A young man from Pont-rhydyfen, Wales, blessed with a sonorous voice, rugged good looks, and talent, Richard Burton seemed destined to succeed Laurence Olivier as the greatest actor on the English-speaking stage. He won acclaim in 1951 as Prince Hal in Shakespeare’s “Henry IV, Part 1,’’ playing opposite Anthony Quayle’s Falstaff, and went on to star in “The Tempest,’’ “Hamlet,’’ “Henry V,’’ and “Othello.’’
Well before Burton died in 1984, at 58, however, critics concluded that he had sold out to Hollywood. Despite receiving six Oscar nominations for best actor and winning a Tony award for playing King Arthur in the musical “Camelot,’’ Burton is remembered, if at all, these days, for his alcohol-soaked, “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf’’-like love affair with actress Elizabeth Taylor, whom he met in the early 1950s, and married (twice).
Comments
What's wrong with this guy (the reviewer)? He praises burton for his objection to the fact that Scofield is preferred as an actor even though Scofield is a "pockmarked man with a cracked voice" and is "elephant-arsed and thin-chested and minute-shouldered" while he, burton is so-called handsome with a "good" voice. (By the way it makes you wonder whether burton ever looked at his wierd chest and shoulders in the mirror, not to mention his notoriously matchstick legs) Burton sounds like the superfical person that he actually was, not someone who is "probing, playfully and plaintively, the mysteries- and manifest unfairness- of his profession." The difference is that scofield can act, burton was a creation of Hollywood's PR industry. Acting is more than having an announcer's voice. By the way, wrong!!!! Everyone I know can understand every word that Brando speaks on the screen. And each of those words is preferable to almost every word spoken by burton.