Richard & Philip: The Burtons - Softcover

In the early 1940s Philip Burton held the post of Senior Master at the Port Talbot Secondary School in South Wales. At the same time he was building a reputation as a playwright, his work having been produced for radio by the BBC. Among his pupils was a boy of exceptional promise, one of thirteen children of a mining family. The boy's home life was unsettled and it was at his own instigation that Philip Burton reluctantly agreed to adopt him and raise him as his son. Within ten years the young Richard Jenkins was transformed into the internationally famous actor Richard Burton, had astounded the critics as Henry V at Stratford-upon-Avon and become a film star in Hollywood. In this moving memoir Philip Burton tells of his forty-year relationship with his adopted son, which ended only with Richard's death in 1984. He recalls how he trained him as an actor, helping him to lose his Welsh accent; how Richard's affair with Elizabeth Taylor and his divorce from his first wife Sybil led to a two-year rift between them; and how Richard nonetheless continued to turn to him for advice and approval throughout his turbulent career. He also writes of his own eventful life, which took him from a Welsh mining community to success as a director on Broadway. Richard Burton was a man whose faults were on the same large scale as his virtues, and Philip Burton knew him perhaps better than anyone. This is a book he is uniquely qualified to write, and which bears witness to the achievements of two remarkable men.

Actor Richard Burton, according to the author, was so generous to his 10 siblings and three divorced wives that to earn big money he starred in third-rate films. But the frustration of not performing in challenging roles, and of forsaking the theater, drove him to drink. Richard (Jenkins) Burton, who became the author's legal ward in Wales sometime around 1943 (dates are often vague in this fragmented memoir), is recalled lovingly by his mentor, who weaves into the story accounts of his own careers as a scriptwriter, acting coach, lecturer, director and occasional actor. Though there was a span of two angry years after Richard left his first wife Sybil to marry Elizabeth Taylor, adoptive father and son were rarely out of touch. When Richard died, in 1984 at the age of 59, the author was 80 and retired. Despite the show-biz glamour and star cast that add glitz to the backdrop here, readers will be disappointed that the lives of these two men are so romantically burnished as to render the telling little more than an exercise in nostalgia.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.