Teenage Richard Burton showed more passion for sport than girls
A TEENAGE Richard Burton saw being a teacher, preacher, rugby player or cricketer as a way out of his mining town upbringing – but never showed any interest in acting, his teenage diaries have revealed.
The first exhibition of his recently unearthed personal journals and effects will open in Wales in April – revealing the star to also be a teenager with an indifference to chasing girls.
The Hollywood icon famously went on to conquer the Shakespearean stage and the silver screen with his formidable talent and equally formidable voice.
He also shook off his early lack of interest in woman, later marrying five times to four women, including twice to Elizabeth Taylor.
In the National Museum Wales exhibition, Becoming Richard Burton, his formative years in Port Talbot are illuminated by his own diary, which he received when he was 14.
The sociable and studious young Burton, who would later wish he played for Wales, recorded his tries and runs tallies as he obsessed over rugby and cricket.
His later preoccupations of romance and acting are not present and would only appear in his writings as part of adult diaries, which reveal a man jaded by Hollywood, and with handwriting shaken by alcoholism.
The documents will be on display for the first time in Wales, showing the life of the Cleopatra star, who died aged 58 in 1984.
“He doesn’t seem to have had a great interest in girls at the time,” said Prof Chris Williams of University College Cork, an expert on the
Burton diaries. “That would certainly come later.”
In the pocket diary he received in 1939, the young man records going to chapel, to school and playing Monopoly with family in Port Talbot. He also makes passing comments on the war slightly disturbing his attendance at school, and Winston Churchill suddenly becoming prime minister. Prof Williams said: “His preoccupations at that time were much more about sport than anything else. He is writing about playing cricket and playing rugby. He records all his runs and tries. He’s measuring.” Prof Williams believes, from Burton’s written material, that he later thought of acting as something embarrassing and effeminate, compared with the heavy industrial jobs of his childhood community. However, as a young man, he wanted to avoid the limited careers in working class Port Talbot.
Prof Williams said: “He was somebody who was very determined and set on making his way in the world. The idea that he could have a career as an actor was one he couldn’t have conceived of at 14. You get a sense later that it’s something that he falls into.”
The new exhibition, which will include items unearthed by Burton’s final wife, Sally, will open in April at the National Museum Wales and use material from the Richard Burton Archive at Swansea University. It will also feature costumes from his most famous roles.