted from a section of Victor Hugo's Les Misérables. Alpert noted that the part had no dialogue and that Richard “mimed his role.” In 1942, Philip gave him a part in the BBC Radio version of Philip's own play, Youth at the Helm.

  Seeing the talent, Jones and Philip had Richard re-admitted to school on the 5th of October 1942. Philip tutored him intensely in school subjects and drilled his acting voice, including outdoor exercises that improved his projection. Richard called it “the most hardworking and painful period” of his life. Philip called him “my son to all intents and purposes. I was committed to him.” Burton later wrote of Philip, “I owe him everything.”

  In March 1943, aged 17, Richard left his sister's home because his brother-in-law resented supporting his renewed education. Philip arranged for him to move in with a widow, Elizabeth “Ma” Smith, where Philip himself lodged. By the autumn Philip planned to adopt him. The law required an adopter to be 21 years older than the adoptee, and Philip fell 20 days short. With Daddy Ni's consent, Richard became Philip's legal ward instead. On the 26th of November 1943, aged 18, he changed his surname to Burton by deed poll, taking Philip's own.

  That same year Burton excelled in the School Certificate Examination, which qualified him for university. Philip asked him to study at Exeter College, Oxford. It was part of a six-month scholarship programme the RAF offered to qualified cadets before active service.

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• 4. Apprentice Years

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  In 1943, Burton played Professor Henry Higgins in a school production of Shaw's Pygmalion, directed by Philip. The role won favourable reviews and caught the eye of the dramatist Emlyn Williams. Williams offered him the small part of Glan, the lead character's elder brother, in The Druid's Rest. The play opened at the Royal Court Theatre, Liverpool, on the 22nd of November 1943 and reached St Martin's Theatre, London, in January 1944. Burton thought it “a nothing part” in which he “hardly spoke at all.” Yet he earned ten pounds a week, which he noted was “three times what the miners got.”

  Reviews of the play were mixed, but James Redfern of the New Statesman singled Burton out. He wrote: “In a wretched part, Richard Burton showed exceptional ability.” Burton said that one sentence changed his life.

  At Exeter College, Oxford, Burton played Angelo, “the complicated sex-driven puritan,” in the Oxford University Dramatic Society's 1944 Measure for Measure. His English literature professor, Nevill Coghill, directed it. In the audience were John Gielgud, Terence Rattigan and the producer Binkie Beaumont. Fellow actor Robert Hardy recalled, “There were moments when he totally commanded the audience by this stillness. And the voice which would sing like a violin and with a bass that could shake the floor.” Gielgud admired the performance. Beaumont, who knew Burton from The Druid's Rest, told him to look him up after the RAF if he still wanted to act.

  In late 1944, Burton finished the scholarship and sat the RAF classification examinations in Torquay, hoping to train as a pilot. His eyesight was below par, so he was classified as a navigator trainee. A short training posting took him to a temporary RCAF base at Carberry, Manitoba. Over three years in the RAF he never joined a flight crew. Instead, as an Aircraftman 1st Class, he did administrative work at the RAF Hospital at Wroughton in Wiltshire. His drinking and smoking increased, and he had a brief casual affair with the actress Eleanor Summerfield. In 1946 he took an uncredited role as a bombing officer in a BBC Third Programme radio adaptation of David Jones's First World War epic poem, In Parenthesis. He was discharged on the 16th of December 1947.

  In 1948 Burton moved to London to find H. M. Tennent Ltd., where he met Beaumont again. Beaumont put him under contract at £500 a year, or £10 a week. Daphne Rye, the firm's casting director, offered him rooms on the top floor of her house in Pelham Crescent. She also cast him as Mr. Hicks, a young officer, in the Irish drama Castle Anna.

  While touring in Wynyard Browne's Dark Summer, Burton got a call from Emlyn Williams about a screen test. The film was The Last Days of Dolwyn, and Williams had written the role of Gareth especially for him. After the test, Williams sent a telegram quoting a line from The Corn Is Green: “You have won the scholarship.” Filming took place in the summer and early autumn of 1948. On that set Williams introduced him to Sybil Williams, and they married at a register office in Kensington on the 5th of February 1949. Critics praised the film debut, with Philip French of The Guardian calling it “impressive.”

