Richard Burton Centenary 1925 to 2025

I was born Richard Walter Jenkins on the 10th of November, 1925, in the little village of Pontrhydyfen, cradled in a valley outside Port Talbot—a place where the rain is a familiar friend, and the hills sing with the echoes of miners' toil. I was the twelfth of thirteen children, the son of a coal miner known as Dic Bach, a man as tough as the pit he laboured in.

But fate, as it so often does, was unkind in my earliest years. My mother was lost to septicaemia when I was but two. My father, drowning his grief in drink, left me in the care of my elder sister Cecilia and her husband, Elfed. Their home was in Taibach, Port Talbot—closer to the steelworks, closer to the sound of industry, of ambition, of struggle. It was there that I grew, a boy of Wales, speaking the tongue of my ancestors, bound to my land by the marrow in my bones.



At the age of eleven, I won a scholarship—the first of my family to do so—and was granted entrance to the local Grammar School. There, amid books and lectures, I first set foot upon the stage, slipping into the shoes of Professor Higgins in Pygmalion. But the true turning point, the event that shaped the course of my life, came in the form of a man—Philip Burton.

Philip was more than a teacher; he was a guide, a mentor, a force of nature. He took my voice, my rough Welsh cadence, and tempered it, sculpted it, so that I might command an audience in any corner of the world. We would climb to the top of Margam Mountain, and there, with the wind tearing at my words, I would project my voice into the vastness of the sky.

So profound was his influence that, in 1943, he became my legal guardian, and I took his name as my own. Richard Burton I became, and as the son of a schoolteacher, doors opened that would otherwise have remained shut. I secured a place at Oxford University, where I spent six months as part of an RAF training course, all the while performing, honing the craft that would one day make my name. It was Philip, ever watchful, who sent me an advert from the Western Mail seeking young Welsh actors. That notice led me to my first professional performance—The Druid’s Rest at St Martin’s Theatre in London, in 1943.

With the war’s end came my release from the RAF in 1947, and soon after, the film The Last Days of Dolwyn. It was on that set that I met Sybil Williams, my first wife. Together, we made our way to London, where I trod the boards of the West End, breathed life into the heroes and villains of Shakespeare at Stratford Memorial Theatre.

Hollywood beckoned, but I was not so easily swayed. In 1953, I turned down a million-dollar contract—an eye-watering sum—to perform Shakespeare at the Old Vic for a modest £150 a week. The stage was my first love, after all.

Yet, destiny is a tide, and soon enough, it carried me across the Atlantic. My first Hollywood picture, My Cousin Rachel (1952), earned me an Oscar nomination. More roles followed—The Desert Rats, The Robe, Alexander the Great, Look Back in Anger—but it was Cleopatra that changed everything. It was there that I met Elizabeth Taylor, a woman as fierce, as brilliant, as impossible as the storm itself. She became my second wife, and together, we became legend.

Through all of it—the glitz, the glamour, the scrutiny—I remained, at heart, a son of Wales. I returned often to Taibach, to the land that shaped me, and when I moved to Switzerland in 1957, I named my home Le Pays de Galles.

The films came, one after another—The VIPs, Becket, The Night of the Iguana, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?—seven Oscar nominations, yet never the golden prize. No matter. My voice, at least, was immortal. It was my voice that gave breath to Dylan Thomas’ Under Milk Wood, that carried the poetry of my homeland across the world.

Elizabeth and I—twin stars in a tempestuous orbit—parted ways after a decade. I married Susan Hunt, then, in later years, Sally Hay. And though my health faltered in the early 1980s, I did not cease. I took to the stage once more, on Broadway in Equus, returned to Wales to honour my father’s memory, and shared the screen with my daughter, Kate, in Ellis Island.

Then, in August of 1984, my story came to an end. A sudden cerebral haemorrhage, and I was gone. I was laid to rest in Switzerland, dressed in red, with Dylan Thomas’ words beside me.

Yet Wales did not forget me. Thousands gathered at Pontrhydyfen Chapel to pay tribute, to honour a man who had carried the sound of his people across oceans, across time. My voice, my work, my love for my land—it endures. As I once said, "I think my voice is invested with small coal and rain or something—the voice is the voice of my people."

And so, though my body is dust, my voice remains.