Word: burtons
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...worked in the '""s), and some of them went on to other positions in local government, the police, and the army. In Richard, however, the family planted its dream of something better beyond the valley. "The idea of a Welsh miner's son going to Oxford University," says Richard Burton, "was ridiculous beyond the realm of possibility...
...athlete and, of all things, a gifted soprano who took prizes in the eisteddfod, singing, as his sister put it, as if "he had a bell in every tooth." In a sense, he outgrew his family, being something more than life-size even then. A teacher-writer named Philip Burton, drama coach and English master at the Port Talbot grammar school, offered him a room in his lodgings. Cecilia and her husband agreed...
Richard describes himself as "mock tough" when he first knew Philip Burton. Burton, for his part, was chiefly impressed?in Richard's first awkward go on a stage?by the boy's "astonishing audience control. He could do anything he wanted with the audience." This is one talent that can only be found, never developed, and since Richard had it, Phil Burton trained him dramatically, put an English polish on his voice without obscuring the Welsh vitality, fed him a reading list of great books, prepared him for his try for Oxford, and directed him in all his early plays...
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...