Richard Burton (Richard Jenkins) (1925-84)
Almost a decade before Cleopatra (1963) changed the trajectory of his life for ever Richard Burton was in the front rank of British stage actors. He made a particularly startling early impression with the Old Vic Company, particularly in Shakespearian roles and the verse plays of Christopher Fry.
He had an aggressive, charismatic screen presence and was also very effective in broody, contemplative parts when his deep baritone, sonorous voice and great verse speaking ability enthralled audiences.
Burton, the 12th of 13 children born to a miner at Pontrhydyfen, south Wales, owed these skills and his early assurance to his mentor and former school drama teacher Philip Burton - later adopting his surname.
His stage debut was in an Emlyn Williams play, Druids Rest, in Liverpool and his screen debut was, fittingly in the only film Williams directed - The Last Days of Dolwyn (1949) - as a callow shop assistant more at home speaking Welsh than English.
He was to make a greater impact early on in Hollywood, gaining his only Hollywood Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination for My Cousin Rachel (1952), then landing his first of six Best Actor nominations for his central role in the Bible epic The Robe (1953), an unremarkable film which garnered massive attention as the first Cinemascope feature.
In the 1950s he was learning the nuances of screen acting, sometimes as lead in prosaic, forgettable films, notably in Prince of Players (1956) and the title role of Alexander The Great (1956).
His two serious performances of note that decade were as the military tormentor, with his sardonic witticisms, of Curt Jurgens in Nicholas Ray's superb, now seriously underrated desert drama Bitter Victory (1957), and as Jimmy Porter, the disenchanted Angry Young Man of Tony Richardson's version (1959) of the 1956 John Osborne stage play Look Back in Anger, which changed the entire direction of British drama. Burton spat out the vitriol and the diatribes with panache, though some critics considered him too old for the role.
Working with fine scripts helped Burton to mature as a performer and the 1960s became his most fertile decade, as he gained four other Best Hollywood Actor nominations - for Becket (1964), The Spy Who Came In From the Cold (1965), Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?(1966) and as Henry VIII in Anne of the Thousand Days (1969). In 1962 he appeared, taking no fee as on-and-off screen narrator, reading, engagingly, the poet's work in a Welsh documentary Dylan Thomas, an Oscar-winning short for director Jack Howells made for television but released in UK cinemas by British Lion.
Burton faced intimidating challenges - and pressure - created in the 1960s by his marriage to co-star Elizabeth Taylor on the Twentieth Century Fox multi-million pound Cleopatra. Beset by production problems it earned only moderate reviews but copious column inches for the lavish sets, costumes and off-screen love match.
Burton's performance in Mike Nichols' Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was the finest of his career - as a bitter disillusioned, academic constantly indulging in tirades against his screen wife (Elizabeth Taylor) and the college life he had grown to loathe.
The Welshman was always best in films when he could display an edge of desperation and he was convincingly downbeat and dishevelled in The Spy Who Came In From the Cold (1965) a superb vehicle for his talents, from the John Le Carré novel. He was a hard-drinking, dyspeptic tour guide in The Night of the Iguana (1964), culled from Tennessee Williams' theatre drama.
There was an opportunity for cinemagoers to assess Burton's stage magic in a filmed recording of his theatre Hamlet (shot over two days, released in 1964 and directed by John Gielgud), though the film seemed inevitably uncinematic.
From the late 1960s Burton took too many lucrative roles, which scarcely benefited his reputation, but allowed maintenance of a high- profile expensive lifestyle. Box office potboilers such as Where Eagles Dare (1969) and The Wild Geese (1978) probably helped, but at least in the 1970s he struck grace notes in Equus (1977), his sixth Hollywood Best Actor nomination, and gave a respectable performance in the title role of Joseph Losey's The Assassination of Trotsky (1972).
In his very late roles he seemed, too frequently, to be going through the motions. Only the voice retained its original, always appealing timbre.
Burton, whose 1960s salaries had soared to over one million dollars per picture in line with his wife's, divorced Taylor in the early 1970s and remarried her in 1975, divorcing again the following year. He later married Suzy Hunt, the estranged wife of racing driver James Hunt, and later Sally Burton. Their daughter Kate Burton is a professional actress.
