Richard Burton borrowed his famous surname from the schoolteacher who remade him
Before his baritone filled theatres and cinemas, Richard Burton was Richard Jenkins, a miner's son growing up in Port Talbot. His schoolmaster Philip Burton drilled his voice outdoors, found him lodgings and, unable to adopt him by a margin of 20 days, made him his ward. In 1943 the boy took his teacher's name.
Richard Walter Jenkins Jr. was born on 10 November 1925 to a coal miner the family called Daddy Ni and a former pub barmaid, Edith. She died of postpartum infection on 31 October 1927, days after delivering her thirteenth child, when Richard was not yet two. His elder sister Cecilia, known as Cis, and her miner husband Elfed raised him in a terraced cottage in Taibach, Port Talbot. An older brother, Ifor, gave him a lifelong passion for rugby; Burton later said he would sooner have played for Wales at Cardiff Arms Park than performed Hamlet at the Old Vic.
He was the first Jenkins to reach secondary school, and as a boy soprano he won an eisteddfod prize. At the end of 1941 he left to work as a draper's assistant at the local co-op, a job he loathed. Joining an Air Training Corps squadron threw him back together with Philip Burton, its commander, who had him readmitted to school in October 1942 and put him through gruelling voice drills. The law required an adoptive parent to be 21 years older than the child, so Philip became his legal guardian instead, and on 26 November 1943 Richard changed his surname by deed poll.
His professional stage debut came that year in Emlyn Williams's The Druid's Rest, paying ten pounds a week, triple a miner's wage. One line of praise in the New Statesman, he said, changed his life. At Exeter College, Oxford, he played Angelo in Measure for Measure in 1944 before an audience that included John Gielgud. His first feature film, The Last Days of Dolwyn, followed in 1949, and after his Hamlet in 1953 the critic Kenneth Tynan hailed him as the natural heir to Olivier.
The honours were real, including a Tony for King Arthur in Camelot (1960), yet seven Oscar nominations, from My Cousin Rachel (1952) to Equus (1977), never yielded a win. Heavy drinking fed a view that he squandered his gift, and his stormy marriage to Elizabeth Taylor, whom he wed and divorced twice and acted alongside in eleven films, often overshadowed the work. He died on 5 August 1984.
Source: Richard Burton