  The film's co-producer, Alexander Korda, signed Burton to a contract at £100 a week that let Korda lend him to other companies. Burton took small parts in British films, including Now Barabbas, The Woman with No Name and Waterfront. C. A. Lejeune of The Observer wrote that he had every quality a leading man needed, including youth, a photogenic face and an alert intelligence. Green Grow the Rushes, where Burton had a bigger part as a newspaper spy, was a box office bomb.

  The stage offered better chances. Peter Glenville rejected Burton for Rattigan's Adventure Story because he thought him too short next to Paul Scofield. Rye then sent him to audition for Christopher Fry's The Lady's Not for Burning, directed by Gielgud. Gielgud was unsure and asked him to come back the next day and audition again. The second time, Burton got the part. It paid £15 a week, and with Williams' help he pushed his Tennent pay from £10 to £30 a week on top of Korda's £100. His co-star Claire Bloom later said of his acting, “he just was,” and added that he was “recognisably a star, a fact he didn't question.”

  The play opened at the Globe Theatre in May 1949 and ran for a year in London. On Broadway it opened at the Royale Theatre on the 8th of November 1950 and ran until the 17th of March 1951. It won the New York Drama Critics' Circle award for Best Foreign Play of 1951, and Burton received the Theatre World Award, his first major award. He also appeared in two more Fry plays, The Boy With A Cart and A Phoenix Too Frequent.

  During the run of The Boy With A Cart, the director Anthony Quayle came to see the play. He was looking for a young actor to play Prince Hal in Henry IV, Part I and Part 2 for the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre season of the Festival of Britain. As soon as he saw Burton, he knew he had found his man. The plays opened at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1951 to mixed reviews, but Burton's Hal won acclaim, and many critics called him “the next Laurence Olivier.” Kenneth Tynan wrote that his playing “turned interested speculation to awe almost as soon as he started to speak.” Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall saw it too. Bacall said, “He was just marvellous … Bogie loved him. We all did.”

  Burton celebrated by buying his first car, a Standard Flying Fourteen, and sharing a drink with Bogart at a pub called The Dirty Duck. He then played the title role in Henry V and Ferdinand in The Tempest in the same season. A reviewer said Burton “lacked inches” as Henry V, and Olivier defended him by pointing out that the same critic had given him the same review for the same role. Burton's last play of 1951, Jean Anouilh's Eurydice, was retitled Legend of Lovers and ran only a week at the Plymouth Theatre in New York. Bob Francis of Billboard still found him “excellent as the self-tortured young accordionist.” Hollywood's offer was only a year away.

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• 5. Hollywood and Hamlet

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  On the 8th of April 1952, Burton opened at the Lyric Hammersmith in Emmanuel Roblès's Montserrat, playing the title captain opposite Noel Willman. It ran only six weeks, yet some critics called it his most convincing role so far. Tynan praised the variety Burton found in a part that was little more than a long exposition of smouldering dismay.

  Director George Cukor recommended Burton for his Hollywood break, the lead in the Gothic romance My Cousin Rachel, opposite Olivia de Havilland. Darryl F. Zanuck of 20th Century Fox arranged with Korda to borrow Burton for three films, paying a total of $150,000, or $50,000 each. De Havilland did not get along with Burton and called him coarse-grained. One of his friends suggested that remarks he made to her may have caused the friction. The film, based on Daphne du Maurier's 1951 novel, concerns a man who suspects his cousin's wife of murdering him for his money, then falls in love with her anyway. It succeeded at the box office. Bosley Crowther of The New York Times found Burton's emotional performance “most fetching.” The film earned him the Golden Globe for New Star of the Year in the actor category and his first Oscar nomination, for Best Supporting Actor.

  During that shoot, MGM offered Burton the part of Mark Antony in Julius Caesar, but he refused it to avoid a schedule clash. Marlon Brando took the role, and it brought him a BAFTA Award and an Oscar nomination.

  The year 1953 turned his career. Burton had reached Hollywood while the studio system was struggling, because television was drawing audiences away. In The Desert Rats, he played an English captain in the North African campaign who commands a hopelessly outnumbered Australian unit against Erwin Rommel, played by James Mason. Variety called Burton “excellent.” He and Sybil became friends with Mason and his wife Pamela, and they stayed at the Masons' home until Burton returned to Britain in June 1953.

