Mr Burton

An atmospheric version of the early life of Richard Burton, the miner’s son who became one of the greatest stage and screen actors of his time and married Elizabeth Taylor, not once but twice.

The Mr Burton in the title is not the star but the village schoolteacher Philip Burton, who wrote radio plays as a sideline and coached young Richard Jenkins in the art of acting; needing a stage name, Young Jenkins became Richard Burton. Toby Jones is very much the “flavour of the year” and in perfect pitch here as the man who saw the boy Richard’s potential and nurtured his modest talent into the strato-sphere. Lesley Manville has a fruity role as Philip’s landlady, who is so motherly that they both call her “Ma”.

The script tentatively hints at homosexuality – why did Philip devote so much of his life to this particular schoolboy? – but possibly for want of evidence this issue fizzles out.

Harry Lawtey delivers a believable portrait of young Richard, the uncouth son of a hard-drinking coalminer who almost accidentally turns out to have the makings of an actor. Getting him to “talk proper” gives the movie some humour and is, of course, the core of what made Richard a star. Lawtey is good in the transitional stages but he doesn’t get the mature Richard’s glorious resonance quite right; it comes across as a bit of a parody. But the tone of the movie is fine, with none of the hyperbole that usually messes up Hollywood biopics.

By chance I watched an early Burton movie on TV last week, The Robe, the Biblical epic that was famously the first movie in CinemaScope. We hear the voice of Jesus but never see his face, relying on the reactions of the other characters, including (oh dear) Victor Mature, one of the prime contenders for the All-Time Worst Actor award. The best thing in the movie is Jay Alexander whose shrieking Emporer Caligula recalls Kenneth Williams’s Captain Ahab in Round the Horne. Our Richard doesn’t look too comfortable in a leather miniskirt tunic but That Voice gives his Marcellus a kind of magic. That Voice made him the best-ever King Arthur in the Broadway cast of Camelot: aping Rex Harrison’s approach to talking in a musical voice when you can’t sing was never better than Burton’s Arthur.

But he could be a klutzy boy on screen (and on stage too: they say his Private Lives with la Taylor was beyond travesty). In some of the movies he made with Liz you can almost see him sneering at the script (“Sorry, people, I know this is crap but we needed the money”) whereas she always gave a good performance even in bad movies, which is the hallmark of a true professional. Of course, at their best – in, say, The Taming of the Shrew and (sublimely) Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, — they were the crème de la crème.

One of these days I must post on here the naughty details of the call I listened in on between Liz (at the Dorchester) and Richard (in Yugoslavia) back in my career as a telephonist at the Continental telephone exchange in London. Spicy!

Mr. Burton can be seen for free on BBC iPlayer