Richard Burton

The Voice That Came Out of a Coal Mine

Richard Burton was born in a Welsh village where the air was heavy with mine dust. He was the twelfth of thirteen siblings, and his expected fate was to end up breaking rocks like his father. But this man had a prodigious voice that turned any sentence into thunder. His teacher Philip Burton legally adopted him to lift him out of poverty and taught him to shape that roar at the University of Oxford.

In 1952, he crossed the Atlantic to shoot My Cousin Rachel in Hollywood. The producers were stunned by his intensity in front of the camera. He wasn't the typical polished leading man the studios were looking for. He was rougher and more dangerous. He earned his first Oscar nomination for that role, and the world realized British theater had unleashed a beast who was hard to tame.

And the gamble paid off.

But Burton despised movies almost as much as he needed them to pay his bills. He said acting in front of a lens was an exercise in vanity compared to the stage of the Old Vic. There he played Shakespeare with an authority no one has matched since. His technique didn't come from method but from an inner rage that only calmed down with alcohol.

The Shoot That Nearly Sank a Studio

In 1963, the project for Cleopatra came along and everything blew up. The film's budget soared to 44 million dollars at the time. There he met Elizabeth Taylor, and the scandal was enormous. Both were married, and the Vatican even issued a statement denouncing their erotic escapades through the streets of Rome.

Fox nearly went bankrupt because of his whims and delays. But audiences didn't care about the logistics. They wanted to see the most explosive couple on the planet burn up on screen. They each earned one million dollars for that blockbuster, which is still studied today as the greatest excess in the film industry.

That was the beginning of the end of his peace.

They married and divorced twice. They bought the Krupp diamond and gave each other yachts while shooting mediocre films to keep up that lifestyle. But amid all the noise, they filmed Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in 1966. It's probably his best work, because they stopped acting and started screaming truths that truly hurt. Burton lost the Oscar to Lee Marvin in one of the Academy's most controversial decisions.

The Decline of a Wounded Giant

The 1970s were a downward slide of paycheck projects and bottles of vodka. He made action movies like The Wild Geese in 1978 purely for the paycheck. His health was shattered, and doctors warned that his liver wouldn't hold up much longer. Yet he still had a presence that filled the frame, even when he could barely stay on his feet.

In 1984, he accepted the role of O'Brien in the film adaptation of 1984. He was so thin that the costume team had to adjust his outfits several times during filming. It was his last great acting lesson. He died shortly after finishing his scenes, due to a sudden brain hemorrhage at his home in Switzerland.

He was only 58 years old.

He died on August 5, 1984, in Céligny. He left an estate valued at 4.5 million dollars at the time, and a legacy of seven Oscar nominations without a single statuette on his shelf. His funeral was private and simple, in a small Swiss cemetery far from the noise of California.