  His second film that year was The Robe, the first motion picture made in CinemaScope. Burton replaced Tyrone Power as Marcellus Gallio, a Roman military tribune whose soldiers crucify Jesus. Haunted by nightmares, Marcellus is led to his own conversion, guided by his Greek slave Demetrius, played by Victor Mature. His wife Diana, played by Jean Simmons, follows his lead. Critics at the time received it well, though Jonathan Rosenbaum of the Chicago Reader later called it “pious claptrap.” The film grossed $17 million against a $5 million budget and brought Burton his second Oscar nomination, his first for Best Actor.

  Zanuck now offered a seven-year, seven-picture contract worth $1 million, and Burton politely declined. He wanted to play Hamlet at The Old Vic. Zanuck threatened to force the deal, and the two compromised on a less binding contract, also for seven years and seven films at $1 million, that would start only after Burton returned. Walking away from a million dollars for £150 a week at The Old Vic stunned and impressed onlookers. Bragg believed Burton defied the studio system, an act that might have guaranteed his unemployment. At a party for The Robe at Simmons' home in Bel Air, Burton met Elizabeth Taylor for the first time. She was married to Michael Wilding and pregnant with their first child. She recalled thinking Burton “rather full of himself” and said she gave him “the cold fish eye.”

  Hamlet both terrified and attracted him, because Gielgud and Olivier had played it. Bogart told him, “I never knew a man who played Hamlet who didn't die broke.” Burton began his thirty-nine-week Old Vic stint in July 1953, rehearsing with Philip coaching him so that Hamlet's character would suit his dynamic style. Bloom played Ophelia. The production opened at the Assembly Hall in Edinburgh in September 1953 during the Festival Fringe. Critics called his Hamlet “moody, virile and baleful,” and young audiences were taken with its aggression. Winston Churchill also praised it. Gielgud was less impressed and asked him backstage, “Shall I go ahead and wait until you're better?... ah, I mean ready?” Burton took the hint and worked some of Gielgud's traits into later performances.

  A bigger success followed with Coriolanus. Burton first refused the role because he disliked the Roman general's early disdain for the poor. The director, Michael Benthall, asked Philip to persuade him. Philip argued that it was Coriolanus's lack of ambivalence that made him admirable, and Burton accepted. Hardy thought Burton's Hamlet “too strong” but called his Coriolanus “quite easily the best I've ever seen,” and Olivier agreed. Burton's Sir Toby Belch in Twelfth Night was called disappointing, partly because he skipped the proper make-up. His Caliban in The Tempest and Philip of Cognac in King John were well reviewed. Benthall directed all five productions, and Alpert believed Burton's presence made the season a commercial success.

  Burton had admired the poet Dylan Thomas since boyhood. After Thomas died on the 9th of November 1953, Burton wrote an essay about him. In 1954 he played First Voice in a BBC Radio adaptation of Thomas's Under Milk Wood, and the entire all-Welsh cast worked for free. He also narrated Lindsay Anderson's short documentary Thursday's Children about the Royal School for the Deaf in Margate. Under Milk Wood would return in 1972 as a film, with Taylor beside him.

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• 6. Lean Years

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  After the Old Vic season, Burton owed Fox three more films, and the first was Prince of Players in 1955. He played the 19th-century Shakespearean actor Edwin Booth, brother of John Wilkes Booth. Philip thought the script “a disgrace” to Burton's name. Director Philip Dunne observed that Burton had not yet mastered the tricks of great movie stars like Gary Cooper, and that the magnetism Burton had on the sound stage did not come through the camera. The film flopped and has been called the first flop in CinemaScope. Crowther did praise Burton's Shakespeare scenes, including Richard III.

  Soon afterwards, director Robert Rossen cast Burton as Alexander the Great, after assuring him he had studied the Macedonian king for two years. Fox loaned Burton to United Artists for a fee of $100,000. The film was shot mostly in Spain between February and July 1955 on a budget of $6 million. Bloom played Barsine, one of Alexander's three wives, and Fredric March played Philip II of Macedon. Burton then made The Rains of Ranchipur, in which he played a Hindu doctor, Rama Safti, who falls for Lady Edwina Esketh, played by Lana Turner. It opened on the 16th of December 1955, three months before Alexander the Great arrived on the 28th of March 1956. Both failed with critics and audiences, and Burton regretted making them. A. H. Weiler of The New York Times did call his Alexander “serious and impassioned.”

