"I've done the most awful rubbish in order to have
somewhere to go in the morning."
Richard Burton
The first time I saw Richard Burton in a movie was probably when I watched "Demetrius and the Gladiators" on television in 1961. He's actually not in that one, except for a brief flashback clip of the scene at the end of "The Robe", where the mad emperor Caligula (Jay Robinson) sends Burton and fellow martyr Jean Simmons off to be executed.
The first time I saw Burton on a big screen was in "The Longest Day", Darryl Zanuck's epic recreation of D-Day, in which he plays a downed aviator whose wounds have been stitched together with safety pins.
After that, he seemed to turn up a lot, sometimes in good movies, sometimes in great ones, and sometimes in junk where the main point of interest is wondering how much the actor was drinking during the shoot. Here are a few of the better ones:
"The Robe" (1953/Henry Koster)
Burton's a Roman soldier who ends up with the robe Christ wore to the Crucifixion. The first movie in CinemaScope.
"The Longest Day" (1962/Ken Annakin, Andrew Marton, Bernhard Wicki)
Burton's sardonic fatalism stands out in a movie loaded with star cameos.
"Becket" (1964/Peter Glenville)
Burton and Peter O'Toole face off as Thomas à Becket and Henry II.
"The Night of the Iguana" (1964/John Huston)
Burton's a defrocked priest on the skids in Mexico, in the company of Ava Gardner, Sue Lyon and Deborah Kerr.
"The Spy Who Came In From the Cold" (1965/Martin Ritt)
Cold War cloak-and-dagger work, from a novel by John le Carré. The anti-james Bond.
"Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" (1966/Mike Nichols)
"The Taming of the Shrew" (1967/Franco Zefirelli)
Mr. & Mrs. Burton in an Edward Albee psychodrama and a Shakespeare comedy.
"Where Eagles Dare" (1968/Brian G. Hutton)
Burton, Clint Eastwood and a million rounds of ammo. A great guilty pleasure.
"Anne of the Thousand Days" (1969/Charles Jarrott)
Genevieve Bujold plays Anne Boleyn. Burton plays Henry VIII.
"Villain" (1971/Michael Tuchner)
Burton plays a vicious gangster in a movie Guy Ritchie must've watched once or twice.
"1984" (1984/Michael Radford)
Burton persuades John Hurt to love Big Brother.
As a young stage actor, Burton's intensity and charisma, along with a magnificent voice, earned him comparisons to Gielgud and Olivier. On screen, he didn't always bother to scale it back, but he could be devastating when he did.
He was famously married to Elizabeth Taylor (twice), and for a time was probably known as much for that and an extravagant lifestyle as he was for his film and theater work.
The years and a lifelong affection for alcohol caught up with him eventually, and in some of his later films, he looks ravaged. Yet even then, his haunted presence makes you want to watch. And he has that voice.
Burton died from a cerebral hemorrhage on August 5, 1984. He was 58.
