Burton Richard - Richard Burton: prince of players

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Prince of Players

Michael Munn

First published in 2007 by

JR Books Ltd, an imprint of

Aurum Press Ltd, 7477 White Lion Street, London N1 9PF

www.aurumpress.co.uk

This eBook edition first published in 2014

Copyright 2008, 2014 Michael Munn

Michael Munn has asserted his right to be identified as the Author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved

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eBook conversion by Quarto Publishing Group USA

Digital edition: 978-1-78131-373-2
Softcover edition: 978-1-90621-786-0

I COULDNT CLAIM THAT Richard Burton was a close friend of mine, but he was a good friend. I couldnt boast that I was his confidant, and yet one day in 1974 in Winchester something traumatic happened that for the next several hours made me his sole confidant.

Before that, I had met him on a number of occasions, the first in 1969 when I was just 16 and still at school. I had managed to wangle myself a visit to Shepperton Studios for the day to watch the filming of Anne of the Thousand Days. I had the burning ambition to be a film director and, just a few years before, had been lucky enough to visit the sets of Othello and The Dirty Dozen. Those experiences made me realise that I was at my happiest on a film set, and so I wrote to the administration offices at all the studios during my last few months at school in 1969, asking if I could come and visit any of the sets. I hardly expected to be told to come down and meet Richard Burton.

Burton was, at that time, one of those mythical star actors. It was as though he didnt exist anywhere but on a cinema screen. He was as famous as any actor could be and, unlike today when every film star appears on every TV programme to plug every film, he was rarely seen on television, or anywhere else for that matter, ready to shatter the myth. I was in awe of him because I admired him enormously in Becket and as Mark Antony in Cleopatra. Oh, how I irritated him from time to time because I insisted that not only was Cleopatra much underrated, which is now the opinion of a good many more than just me, but that his Mark Antony was an extraordinary performance that displayed something of his power as a stage actor within the confines of the film medium.

So the idea of meeting Richard Burton was exciting enough to make me feel so nervous that I thought I was meeting royalty. And I was, because he was playing Henry VIII. I couldnt understand why he had agreed to meet me. I was taken to one of the sound stages where he sat on a kingly throne, fully dressed in his costume, sporting a thick dark beard, looking not too unlike Henry VIII perhaps but certainly looking for all the world like Richard Burton in another historical costume.

A royal ball was being filmed, and he pointed out to me his wife, Elizabeth Taylor, who was making a brief guest appearance.

What do your friends call you? he asked me.

I told him it was Mick.

He said, Then you shall be Mick to me and I shall be Dick to you.

I was told later that nobody was allowed to call him Dick. It was a nickname he despised, even though all the Americans would insist on calling him Dick. He said it made him sound like a phallus.

We shall be Mick and Dick, and if Elizabeth comes over, we shall be Mick and Liz and Dick, he said and laughed.

He was simply enjoying a tiny word game, but whenever I met him after that, usually when I was an extra in one of his films, I always said to him, Hello, Dick, and the assistant director would have apoplexy. I would come to call him Rich, which he preferred.

Several years later, when I was with him on the set of The Wild Geese, he introduced Richard Harris to me and said, Mick, this too is Dick. I am Dick One and this is Dick Two.

Harris said to me, If you call me Dick Ill knock your fucking head right off your shoulders.

Rich said, Its okay, Mick. That means he likes you. Fortunately, he was right. I got on well with Harris.

But back in 1969 there was just Mick and Dick for a short sweet time, waiting for a highly complicated set-up (well, it looked highly complicated to me) involving many people performing a Tudor dance. Richard may have been a little drunk; he was certainly very merry which, as I would later discover, was not how he felt very often during the making of Anne of the Thousand Days. He suffered from deep melancholy and a conviction that the screenplay was poor and his performance boringhis own description. He was wrong; he was nominated for an Oscar. And its another of my favourite Burton performances.

He told me he had been shown my letter in which Id said that I had visited the filming of Othello in 1965 and had greatly enjoyed seeing Laurence Olivier performing and that shortly thereafter I had had the pleasure of seeing that performance on the screen. I said in my letter that I would like to enjoy that kind of experience again as I hoped to become a film director. That, it seems, was enough for him to decide to meet me; he figured I had to have a touch of culture to have been so impressed by Oliviers Othello.

Larry can do what I cant, Rich told me. He can become someone else. I can only ever make my characters into me. So Henry VIII will be me in tights, a codpiece and a beard.

I hadnt learned then, as I did a little later when I began working in the film industry, to write down at the earliest convenience everything anyone of any import said to me, so I dont remember word for word all Richard Burton said to me that day. But the day itself, the feeling of excitement, and the sense of being at home on a film set has always stayed with me.

And the memory that Richard Burton was prepared to put himself out for me for just an hour or two has also remained with me. My affection for that usually high-spirited, sometimes sad but extraordinary man began that day and grew over the years.

In 1969 I was only a messenger boy at Cinerama but I was rewarded by my managing directora wonderful man named Ron Leewith a little work as a film extra which he was able to arrange, and one day in 1970 I was a London bobby in a scene in Villain with Richard Burton, who promised me that he would get me work as an extra whenever he worked in the UK, which was not all that often as he, like many of his peers, was a tax exile. But he kept his promise.