Part III

Once again, this information has been gathered from various sources including online archives, biographies and The Richard Burton Museum. The non-autograph writings are mostly a work of compilation. Images are used for educational purposes only.

In 1960 Burton made two films for Warner Bros., The Bramble Bush and Ice Palace. Both were unsuccessful. Burton's next appearance was in BBC's documentary-style television adaptation of John Osborne's A Subject of Scandal and Concern.  He also provided narration for 26 episodes of The Valiant Years, an American Broadcasting Company (ABC) series based on the memoirs of Winston Churchill.

Burton made a triumphant return to the stage in Moss Hart's 1960 Broadway production of Camelot as King Arthur. Initial performances were held at The O' Keefe Centre in Toronto in October or 1959, and it opened at the Majestic Theater in New York City on December 3rd. Julie Andrews, Robert Goulet and Roddy McDowall rounded out the main cast. However, on the whole the play initially received mixed reviews on its opening on Broadway and was slow to earn money. Advance sales managed to keep Camelot running for three months until a twenty-minute extract was broadcast on The Ed Sullivan Show which helped Camelot achieve great success, and an unprecedented three-year run overall from 1960 to 1963. Its success led to Burton being called "The King of Broadway", and he went on to receive the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Musical.

Below is a very rare playbill from the Broadway production, and Burton's 1960 signature inside.

Below is an early 1960's signed candid.

In 1962, Burton appeared as Flying Officer David Campbell, an RAF fighter pilot in The Longest Day. The same year he provided narration for the Jack Howells documentary Dylan Thomas. The short won the Best Documentary Short Subject at the 35th Academy Awards ceremony.

In July 1961, Burton met producer Walter Wanger who asked him to replace Stephen Boyd as Mark Antony in director Joseph L. Mankiewicz's magnum opus Cleopatra, with Elizabeth Taylor. Fox's future appeared to hinge on what would become the most expensive movie ever made until then, with costs reaching almost $40 million. During filming, Burton fell in love with Taylor, who was then married to Eddie Fisher. Laurence Olivier, shocked by Burton's affair with Taylor, cabled him: "Make up your mind, dear heart. Do you want to be a great actor or a household word?" Burton replied "Both."

Below, the cover and two inside pages from the 1963 British program from Cleopatra.

Cleopatra was finally released on June 11th, 1963, with a run time of 243 minutes, to polarising reviews. The Time magazine critic found the film "riddled with flaws, [lacking] style both in image and in action", and wrote Burton "staggers around looking ghastly and spouting irrelevance." In a contradictory review, Crowther termed the film "generally brilliant, moving, and satisfying" and thought Burton was "exciting as the arrogant Antony." Richard Brody of The New Yorker commented positively on the chemistry between Burton and Taylor, describing it as "entrancing in the movie's drama as it was in life". Cleopatra grossed over $26 million, becoming one of the highest-grossing films of 1963. It was not enough to prevent Fox Studios from entering bankruptcy. The studio sued Burton and Taylor for allegedly damaging the film's prospects at the box office with their behaviour, but it proved unsuccessful. Cleopatra was nominated for nine Academy Awards, winning for Best Production Design, Best Costume Design and Best Visual Effects. The film marked the beginning of a series of collaborations with Taylor, in addition to making Burton one of the Top 10 box office draws until 1967.

It was after The V.I.P.s that Burton became considerably more selective about his roles; he credited Taylor for this as he simply acted in films "to get rich" and she "made me see what kind of rubbish I was doing". Burton divorced Sybil in April 1963 after completing The V.I.P.s while Taylor was granted divorce from Fisher on 6 March 1964. On March 15th Burton and Taylor were married.

The supercouple, dubbed "Liz and Dick" by the press, continued starring together in films in the mid-1960s, earning a combined $88 million over the next decade, and spending $65 million. It is at this point, between 1960 and 1964, that Burton's lifestyle begins to disorder his signature, often rendering it erratic and even illegible at times.

In 1964, Burton portrayed Thomas Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury who was martyred by Henry II of England, in the film adaptation of Jean Anouilh's historical play Becket. Both critic Hollis Alpert and historian Alex von Tunzelmann noted Burton gave an effective, restrained performance, contrasting with co-actor and friend Peter O'Toole's manic portrayal of Henry. The film received twelve Oscar nominations, including Best Actor for both Burton and O'Toole; they lost to Harrison for My Fair Lady. Burton and O'Toole also received nominations for Best Actor – Motion Picture Drama at the 22nd Golden Globe Awards, with O'Tool winning.