  In December 1955, Burton returned to The Old Vic to play Henry V a second time, and the Benthall-directed production was a much-needed triumph. Tynan declared Burton the “next successor to Olivier.” The reviewer for The Times contrasted it with his 1951 attempt and noted that the performance showed a “steely strength.” In January 1956 the London Evening Standard gave him its Theatre Award for Best Actor, and the press began calling him the “Welsh Wizard.” In February 1956 he alternated with John Neville between the roles of Othello and Iago in Benthall's Othello. He drew praise for his dynamism as Othello and was acclaimed as Iago.

  His stay at The Old Vic ended early when the Italian director Roberto Rossellini approached him for Fox's Sea Wife. The film concerns a nun and three men marooned on an island after a U-boat torpedoes their ship. Joan Collins played the nun, and Burton played an RAF officer who falls for her. Zanuck forbade kissing scenes, Rossellini found that unnatural and walked out, and executive producer Bob McNaught replaced him. According to Collins, Burton had a “take-the-money-and-run attitude.” Biographer Munn observed that his salary was the only good thing to come from it. Philip said he was “ashamed.” Burton's next picture, Nicholas Ray's Bitter Victory, in which he played Captain Jim Leith, also failed despite positive feedback.

  By mid-1957 Burton had no offers. He could not return to Britain because of a self-imposed tax exile, and his film fortunes were fading. Producer Milton Sperling then offered him a role in Jean Anouilh's Time Remembered, opposite Helen Hayes and Susan Strasberg. Burton played Prince Albert, who falls in love with a milliner named Amanda. On the 10th of September 1957, a day before he left for New York, Sybil gave birth to their first child, Kate Burton. The play opened to a warm reception at Broadway's Morosco Theatre and ran for 248 performances. It brought Burton his first Tony nomination for Best Actor in a Play, though Hayes won her second Tony for playing his mother.

  On the 9th of May 1958, CBS aired a 90-minute television version of Wuthering Heights in which he played Heathcliff. Philip thought he was “magnificent.” Burton then starred in the film version of John Osborne's Look Back in Anger as Jimmy Porter, an angry young man, with Tony Richardson directing and Bloom again beside him. Burton identified with Porter, finding it “fascinating to find a man who came presumably from my sort of class, who actually could talk the way I would like to talk.” British reviews were favourable, but American ones were more negative. Crowther found his tirades eloquent but tiring.

  The film earned Burton Best Actor nominations at the BAFTA and Golden Globe Awards, but he lost to Peter Sellers and Anthony Franciosa respectively. It earned little at the box office, yet Burton was proud of it. He wrote to Philip, “I promise you that there isn't a shred of self-pity in my performance.” Today it counts as one of the defining films of British New Wave cinema, and Jimmy Porter is regarded as one of Burton's best screen roles. The review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes gives it 89%.

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• 7. Camelot and Cleopatra

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  In 1960, Burton starred in two Warner Bros. films, The Bramble Bush and Vincent Sherman's Ice Palace, and neither succeeded. He was paid a fee of $125,000 for both. He then narrated 26 episodes of the ABC series The Valiant Years, based on Winston Churchill's memoirs. Camelot changed everything.

  Moss Hart, directing the Lerner and Loewe musical on Broadway, had heard from Alan Jay Lerner that Burton could sing. He offered Burton the role of King Arthur at $4,000 a week. Burton asked Olivier for advice, and Olivier told him the salary was good and he should accept. Julie Andrews, fresh from My Fair Lady, played Guinevere, Robert Goulet played Lancelot, and Roddy McDowall played the villain Mordred.

  The production was troubled. Both Loewe and Hart fell ill, advance sales were huge, and the show ran nearly five hours. Burton drafted Philip, who revised the script and cut the running time to three hours while adding three new songs. Burton coached the understudies himself. Lerner said, “he kept the boat from rocking, and Camelot might never have reached New York if it hadn't been for him.” Time magazine wrote that he gave Arthur “the skillful and vastly appealing performance that might be expected from one of England's finest young actors.” Walter Kerr of the critical press praised the “house-hushing brilliance” of Burton's account of pulling the sword from the stone.

