Getting drunk with my hero, Richard Burton

Early in his career Gabriel Byrne worked with Richard Burton on the 1983 TV series Wagner. In this extract from his memoir, he recalls how the legendary actor and hellraiser took him under his wing during filming in Venice.

Suddenly a rogue wave rolled under the boat. The swell unbalanced the make-up artist, and the blade of her scissors went through my lip. Within moments blood was dripping on to my starched white shirt.

“Jesus H Christ! Get them up here! Get the nurse!” shouted the megaphone. I was led ignominiously up the gangplank. The nurse applied iodine and a bandage and I was dismissed for the day.

I returned to my suite and attacked the minibar again, although it was still midmorning. I watched Brief Encounter, dubbed in Italian, and sucked brandy through a straw, my lip throbbing. Sometime that evening the phone awoke me from my coma.

“Hello, Lippy,” said Burton. “Come and have a drink.”

We sat on his terrace, me with my bandaged lip, drinking late into the evening until I felt at ease and drunk again, realising that the shame of a split lip was nothing when you thought about it, especially if it meant you could spend time in the company of your hero, his voice directed at you alone. One of the world’s greatest actors. I’d been watching his performances in the picture houses of Dublin for years, and now here I was getting drunk with him. I remarked on the chaos of the photographers that morning.

“Fame,” Burton said, “doesn’t change who you are, it changes others. It is a sweet poison you drink of first in eager gulps. Then you come to loathe it.

“I’m rather ashamed to be an actor sometimes. I’ve done the most appalling s**t for money.”

“I detest the self mirrored back to me by others. It’s a kind of fractured reality. I can’t see me.

“But this Jameson’s makes sense of everything, for the moment. And poetry, the sound and music of words sooth me, always have. And books.

“Home is where the books are,” he said.

“What I’ve always rather wanted was to be a writer, perhaps it’s too late now.”

“I am at an age,” he said quietly, “when I fear dying in a hotel room on a film.

“Give it all you’ve got but never forget it’s just a bloody movie, that’s all it is. We’re not curing cancer. Remember.”

I’ve made eighty films since then and never forgotten those words

He didn’t die in a hotel room but at home in bed, halfway through a volume of the Elizabethan poets.