Ammon News - The glamorous marriage of Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor was a real-life soap opera played out on the global stage. Burton, who was born 100 years ago this month, was often accused of drowning his dazzling natural talent in booze and bad choices. In 1966, a BBC interview with the couple saw a furious Taylor come to her husband's aid.

At their extravagant peak as a Hollywood super-couple, Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor took the unusual step in 1966 of trading the movie business to appear for free in a student production at Oxford University. The play was Christopher Marlowe's Dr Faustus, a tragedy about a man who sells his soul to the devil. Burton was asked on the BBC if he had done something similar by betraying the promise of his early theatrical career, as "potentially the greatest stage actor England ever produced", to take Hollywood riches?

Before the defiantly Welsh Burton had a chance to correct the error, Taylor leapt in. "Excuse me, Richard. That makes me so angry! Because he has NOT left the stage! That's absolute bloody rubbish..."

Burton stepped in to say, "Elizabeth, pull yourself together" but she carried on regardless. "Last year, he was just doing a thing here for Oxford on the stage. On Broadway, that was the stage. How can you say he's left the stage?"

The pair were being interviewed alongside Nevill Coghill, the Oxford professor who two decades earlier had championed Burton's acting talent when the young Welshman was studying English Literature there. The offending interviewer was Daily Mail critic David Lewin, who – possibly unwisely – persisted with his line of questioning. Asking Taylor if she got so cross because she felt cinema was "a less creative medium", she said it was "because you said the exact phrase that I knew you were working up to, 'sold out,' and it offends me to my soul". Burton insisted he was not bothered. "I don't care whether they think I've sold out or not," he shrugged.

If Burton was guilty of taking the money and running, few would blame him; his ascent to stardom was almost literally a tale of rags-to-riches. Born Richard Walter Jenkins in the impoverished Welsh mining village of Pontrhydyfen on 10 November 1925, he was the 12th of 13 children. As his second birthday approached, his mother died on Halloween, just days after giving birth to his brother Graham. With his father largely absent during his childhood, Richard was taken in by his older sister and her husband. A bright child with a passion for performance, the young Jenkins was the first of his family to go to secondary school. His teacher Philip Burton, a keen dramatist and frustrated actor, encouraged this natural talent and became his mentor. When Richard was 17, Burton became his legal guardian, and the teenager changed his surname to match his as well.

Now officially "Richard Burton", the working-class miner's son secured a place at the prestigious Oxford University. It was there that the Burton legend took shape; his blazing talent, reckless womanising and prodigious appetite for drink were already in full bloom. In 1949, he married his first wife Sybil, another Welsh actor who would have two children with him. That same year, he made it to London's West End in The Lady's Not for Burning, a romantic comedy that transferred to Broadway a year later. By 1951, he had graduated to playing lead roles at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon, the Bard's home turf. He moved on for two legendary seasons at London's Old Vic, where his monumental portrayals of roles from Hamlet to Henry V sealed his reputation as a potential great.

But Hollywood was also calling. In tandem with his stage career, in 1952 he received the first of his seven Oscar nominations with a best supporting actor nod for My Cousin Rachel, following it up a year later by making it onto the best actor shortlist for The Robe. By the time he was invited in 1961 to appear in Cleopatra, he was already living as a tax exile in Switzerland and had left the London stage forever.

Fiery affair
Everything changed when he met Elizabeth Taylor on the set of the epic flop that would almost bankrupt the 20th Century Fox film studio. Burton was still on his first marriage while Taylor was on to her fourth husband, the crooner Eddie Fisher. Their fiery affair during filming in Rome was an international scandal so great that the Vatican's newspaper L'Osservatore Romano is reported to have denounced Taylor for her "erotic vagrancy", describing her as "an avaricious vamp who destroys families and devours husbands". When Burton was asked in 1974 by BBC film critic Barry Norman if he agreed his career was divided by the eras before and after Cleopatra, the actor instead suggested: "I think my life was changed by a woman called Elizabeth Taylor."

Married in 1964, they became an international source of fascination thanks to their lavish world of ostentatious jewellery, private planes and personal yachts. Some wondered if this superstar lifestyle was a sign of Burton's squandered talent. Burton admitted to the critic Kenneth Tynan in 1967 that his early period after swapping the London stage for Hollywood was "not the most interesting period of my life, from the artistic point of view". However, bad or indifferent reviews never bothered him: "I firmly believe that if people pay money to see me in the theatre or in films, that's their responsibility and not mine. If they stopped seeing me, if my box office ratio went down or something like that, I'd be perfectly content to stop working. I do it because I rather like being famous."

Anyway, Burton rejected any idea that film acting was somehow a lesser art. Rather than needing to project his voice up to the rafters in theatre, he was taught by Taylor – after all, a movie star since the age of 12 – how film acting required "economy, a spareness of voice, of movement, of gesture, of... agony." He added: "When your face, as she explains to me, is going to be 38-feet high… you have to be very careful how massively you register any emotion of laughter, of idiocy, of delight, of tragedy, whatever it is. She is, of course, the best film actress in the world."

His volatile marriage to Taylor brought him both fame and notoriety, and he documented the extreme highs and lows of their life together in his diaries, eventually published in 2012. After that Oxford interview with David Lewin, Burton noted that he felt the Daily Mail critic had been "quite silly and shaming," both on television and at dinner afterwards. Taylor, on the other hand, refused to sanction his buffoonery: "She let him have it with both barrels, both there and on TV. She became almost inarticulate with fury." Burton wasn't yet done with the hapless Lewin, returning to the matter a whole two years later to take delight, somewhat unsportingly, that he had lost his job thanks to his "persistent idiocy" during their encounter. "Everybody exulted in Elizabeth's annihilation… of him, though at the time I had the cold horrors and thought that, in her tigress-ish defence of me, she was making a fool of herself," he wrote.

During the interview itself, Burton had laughed it all off: "We're people of very high temperament, as you may have noticed from Elizabeth." Acknowledging that they found it difficult to be apart from each other for too long, he said their respective careers were "bound up in the fact that we must never ever be separated". But by 1974 the strain had got all too much and they divorced.

Even then, they found it difficult to live apart and married for the second time 18 months later. But that was a bad idea and after four months, they divorced for a second time. By the end of 1976, Burton and Taylor were both married to other people. In 1982, they both divorced those other people. Later that year, that most public of couples announced their professional reunion, returning to the Broadway stage as co-stars of Private Lives.

During the 1983 theatrical run of the Noël Coward comedy, Burton married wife number four, Sally Hay. Taylor would have one more wedding; in 1991 she married husband number seven Larry Fortensky, a mullet-sporting construction worker whom she met in rehab and divorced in 1996. Taylor died at the age of 79 in 2012. When Private Lives was over, Burton returned home to Switzerland with Sally. A year later, on the evening of 4 August 1984, the 58-year-old went to bed early, complaining of a headache. He never woke up.



bbc