  Overall, the opening at the Majestic Theatre earned mixed reviews, and the show was slow to earn money. Advance sales kept it running for three months until a twenty-minute extract aired on The Ed Sullivan Show. After that, Camelot ran for three years, from 1960 to 1963. Burton was called “The King of Broadway” and won the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Musical. The cast recording topped the Billboard charts throughout 1961, and President John F. Kennedy reportedly enjoyed the show and invited Burton to the White House.

  In 1962, Burton played Flying Officer David Campbell, an RAF fighter pilot, in the ensemble war film The Longest Day. The same year, his narration for Jack Howells's documentary Dylan Thomas won the Oscar for Best Documentary Short Subject at the 35th Academy Awards.

  In July 1961, after six months of Camelot, Burton met the producer Walter Wanger, who asked him to replace Stephen Boyd as Mark Antony in Joseph L. Mankiewicz's Cleopatra. Burton was paid $250,000 for four months of work. The production was huge and troubled, with Taylor ill and her weight fluctuating, and Life magazine called it the “Most Talked About Movie Ever Made.” Costs reached almost $40 million, making it the most expensive film made until then, and Fox's future seemed to depend on it.

  During filming, Burton fell in love with Taylor, who was then married to Eddie Fisher. He gave the affair the sardonic nickname “Le Scandale.” According to Alpert, Burton opened their first meeting, during publicity photographs, by asking, “Has anyone ever told you that you're a very pretty girl?” Taylor later recalled thinking, “Oy gevalt, here's the great lover, the great wit, the great intellectual of Wales.” Bragg contradicts Alpert, claiming Burton could not stand Taylor at first and told Mankiewicz, “I expect she shaves.” In their first scene together Burton was shaky and forgot his lines, and Taylor soothed him. According to Taylor, that was when she fell for him.

  Fisher fled the sets for Gstaad, while Sybil went first to Céligny and then to London. Cleopatra was released on the 11th of June 1963 at 243 minutes, to polarising reviews. Time's critic found it “riddled with flaws,” while Crowther called it “generally brilliant, moving, and satisfying.” Richard Brody of The New Yorker later praised the chemistry between Burton and Taylor. The film grossed over $26 million and was nominated for nine Academy Awards, winning three. That was not enough to save Fox from bankruptcy, and the studio's lawsuit against Burton and Taylor for allegedly hurting the film's prospects failed.

  Cleopatra began a series of collaborations with Taylor and kept Burton among the Top 10 box office draws until 1967. He played her tycoon husband Paul Andros in Anthony Asquith's The V.I.P.s, a hit set in the VIP lounge of London Heathrow Airport. After it, Burton became far more selective, crediting Taylor for showing him “what kind of rubbish I was doing.” He divorced Sybil in April 1963. Taylor was granted her divorce from Fisher on the 6th of March 1964.

  The press dubbed the pair “Liz and Dick.” Over the next decade they earned a combined $88 million and spent $65 million. In a 1976 interview, Burton said that “they say we generate more business activity than one of the smaller African nations,” and that they often outspent the Greek tycoon Aristotle Onassis. Taylor took a two-year break from films before her next project with Burton, The Sandpiper in 1965.

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• 8. Mr. Box Office

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  In 1964, Burton played Thomas Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury martyred by Henry II, in Jean Anouilh's Becket. Alpert and historian Alex von Tunzelmann both noted an effective, restrained performance that contrasted with Peter O'Toole's manic Henry. Burton had asked the director Peter Glenville not to throw him out as he had on Adventure Story. Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times said the portrayal reminded viewers of how fine an actor Burton was. The film earned twelve Oscar nominations, including Best Actor for both Burton and O'Toole, who lost to Rex Harrison for My Fair Lady.

  Next Burton played the defrocked clergyman Dr. T. Lawrence Shannon in John Huston's The Night of the Iguana, from Tennessee Williams. Alpert believed it worked because Burton varied his seduction of three women, played by Ava Gardner, Sue Lyon and Deborah Kerr. The two hits led Time to call him “the new Mr. Box Office.”