Burton's triumph at the box office continued with his next appearance as the defrocked clergyman Dr. T. Lawrence Shannon in Tennessee Williams' The Night of the Iguana (1964) directed by John Huston; the film was also critically well received. Alpert believed Burton's success was due to how well he varied his acting with the three female characters, each of whom he tries to seduce differently: Ava Gardner (the randy hotel owner), Sue Lyon (the nubile American tourist), and Deborah Kerr (the poor, repressed artist). The success of Becket and The Night of the Iguana led Time magazine to term him "the new Mr. Box Office".

Below, Burton and Gardner in a scene from John Huston's The Night of the Iguana. From a still in my collection.

During the production of Becket, Burton went to watch Gielgud perform in the 1963 stage adaptation of Thornton Wilder's 1948 novel, The Ides of March. There he was confronted by Gielgud, who asked what Burton planned to do as a part of the celebration of Shakespeare's quatercentenary. Burton told him he was approached by theatrical producer Alexander H. Cohen to do Hamlet in New York City. Burton accepted Cohen's offer under the condition that Gielgud would direct, which he conveyed to Gielgud. Gielgud agreed and soon production began in January 1964 after Burton had completed his work in Becket and The Night of the Iguana.

Below, the Hamlet playbill from the Lunt-Fontanne Theater, April 1964, and a signed printed promotional photograph.

The New Yorker: "In John Gielgud's production of 'Hamlet', at the 'Lunt-Fontanne', Richard Burton depicts the Danish prince as a man cold, bold and ironic. He makes no attempt to demonstrate any of the customary Freudian conclusions about the character, and the question here is not whether Hamlet will revenge himself upon the king who murdered his father but when...Though this version of the Prince may now and then seem rather roughhewn, he is commanding, and Mr. Burton delivers the Shakespearean verses effectively and without any unnecessary flourishes."

Newsweek: "Burton offers an unprecedented 'Hamlet' - a fusion of the grand manner of the role's great nineteenth-century interpreters with the most contemporary wit and indirection. Cutting through all the sanctified recent conceptions of the part, from the pallid intellectual to the neurotic son, he plays Hamlet to the full, as the complex, tortured but infinitely conscious and, above all, animate figure of the text."

Time: "Burton's 'Hamlet' is master of the stage, master of Elsinore, and master of himself. And there's the rub. A masterful Hamlet is more heroic than tragic, and can scarcely evoke the torment of a man who is to be overmastered by fortune and by fate."

The performance was immortalised in a film that was created by recording three live performances on camera from June 30th to July 1st using a process called Electronovision; it played in US theatres for a week in 1964.

At the end of 1964 Burton published a small book called A Christmas story. From the dustjacket: "Richard Burton has been quoted as saying that he would rather be a writer than an actor. A Christmas story is singular proof that the ambition is not misplaced. It is a truly memorable tale that will seize and hold the heart of every reader. Autobiographical in tone, the story is told from the point of view of an eight-year-old boy living in such a Welsh mining town as the one in which Mr Burton himself spent his childhood. It has a great sense of place, of community and of character, and strength and humour. No one will forget Sister and Mad Dan, not Mrs Tabor T.B. And "Tommy Elliott's farm" is likely to become everybody's idea of what not to get for Christmas."

Below is Burton's authentic signature in a copy of A Christmas story. It is at this time and with Hamlet that secretarial signatures begin appearing.

Taylor  took a two-year hiatus from films until her next venture with Burton, The Sandpiper in 1965.

Below is Burton's signature on a Sandpiper contract.

In 1965 Burton went on to star opposite Claire Bloom and Oskar Werner in The Spy Who Came In from the Cold, a Cold War espionage story about a British Intelligence agent, Alec Leamas (Burton), who is sent to East Germany on a mission to find and expose a mole working within his organisation for an East German Intelligence officer, Hans-Dieter Mundt. Dave Kehr, of the Chicago Reader, called the film "Grim, monotonous, and rather facile", he found Burton's role had "some honest poignancy". Variety thought Burton fitted "neatly into the role of the apparently burned out British agent." The Spy Who Came In from the Cold was a box-office success, receiving positive reviews and several awards, including four BAFTA Awards for Best British Film, Best Actor, Best Cinematography, and Best Art Direction. For his performance, Richard Burton received the David di Donatello Award for Best Foreign Actor, the Golden Laurel Award, and an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor in a Leading Role. The film was named one of the top ten films of 1966 by the National Board of Review in the United States.

