This month has marked the centenary of the birth of the actor Richard Burton — or, as he is known in my house, “the sonorous Welsh actor Richard Burton”. The event has been marked with the usual obsequies paid to the dear departed. Blue plaques were unveiled outside his birthplace in Danybont, Pontrhydyfen and at the home of his adoptive father, the schoolmaster Philip Burton, in Port Talbot, and there has been a BBC documentary, Wild Genius, produced about him. The beleaguered broadcaster has also screened a recently made film about Philip, Mr Burton, starring Toby Jones as the pedagogue and Industry actor Harry Lawtey as the young Richard. Another Welshman, Matthew Rhys, is playing Burton in a one-man show, Playing Burton, and has described the experience as “pretty terrifying … I could hear the drumbeat in my head”.
For Rhys, who has had conspicuous success in shows like The Americans and Perry Mason — as well as giving a fine performance as another Celt, Dylan Thomas, in the biopic The Edge of Love — there is no question that Burton is the formative and influential Welsh actor. He said of his forbear that “He didn’t just walk the path; he blazed it. To me, he was — and still is — a kind of pillar and beacon who showed us that it’s allowed: we can do this, we’re allowed to take our place.” Rhys is far from the first actor to salute Burton in such a way. Everyone from Anthony Hopkins to Burton’s co-star and drinking partner Peter O’Toole has talked about the thespian in awestruck, reverential terms that bear more relation to a god amongst men than someone who wore make-up and recited lines written by other people for a living.
Looked at now, it is a wonder of sorts that he even made it to 58
To an extent, this is a reflection of the way in which actors often fail to acquire perspective about their own profession. If the average viewer were to catch sight of many of the films Burton made, especially later in his career when the booze had taken hold of him, they are unlikely to be particularly impressed by what they saw. Dads’ favourite man-on-a-mission films Where Eagles Dare and The Wild Geese aside, there are an awful lot of terrible projects that have clearly been made to pay off the figurative (or literal) bar tab, and Burton, looking terrible, has a glassy-eyed thousand-yard stare that seldom breaks into animation. It did not help that such appalling pictures as Exorcist II: The Heretic and The Medusa Touch were hamstrung by scripts that even the world’s finest actor could not have salvaged, and Burton — who once was in serious contention for such a title — had long since given up caring.
Yet the narrative that has grown up around him, whether that he was a man of immense potential who squandered it through booze, profligacy and the misfortune of his generation’s most scandalous and tabloid-baiting love affair with Elizabeth Taylor, or that he is an actor without peer who single-handedly redefined Welsh performance in his image, remains a partial one. It is undeniably true that, in his heyday, he was someone of rare magnetism precisely because he wasn’t from the public school-Oxbridge background of so many of his peers or predecessors. Instead, he was the twelfth of thirteen children, born into obscure back-alley poverty, and who dragged himself out of it through self-belief and vigour alike.
To see Burton on screen or, more vitally, on stage was to watch innate anger and resentment as much as it was to witness the quicksilver expression of a talent that somehow seemed too large to be contained by celluloid or the proscenium arch alike. If he was playing Hamlet, or John Osborne’s Jimmy Porter, or the hopelessly compromised spy Alec Leamas, or even, inevitably, Alexander the Great, you were not expecting a bland and naturalistic performance, but something elemental and vital that appeared to have been wrenched out of him. You knew that he would have been fighting, shagging and boozing either side of curtain up or “action!” and that he would be resuming these activities, with vigour, as soon as his unmanly moment of acting was over. Not for Burton the refinement of a Gielgud or the oration of an Olivier. Instead, acting for him became a vital, even painful, expression of the self, and the consequences could only be horrendous.
Looked at now, it is a wonder of sorts that he even made it to 58. It is a reflection of his residual talent that his final role, as a brutal but wry O’Brien in the 1984 adaptation of Nineteen Eighty-Four, proved that he never lost the ability to act in a way that could produce the true Aristotelean combination of pity and fear, save that he could so seldom be bothered to do so. Yet it was this sense of danger that he conveyed on and off screen alike that made him an electrifying, complex presence. Tell Burton one day that you’d found a performance of his affecting — or disappointing — and he would have embraced you, agreed with you and bought you drinks all night. Tell him exactly the same thing the next day, and he would have knocked you to the ground and shouted abuse at you.
Being quixotic, of course, is the prerogative of a great actor. And it is sadly telling that Burton’s influence today is in decline. Most contemporary performers are media-trained, well-behaved and predictable. Few, if any, manage any kind of hellraising lifestyle, even in private, because the demands that studios and publicists exert upon them means that they are required to be on show and Instagram-ready at virtually any time of day, or face the inevitable cancellation.
Were Burton alive today, there is no way that he would have had a career of the calibre that he enjoyed, even before the rubbish took over, because some small-minded bean counter would have regarded his talent as less important than the necessity of remaining docile. If we raise a glass to the late, lamented Richard Jenkins, as he was born, we do so not only in memory of a remarkable, unpredictable talent, but in that of a bygone and more compelling age of acting that will, alas, never come again.
