Richard Burton—who
died 40 years ago today at his home in Geneva, Switzerland—fascinates me as
much as any actor. He was a hell-raiser, to be sure—and, in coupling with the
object of desire mentioned in the above paragraph a decade later, in Cleopatra, a cyclone of scandal.
Since his death at age 58, many have wondered how much
more he might have accomplished had he not become addicted to both fame and
alcohol. He himself thought he had squandered his talent on work that was
essentially inconsequential: “All my life I think I have been secretly ashamed
of being an actor and the older I get the more ashamed I get.”
I think of Burton as suffering from Mickey Mantle
Disease, named after another prodigiously talented celebrity who overcame the
humblest of origins—but still rued that he never became more.
But think of it this way in both cases: How many other
gifted people have yielded to their demons without accomplishing anything at
all?
Oscar nominated seven times (though he never won),
Burton, for all his difficulties in staying sober, still showed at the end of
his life that he could be superb in a supporting role, as in his unsettling
appearance as the mysterious, cruel Party leader “O’Brien” in his last film, 1984.
At his best, in earlier films like Look Back in
Anger, Becket, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, Who’s
Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and Equus—not to mention stage work such
as his legendary 1964 Broadway appearance in Hamlet— few could match his
erudition, intensity, or magnificent baritone voice.
Burton showed talent in another capacity besides
acting. (Surprisingly, it wasn’t in directing—his single foray behind the
camera, a 1967 adaptation of Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, was
critically panned.)
No, his talent turned out to be writing. It didn’t
involve screenplays, as so many other actors have turned their hands to, nor
film analysis (Louise Brooks), novels (Dirk Bogarde), or memoirs (too many to
list here), but diaries, 400,000 words scrawled in pocketbooks, desk diaries
and loose paper.
Burton’s observational powers were acute, as was his
sense of the rhythm of words. Thinking to himself, he could summon passion for
material he admired such as Shakespeare’s plays:
“Last night I was lying on the bed doing a double
crostic and looked up a quotation in the paperbacked Quotation Dictionary that
I carry around with me specifically for that purpose. I immediately became lost
in the book and read all the Shakespeare ones right through very slowly. There
was hardly a line there that I didn't immediately know but seeing the
miraculous words in print again doomed me to a long trance of nostalgia, a
stupor of melancholy, like listening to really massive music, music that moans and
thunders and plumbs fathomless depths.”
Unfortunately, just as often he expressed anger and
disenchantment that all his attempts at self-medication could do nothing to
assuage:
“I loathe, loathe, loathe acting. in studios. In
England. I shudder at the thought of going to work with the same horror as a
bank clerk must loathe that stinking tube journey every morning and the rush
hour madness at night.”
In Elizabeth Taylor, he found his muse (they
would star in 11 films together) and his downfall, as surely as Zelda
Fitzgerald served the same functions for her novelist husband Scott. And, like
the Jazz Age duo, their marriage was as much train wreck as love story, with the
volatility and drinking of each only worsening the same instincts in the other.
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