Richard & Philip: The Burtons

About this book

In the early 1940s Philip Burton held the post of Senior Master at the Port Talbot Secondary School in South Wales. At the same time he was building a reputation as a playwright, his work having been produced for radio by the BBC. Among his pupils was a boy of exceptional promise, one of thirteen children of a mining family. The boy's home life was unsettled and it was at his own instigation that Philip Burton reluctantly agreed to adopt him and raise him as his son. Within ten years the young Richard Jenkins was transformed into the internationally famous actor Richard Burton, had astounded the critics as Henry V at Stratford-upon-Avon and become a film star in Hollywood. In this moving memoir Philip Burton tells of his forty-year relationship with his adopted son, which ended only with Richard's death in 1984. He recalls how he trained him as an actor, helping him to lose his Welsh accent; how Richard's affair with Elizabeth Taylor and his divorce from his first wife Sybil led to a two-year rift between them; and how Richard nonetheless continued to turn to him for advice and approval throughout his turbulent career. He also writes of his own eventful life, which took him from a Welsh mining community to success as a director on Broadway. Richard Burton was a man whose faults were on the same large scale as his virtues, and Philip Burton knew him perhaps better than anyone. This is a book he is uniquely qualified to write, and which bears witness to the achievements of two remarkable men.