Byrne on Burton
A century after his birth, Richard Burton is remembered by fellow actor Gabriel Byrne
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- Amy Raphael
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When Richard Burton arrived on the set of the mini-series Wagner in the early 1980s, the actor’s two marriages to Elizabeth Taylor had made him one of the biggest stars on the planet. The working-class boy from a south-Wales mining village had enjoyed a glittering career on stage and screen, earning seven Oscar nominations for celebrated films like Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Equus.
Yet when Gabriel Byrne, who had just landed one of his first jobs outside his native Ireland as composer Richard Wagner’s patron Karl Ritter, met the actor with the famously mellifluous voice, he was shocked. “I remember walking on set and thinking he must be well into his 70s, but he was, in fact, only in his mid-50s,” the actor recalls. “He was dissipated by drink and years of heavy smoking. He had a horrendous back problem that limited his mobility. I’d seen him in all these films about masculine energy and here he was on set, looking frail.” It was, it would later turn out, the coda to Burton’s life.
Gabriel Byrne. Getty
Byrne, who went on to enjoy a successful career with films including Miller’s Crossing and The Usual Suspects and the TV series In Treatment, found Burton, despite his diminished physicality, to be bright, engaged and kind. “He read novels translated from Russian and Japanese and his knowledge of poetry was encyclopaedic. Once I got over the fact that he was one of my favourite actors, I would sit around talking to him as he smoked a steady stream of Marlboro Reds. I think he was quite sick at the time because he’d undergone treatment for alcohol misuse in the States, but he was trying to stay sober for the eight-month Wagner shoot.”
Byrne recalls a particular day filming Wagner in Austria that, for him, epitomises Burton’s later life. “There were 50 to 100 photographers at 5am all yelling, ‘Are you and Liz going to get back together?’ He was divorced from Elizabeth Taylor for the second time in 1976, and in 1983 had new partner Sally Hay [the pair met on the set of Wagner], so it was disrespectful, to say the least. When he died the following year, people were still talking about Elizabeth at his graveside as his wife was standing there, grieving. Richard and Elizabeth were toxic, addictive companions and Sally was helping him live a simple life.”
He put his work first and his life second
Gabriel Byrne
Byrne appears alongside Hay and Burton’s daughter Kate in Richard Burton: Wild Genius, a new documentary that’s part of the BBC’s celebration of the centenary of his birth. There are previously unseen home movie recordings, photos and letters, all of which help paint a picture of an extraordinarily gifted Welsh kid who, like Richard Harris and Oliver Reed, became immortalised as a tortured artist. In Wild Genius, Byrne says that Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor “were addicted to each other, to alcohol and to fame”.
Now, talking on Zoom from New York, he explains more. “All those great actors like Burton, who struggled with alcohol, were sick with a disease, but the stories of their decline are couched in bravado, and they are seen as ‘wild men’. Drink destroyed his talent. He suffered while the media mythologised him.”
Would it be fair to say that Burton’s ability to access pain made him a great actor? “I don’t think he was in love with acting, but in the right role, like, say, The Spy Who Came In from the Cold, there was absolutely a melancholy and sadness. He didn’t think he was that good an actor. I don’t think he would’ve called himself a genius. A genius, for him, was Dylan Thomas or Shakespeare.”
Gabriel Byrne and Richard Burton in Wagner.
Even though Burton has been dead for over 40 years, Byrne clearly loves talking about him. “He gave me a fantastic piece of advice that has stayed with me: ‘Your work isn’t who you are. The real you is not your job.’” Did Burton adhere to his own advice? Byrne laughs. “He did not; he put his work first and his life second. He ultimately understood the futility of success and fame. He certainly didn’t have it easy. I thought it was incredibly unfair that people said he ‘threw away’ his genius and ‘betrayed’ the British stage. He didn’t. He left to make great films.”
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Byrne saw Burton for the last time in 1984. “We kept in touch, and I went to see him on the set of Nineteen Eighty-Four. His hair was white and his eyes very bright. It was as though he had a fever. He said to me, ‘This is my comeback.’ It was a real moment of hope. And then, shortly afterwards, he died from a haemorrhagic stroke. He was buried in Switzerland, where he lived, which was so strange to me.” Because he never went home to Wales? “Exactly. But I don’t think he was ever at home, even in himself."
Authors
Amy Raphael
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