All in the family
Pedigreed actress celebrates her famous dad and movie-star stepmom
WHEN your famous-actor father falls in love with a movie star, maybe the best thing your mom can do is move away.
It worked for Kate Burton. When the Italian paparazzi descended on Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in 1962, Sybil Burton decamped to Manhattan. Living near Central Park, surrounded by family friends, young Kate enjoyed “a fabled, but not tumultuous” childhood: She attended the United Nations International School, spent summers with her dad and stepmom and, in 1982, made her Broadway debut in “Present Laughter.”
Thirty-five years and many “Grey’s Anatomy” and “Scandal” episodes later, she’s back in “Present Laughter.” No longer the ingénue, she plays Kevin Kline’s character’s ex-wife. And while this new revival has brought her warm reviews, that 1982 production gave her even more: Michael Ritchie, the stage manager she met there and wed in 1985.
That show also marked the first time Richard Burton saw his daughter perform onstage.
“He was very complimentary, but I was very nervous,” Kate, 59, recalls over buttered bread and salad at Atlantic Grill, near Lincoln Center. “I’d never invited him to see me at Brown or Yale [School of Drama], not because I wasn’t proud of him, but because he was just so famous, there would have been a hullabaloo . . . My mother had seen me in everything. She was an extraordinary woman.” Nora Ephron thought so, too. Writing for The Post during the “Liz and Dick” years — a phrase that makes Kate wince (“It’s Elizabeth and Richard!”) — Ephron called Sybil “the heroine of the stickiest mess in the history of sticky messes.” A Welsh coalminer’s daughter, she started the ’60s nightclub Arthur, the precursor to Studio 54; married the house band’s lead singer Jordan Christopher in 1966; and later cofounded Sag Harbor’s Bay Street Theater. “When I look back, the person who was the most powerful in my life was my mother,” says Kate, who has a son, 28, and daughter, 19. “Of course, my father was iconic, though anybody under 40 will not know who he was.” Kate was too young to have caught him in “Camelot,” in 1960, but recalls that 1974 day he took over in Broadway’s “Equus.” “They put him on without telling anyone,” she says. “They made an announcement: ‘Today the role of Dr. Dysart will not be played by Anthony Perkins,’ and the audience went, ‘Ooohhh.’ Then they said, ‘It will be played by Richard Burton,’ and they went nuts! He was one of the first stars to take over in a role created by someone else.” (He played that same part in the 1977 movie.)
His daughter has his green eyes but not his Welsh baritone.
“A couple of people can imitate it,” she says, laughing. “Alec Baldwin’s pretty good!”
She has warm memories of Tay- lor, with whom her father had the stormiest of romances. “She was an incredible lady. I got along wonderfully well with her, and I was very close to her children.” She says all are active in the Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation. “I truly think Elizabeth put attention to AIDS on the map. It’s one of the things I’m very proud of her for.”
Salad finished, Kate Burton is ready to go. “I have to springclean my daughter’s apartment,” she says, and, with a flick of her Hermès scarf, she’s off.