Below is a rare signed still from The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. From this point on his signature would steadily deteriorate. Once owned by me and sold to a fellow collector.

Below, Oskar Werner and Burton in an original still showing the revelatory Tribunal scene in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.

In 1966, Burton and Taylor enjoyed their greatest on-screen success in Mike Nichols's film version of Edward Albee's black comedy play Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,  in which a bitter college couple trade vicious barbs in front of their guests, Nick (George Segal) and Honey (Sandy Dennis). Burton wanted Taylor for the character of Martha "to stop everyone else from playing it". He didn't want anyone else to do it as he thought it could be for Elizabeth what Hamlet was for him. 

In February of 1966 the Burton's appears in The Tragical History Of Doctor Faustus at Oxford University Theatre. The critic's were not favourable when it came to reviewing Richard Burton's performance as Doctor Faustus, claiming he was unprepared and dispassionate about the role. They further accused him of not knowing his lines and having such a casual attitude to the production he distracted many of the other actors, who found it nearly impossible to act with him. An example of one of these unfavourable reviews reads "Mr. Burton seems to be walking through the part and his contribution to the stiff high jinks in the Vatican are almost as embarrassing as those of the undergraduate actors. Those who visit the production to see Miss Taylor as a speechless apparition of Helen of Troy will not be out of the theatre before 10:45."

Below, Burton and Taylor's signatures (as Taylor Burton) on a guest book from Gstaad while preparing for Whose Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Valentines Day, 1966.

The film's script, adapted from Albee's play by Ernest Lehman, broke new ground for its raw language and harsh depiction of marriage. So immersed had the Burtons become in the roles of George and Martha over the months of shooting that, after it was wrapped up, he and Taylor found it difficult not to be George and Martha. Later the couple would state that the film took its toll on their relationship, and that Taylor was "tired of playing Martha" in real life. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? garnered critical acclaim, with film critic Stanley Kauffmann of The New York Times calling it "one of the most scathingly honest American films ever made." Kaufman observed Burton to be "utterly convincing as a man with a great lake of nausea in him, on which he sails with regret and compulsive amusement", and Taylor "does the best work of her career, sustained and urgent." In her review for The New York Daily News, Kate Cameron thought Taylor "nothing less than brilliant as the shrewish, slovenly. blasphemous, frustrated, slightly wacky, alcoholic wife" while noting that the film gave Burton "a chance to display his disciplined art in the role of the victim of a wife's vituperative tongue."

Below, a rare original 1966 color still from Whose Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. A still from my collection.

Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor at the end of Whose Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Another still in my collection.

In 1967 Burton and Taylor appeared in The Comedians by Graham Greene with Alec Guiness and Peter Ustinov. It opened On October 31st.

Burton's signature on the 1966 contract is reproduced below.

The Comedians and the Tennessee Williams adaptation Boom! were critical and commercial failures.

Below is a 1968 still from Boom! From a still from my collection.

In 1968, Burton enjoyed a commercial blockbuster with Clint Eastwood in the World War II action film Where Eagles Dare. He received a $1 million fee plus a share of the film's box office gross. Burton's last film of the decade, Anne of the Thousand Days for which he was paid $1.25 million, was commercially successful but garnered mixed opinions from reviewers. Anne of the Thousand Days received ten nominations at the 42nd Academy Awards, including one for Burton's performance as Henry VIII of England, which many thought to be largely the result of an expensive advertising campaign by Universal Studios. The same year, Staircase in which he and his Cleopatra co-star Rex Harrison appeared as a bickering homosexual couple, received negative reviews and was unsuccessful.

The 1970's would mark a period of artistic decline, drinking and divorce. By 1970 Burton's alcoholism was staggering and would only worsen. Burton's health was visibly deteriorating before he was 40. Part IV, Dissolution and Redemption, will cover 1970 to 1984 and it is there this study will resume.

Richard Burton 1925 -1984 Signature Study Part IV Dissolution and R...

Below, Burton and Taylor at the 42nd Academy Awards in 1970. Taylor is seen wearing the nearly 70 carat Burton Van Cleef & Arpels brooch, purchased in 1969 for just over $1,000,000. It is considered the second most famous diamond in the world.