Richard Burton, CBE ( 1925 – 1984) was a British 7 time Academy Award nominated, Golden Globe Award winning actor. He was at one time the highest-paid actor in Hollywood and is best associated with his second wife, actress Elizabeth Taylor, notes Wikipedia. [1]
Early on as an actor, he developed the habit of toting around a book-bag filled with novels, dictionaries, a complete Shakespeare, and books of quotations, history, and biography, to stoke his mind and stimulate conversation. He was also an enthusiastic crossword puzzle solver. His Welsh love of language was paramount, as he famously stated years later, with a tearful Elizabeth Taylor at his side, “The only thing in life is language. Not love. Not anything else.”[18]
Burton appeared on Broadway, receiving a Tony Award nomination for Time Remembered (1958) and winning the award for playing King Arthur in the musical Camelot (1960). Burton's reviews were excellent, Time magazine stated that Burton “gives Arthur the skillful and vastly appealing performance that might be expected from one of England's finest young actors”. The show's album was a major seller. The Kennedys, newly in the White House, also enjoyed the play and invited Burton for a visit, establishing the link of the idealistic, young Kennedy administration with Camelot.
In the troubled production Cleopatra (1963), Twentieth Century-Fox's future appeared to hinge on what became the most expensive movie ever made up until then, reaching almost $40 million.[43] The film proved to be the start of Burton's most successful period in Hollywood; he would remain among the top 10 box-office earners for the next four years. During the filming, Burton met and fell in love with Elizabeth Taylor, who was married to Eddie Fisher.
He and Taylor had a great success in Mike Nichols's film (1966) of the Edward Albee play Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, in which a bitter erudite couple spend the evening trading vicious barbs in front of their horrified and fascinated guests, played by George Segal and Sandy Dennis.
Burton died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1984 at his home in Switzerland, where he is buried. He was 58 years old.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment