Word: burtons
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Coward once went backstage and tartly informed the two leading players in one of his shows that their performance was "a triumph of nevermind over doesn't-matter." If Coward were around to chide Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton for a similar self-indulgence, he would have to trip them up on the way to the bank. Both are said to receive $70,000 per week. Coward may have written Private Lives but Midas cast this revival...
...plot line is as simple as sin. Previously wed to each other, Amanda (Taylor) and Elyot (Burton) meet again on the terrace of a seaside resort in France. Each is on a second honeymoon with a fail-safe second mate. Amanda has chosen conventional, humdrum Victor (John Cullum), and Elyot has chosen humdrum, conventional Sibyl (Kathryn Walker). But Amanda and Elyot are blithe spirits: witty, sophisticated, selfish, mercurial. They skip off to Paris, make love again, tiff tempestuously again and, when discovered by the appalled Victor and Sibyl, steal off together again...
...basic flaw with Taylor and Burton is that they lack any flak for feather-light comedy. They substitute double or sextuple entendre, as when Taylor says, "I feel rather scared of marriage really," looking out at the audience with the eyes of a wounded doe. What the Elyot-Amanda roles call for is the sort of fond nonchalance and glancing asperity that William Powell and Myrna Loy brought to Nick and Nora Charles in The Thin Man series. What Taylor's role model was for her part is undecipherable; it comes out as some sort of compromise between Mata...
...Burton's melancholy mien and burnt-out stance would scare any comic muse off into the wings. His has too long been the gravity of a potentially heroic tragic actor waylaid en route to his destiny. His voice is still a casque of gold, but like that ardent Burton fan, Churchill, he seems always to be addressing a constituency, never a person. Of course, the audience for this Taylor-Burton fandango is undeniably a constituency...
Many of the fellows stay on at Harvard as faculty members. Some have even proved Lowell's thesis that a Ph.D. is not necessary for scholarship. Political Scientist McGeorge Bundy, who became Harvard's dean of arts and sciences, and Society of Fellows Chairman Burton Dreben, a former dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, never took the degree. Excellence is the society's reason for being, and excellence is Harvard's reward. Says Dreben: "With all the compromises we make, there has to be true support of pure scholarship, the inquiry into knowledge...