Something Thoughtful

Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him.      

                                      WHEN A BRIGHT STAR BURNS OUT                                

Recently my wife and I went to the local cinema and saw Mr Burton, a reasonably good film about the youth of the actor who became known as Richard Burton. Not a great film – it looked like the type of film that would be screened on the B.B.C. for late night cultured viewers - and it was shot in dim, muddy colours. But it was entertaining. It was the story of how the rough Welsh teenager Richard Walter Jenkins, son of an impoverished coal-mining family, was tutored by Philip H. Burton who made him into an actor. Mr. Burton legally adopted young Jenkins, who changed his name to Burton. Philip Burton was a single man, and there have been some whispers about his sexuality; but whatever it was, it had no influence on the young actor who was lifelong lustily heterosexual. The film has some brief moments where young Richard Burton is cuddling and kissing a young Welsh woman – presumably meant to be the Welsh actress Sybil Williams who became the first of Richard Burton’s four wives. And the film ends with the young actor getting a standing ovation for his performance in a Shakespeare play.

I wasn’t too impressed by this film, but it set me thinking about how a bright and charismatic actor like Richard Burton could burn out long before he died. I think about these things because for thirty years I was a film-reviewer when I wasn’t teaching. 

 

In the late 1940’s and up to the late 1950’s, Richard Burton was regarded as the great up-and-coming Shakespearian performer on stage, in the Old Vic, at  Stratford-on-Avon and in New York. He did Hamlet and Othello and Coriolanus and Henry V on stage and was widely seen as rivalling the likes of Laurence Olivier. These performances were not filmed and they were before my time, so I have to take on trust how good he was. He appeared in some films early in his career. [I can recall as a teenager watching on television one Sunday afternoon the first film in which Burton appeared, in a minor role in The Last Days of Dolwyn, made in 1947.] In the late 1950’s he starred in the film version of John  Osborne’s grumpy play Look Back in Anger, one of his best film performances. He gained a big audience in New York in the musical Camelot. He was nominated for the Oscar in 1964 for his role in Becket but didn’t win it. The following year he was nominated for The Spy Who Came in From the Cold – and I am still angry that he didn’t win it, because I think it was the best performance he ever did on screen – though in fairness I should also say that he did very well in the film of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf and he still managed to record excellent readings of poetry by Shakespeare, by many other poets, but especially by his fellow Welshman Dylan Thomas, with his rich, rolling voice.

But by the early 1970s, I can remember one of my lecturers referring  to Richard Burton as just “a rich man with a loud voice”. What had happened? Of course he was ageing but, more depressingly, he was allowing himself to appear in films that were pure trash – cheap war films in particular… and if you don’t believe me, look up Where Eagles Dare and, worse, the abominable Raid on Rommel. He would do anything for the money. I remember him having a bit part in an American sit-com. It was cringe-worthy. Part of the trouble was his need for money, not only for his children but also for being sucked into the glam of Hollywood first when starring with Elizabeth Taylor in the overblown extravaganza Cleopatra. They did at least one good film together [Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ] but Hollywood gave him trash and he knew it. He was no more a “prince of players” [in the 1950s he had starred in a film called Prince of Players].  Well before he died in 1984, he was becoming a parody of himself. Richard Burton was not the only actor who allowed himself to star in rubbish (think of Laurence Olivier in The Betsy ; think of pompous old John Gielgud in the witless Arthur). But Burton was wasting his talent long before he could be called old.

…. My wife and I drove back home after seeing the film Mr Burton, and sat down in front of the television, went to Youtube, and watched as many interviews as possible Burton had given in his later years. He was good at telling anecdotes about his deceased parents and his early years in Wales. He was good at reciting some poems. Sometimes he mimicked a few other actors. But it was clear that he was well past his best years and no longer had his original charisma, even though he was not yet all that old . Pity.