  While shooting Becket, Burton went to see Gielgud in The Ides of March. Gielgud asked how Burton planned to mark Shakespeare's quatercentenary. Burton replied that producer Alexander H. Cohen had asked him to do Hamlet in New York, and he had accepted on the condition that Gielgud direct. Gielgud agreed, and production began in January 1964. Burton disliked period clothing, and Gielgud embraced the idea of the play as a “permanent rehearsal.” The actors performed on an incomplete set in their own clothes. The cast found the freedom hard, wearing different attire every day. After the first performance in Toronto, Gielgud decreed that capes were needed because the show “lacked colour.” Gielgud also played the Ghost.

  According to Gielgud's biographer Jonathan Croall, Burton's basic reading was a more vigorous and extrovert version of Gielgud's own 1936 performance. In later performances, Burton varied the interpretation and even tried a homosexual Hamlet. At the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre in New York, Howard Taubman of The New York Times praised “a performance of electrical power and sweeping virility.” Time said Burton put his passion into the language rather than the character. Kerr felt “a certain lack of feeling” but admired the “reverberating” voice. Six hundred celebrities attended the opening night party. The run lasted 137 performances, beating the record Gielgud himself had set in 1936. Hume Cronyn won his only competitive Tony for playing Polonius, and Burton lost the Best Actor in a Play Tony to Alec Guinness.

  Three live performances, filmed between the 30th of June and the 1st of July 1964 using a process called Electronovision, were shown in US theatres for a week. Cast members William Redfield and Richard L. Sterne wrote books about the production. On the 21st of June 1964, Burton and Taylor also opened A Poetry Reading at the Lunt-Fontanne, her stage debut. Burton conceived it as a benefit for Philip's conservatory, the American Musical and Dramatic Academy, which had run short of funds. The house was packed, and the pair received a standing ovation. Burton said afterwards, “I didn't know she was going to be this good.”

  On screen, Burton starred opposite Bloom and Oskar Werner in The Spy Who Came In from the Cold, based on John le Carré's 1963 novel. He played Alec Leamas, a British agent sent to East Germany. Director Martin Ritt wanted anonymity, with no eloquent speeches or intense emotional moments, which worried Burton because he had built his reputation on exactly those. Ritt, a non-drinker, disliked Burton's drinking, saying it “lacked a certain discipline.” Even so, the film earned positive reviews, and Fernando F. Croce of Slant Magazine called his performance more “tragic patsy than swashbuckler.”

  In 1966 came Mike Nichols's film of Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Burton wanted Taylor as Martha, saying he wanted “to stop everyone else from playing it.” Jack Lemmon turned down the role of George, and Jack L. Warner agreed to Burton at $750,000. Albee had preferred Bette Davis and James Mason, fearing the Burtons' presence would overwhelm the film. Alpert called the result “the summit of both Richard's and Elizabeth's careers.” Stanley Kauffmann of The New York Times called it “one of the most scathingly honest American films ever made.” The film earned thirteen Oscar nominations, including one for each of the four actors. Only Taylor and Sandy Dennis won. Burton and Taylor won their first BAFTAs, his also for The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.

  Burton and Taylor then staged Marlowe's Doctor Faustus at the Oxford Playhouse, as thanks to Nevill Coghill. It made $22,000 for the Oxford University Dramatic Society. Burton and Coghill adapted it for the screen in 1967, with Burton making his directorial debut, but it was critically panned and a box office failure. Franco Zeffirelli's The Taming of the Shrew in 1967 was a critical and commercial success. Burton also narrated Zeffirelli's documentary Florence: Days of Destruction, which raised $20 million for victims of the 1966 Arno flood.

  By the end of 1967, films starring Burton and Taylor had grossed a combined $200 million. Biographers John Cottrell and Fergus Cashin write that when the couple considered a three-month break, Hollywood “almost had a nervous breakdown,” as nearly half the US cinema industry's theatrical income came from their pictures. The Comedians and Boom! then failed. In 1968, Burton had a commercial blockbuster with Clint Eastwood in the World War II film Where Eagles Dare, earning a $1 million fee plus a share of the box office.

  Heavy drinking fed a reputation as a great performer who wasted his talent, and some critics and colleagues felt he never lived up to the promise Tynan saw in him. Even so, he is widely regarded as one of the finest actors of his generation. He was nominated for an Academy Award seven times and never won, from My Cousin Rachel in 1952 to Equus in 1977, his seventh and last nomination. Richard Burton died on the 5th of August 1984.

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