Welsh actor, brilliant and famed first for Shakespeare, then for international films in a meteoric career, a blazing rise across the heavens before an early death of a stroke at 58. He was nominated for the Best Actor Oscar for his roles in a half dozen magnificent films. He was a wild Celtic charmer who spoke with the tongue of angels and revered intelligence and scholarship but surrendered all to eagerly to the lure of liquor, womanizing and excess. As a legendary film star he was noted as much for his roistering appetites as his acting brilliance, plus a global romance conducted in the privacy of the first page and TV newscasts. In all too brief a time, he was burnt-out, living quietly in Switzerland. He left such memorable performances as “Equus” on Broadway in 1976, for which he got a Tony, his “Hamlet” and “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.”
The 12th of 13 kids of a poor Welsh mining family, whose mother died two years later, he started drinking at 15 and was fully an alcoholic by the ’60s; he died with a liver three times a normal size. As a youth, he met his mentor, Philip Burton, whose name he took professionally. Philip, to whom he referred as his foster father, was an actor and professor of literature who taught Richard to speak, overcoming his incomprehensible Welsh accent. He primed the boy for his early debut, when he made a glorious entry on to the English stage. The play opened in Liverpool and later ran in London.
At 18, Burton joined the Royal Air Force and was sent to Canada for training as an air navigator. He left the service as a sergeant in 1947. Back in London, he joined a production company that paid him $30 a week for a year. His first film was in 1949, “The Last Days of Dolwyn.” He made his Broadway debut in Christopher Fry’s “The Lady’s Not for Burning.”
One of the extras in his first film was Sybil Williams, who became his first wife. He was casting about when, as he said later, “lightning struck.” His agent informed that 20th Century Fox wanted to star him in “My Cousin Rachel.” The financial draw seemed a fortune to the young couple. Sybil stayed in London while Richard found Hollywood with all its glitter and all its access. He began to drink heavily and fall into easy beds. He became a drinking buddy with Spencer Tracy and Humphrey Bogart. While on the party circuit a day in 1952, one of the gorgeous women whom he met was a 20-year-old named Elizabeth Taylor, sitting on the other side of a swimming pool and meeting his gaze.
He made “The Robe” the following year and was nominated for an Oscar for these first two pictures as well as three others. While not filming, Burton played in the London legitimate theater. He and Sybil had two daughters, Kate and Jessica, who was born autistic.
In 1960, 20th Century Fox assigned him to a film that was being made in Rome, “Cleopatra,” starring Elizabeth Taylor. During the filming, the two stars, both married, met with an irresistible impact. They couldn’t keep their hands off each other. The film became one of the most expensive failures in Hollywood history, but Liz-and-Dick provided hot copy for the media. They divorced their respective mates, Sybil Burton and Eddie Fisher, and married.
Of Burton’s five marriages, two were to Elizabeth Taylor, by whom he was utterly bewitched. They would ultimately pair in nearly a dozen films and one stage play, Noel Coward’s “Private Lives,” 1983. Their conspicuous consumption was notorious, of houses, yachts, diamonds; they spent millions on the good life. After eight years of marriage he wrote, “My God she’s a beauty. I look at her when she’s asleep at the first light of a gray dawn and wonder at her.” They were both drinking, Burton was endlessly womanizing, and their fights sounded like raging tenement brawls. It ended with their divorce in 1974. A year later they married again in Africa, October 1975, both mesmerized by their marital and sexual volcanic vortex. They were the same people as before, and the ending was predictable. By December he had met a beautiful, very British model, Susan Hunt. They married on 8/21/1976, a marriage that lasted six years. His last wife was Sally Hay, a former secretary, who inherited his estate, but Elizabeth never left his mind and heart.
During the peak days of his success, Burton was supporting some 42 friends and relatives. For all his fame and wealth, he was never far from inexplicable melancholy.
He died of a cerebral hemorrhage on 8/05/1984, Geneva, Switzerland.
Link to Wikipedia biography