Word: burtonizing
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Druid Wanted. Phil Burton, now director of the Musical and Dramatic Theater Academy of America (in Manhattan), trained Richard with some novel devices. He made him talk on five telephones at once, doing a scene from a play about a busy bank manager who could hold five separate conversations, darting from phone to phone. The exercise was repeated a thousand times to teach the boy coordination and mathematical precision in speaking. Today, Richard understandably hates telephones; but he speaks with fantastic precision. Also, Phil Burton would take Richard to the summit of Mynydd Margam, the last high mountain between Pontrhydyfen...
...Exeter. It was wartime Oxford, but no war to date has changed the ways of the university, and Burton was soon climbing into the college after late and beery forays. He boasts that he broke the Exeter sconce record, a complicated dining-hall punishment for bad etiquette in which the offender was forced to drink nearly two pints of beer in 30 seconds or pay for it. He learned to drink without swallowing and could put down a sconce in ten seconds. "So far as I know," he says, "no one has ever whacked that feat...
...reading English Literature and Italian, and he even went to lectures "with all those pustular, sweaty, hockey-playing, earnest, big-breasted girls"; but he found his real interest in the Oxford University Dramatic Society. Nevill Coghill, don, critic, and man of the theater, was directing Measure for Measure. When Burton asked for a part, Coghill said he was sorry but the play was all cast. Burton's native aggressiveness flashed to the surface. "Let me understudy the leading man," he said wickedly. Undermine would have been a better word. When Measure for Measure opened?with people like John Gielgud...
...Absolute Natural." Burton trained as a navigator, but the war ended before he could fly missions. He spent the next two years playing rugger for the R.A.F. He has never saved a single theatrical notice, but he will unblinkingly refer anyone to "page 37, paragraph i of Rugger, My Life" a book by Wales's own Bleddyn Williams, the Red Grange of Rugby. "I played with a wing-forward," writes Williams, "who soon caught the eye for his general proficiency and tireless zeal. His name: Richard Burton. But it was in CinemaScope that he caught the eye after...
Binky Beaumont gave Burton a contract when he was demobbed in 1947, and within a year he was an established actor. "I would like to be recognized as a great actor on the stage," he was saying before long. "The chances of that coming off are extremely remote, but it's a chance I'll take, which is why I don't want to sign film contracts. It impedes, it gets...