By Elliott West
“You may be as viscous about me as you please. You will only do me justice”.
Richard Burton
Introduction
Michael Parkinson is rightly known as the king of the chat shows. He interviewed everyone that was famous and influential on his BBC show from 1971-1982 and later again on ITV between 1998-2007. His Yorkshire background made him hungry for inside information and he didn’t pull any punches when interviewing guests. A journalist who loved to cajole stories out of his selected interviewees, Michael was perhaps apprehensive when he sent an invitation to Richard Burton in 1974. I say this because the Welshman was at the time recovering from a spell in an alcohol detox clinic and just out of a broken 13-year marriage to Elizabeth Taylor.
Recorded as it was supposed in the evening, the show was actually filmed in the morning to make sure Richard was actually sober. Perhaps he thought he was still in the hospital because when he walked down the stairs, the audience was made up of sixty of the catering staff from the BBC canteen in their kitchen uniform. Burton or Jenkins as he was originally known, looked shy and clearly nervous. He didn’t like the one-on-one interviews, a situation where the camera and the lights captured every expression and move. The actor known for his distinctive, Welsh, baritone voice, represented everything Welsh, was born in the Welsh valleys.
His father, Richard was a coal miner and Burton was one of 13 children. A time when coal miners were the kings of the land that they surveyed. Big and strong, their skin was engrained with coal dust and they wielded their axes at the black gold that financed the many pit towns across Wales. They were demi-gods and highly respected, a profession that was seen to last from your first pay packet until retirement.
Behind the Famous Mask
Richard Burton was actually the timider of the two as Parkinson revealed through his questioning, the more vulnerable side of this Welsh giant. A man who meticulously smoked his way through a packet of cigarettes as he spoke and drank nothing but water. Burton was a true Celt, someone who loved to live and teeter on the precipice of life. Alcohol sunk him into oblivion but it never quite made him want to end his life. He loved the thrill of oblivion, a place where his sorrows were drowned as he downed several bottles of spirits a day but even when he was given a doctor’s warning that he only had two weeks to live, he still pondered on what he could do in that short space of time.
Burton met and socialised with them all, Dylan Thomas, Humphrey Bogart, Laurence Olivier and Winston Churchill to name but a few but when he was behind closed doors, he just wanted to live the excess life. He couldn’t walk down the street when he was married to Elizabeth Taylor without journalists trying to take pictures of them. Their life was complicated, Taylor wearing a constant mask of secrecy in public and showered with material gifts and a lavish lifestyle. He even bought her the most expensive diamond in the world because it was a challenge to purchase. There are not many people who could say that Sir Winston Churchill used their dressing room toilet after watching a performance of Burton in Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
Described as an acting genius, Burton never lost the sense of wonder of what this working-class Welshman had achieved in life. A great mimic who could take off Laurence Olivier and Lee Marvin to a tee, Richard never forgot his humble upbringing and praised his roots. At the time of this interview in 1974, he thought he had another thirty years of acting work left in him to prove his genius but always considered his talent and work to be a miracle.
Sadly it wasn’t to be because Burton died in 1984 in Switzerland shortly after making his last film with Joh Hurt, an adaptation of George Orwell’s book 1984. He passed away from a cerebral haemorrhage, at the age of only 58. A fascinating man who lives on in his extensive television and film catalogue.
