Richard Burton Talking Pictures

'Richard Burton was a Welsh miner's son who left the valleys

'to become one of the most acclaimed stage actors of his generation.

'Burton had the looks, the charisma and that fantastic voice.

'But in the eyes of some,

'he sacrificed his artistic promise by becoming a huge Hollywood star.

'He was permanently plastered across the newspaper front pages,

'more famous for his lifestyle and relationship with Elizabeth Taylor

'than for his roles and his talent.

'It was a criticism Burton didn't necessarily reject.

'In interviews throughout his career,

'he would openly admit that he was driven by money

'and that he didn't rate many of his performances -

'downplaying, perhaps, his seven Oscar nominations for Best Actor.

'We join Burton here for an interview with Michael Elwyn

'from the 1965 programme My Time Again,

'which begins with him discussing the craft of acting.'

How absorbed into a part do you get?

You seem to use little theatrical tricks

and that it is very much your own brooding personality and voice,

with little...technical means of getting something over.

How much, you know, do you feel in a part?

Well, I didn't think that I was capable of,

I don't know quite what the word is, but when you get close to a part...

In my case, it's a sort of osmosis,

the transference of something from one thing to the other,

that I actually begin to feel

curiously like the character that I'm playing,

even if it's in a film.

I'm not, by any means, a method actor.

I don't deliberately think myself into these kind of things.

There is an odd thing that does happen

when you're totally absorbed in a part.

I'm a fairly grey fellow, latterly very grey and...

..live within myself, as it were,

because I'm playing a part who is grey and lives within himself.

He's not heroic - antiheroic.

I wouldn't accept a fight from anybody at the moment.

Maybe a year ago, I would have.

You made your name playing Hamlet, Henry V, Iago, Coriolanus,

roles like these, and never Troilus, Florizel, Romeo.

How... I hate those parts. It's completely alien, is it?

Oh, yes. I think Romeo's probably the worst part written by anybody.

That's so famous, I mean. There are worse parts.

I once played Ferdinand in The Tempest. I'll tell you a story.

When you start to get bad notices, it's interesting to collect them.

My favourite bad notice is for Ferdinand in The Tempest.

He's a kind of stand-in, a kind of understudy for Romeo

and all those abject Shakespearean heroes

who, quite clearly, are ladies.

I was playing this part, Ferdinand, in The Tempest.

I loathed it with a passionate intensity and begged them to let me out of it.

I said, "I'll be one of the dancers. I'll be a nymph, anything,

"but don't let me play this diabolical Ferdinand."

However, they forced me to play it.

I'm not short - but then, I'm not tall, either.

I'm exactly five feet ten and a half inches in height,

and I tend to width.

They put me in a costume that had bunches of grapes over here.

I looked like some strange Welsh Stone-Age troglodyte.

And I pretended that I wasn't on the stage.

I had a toy sword in my hand and those terrible things

they give you in Shakespeare that make your legs look two inches high.

I was perfectly convinced that nobody knew I was on the stage.

The critics were suitably kind.

They said I "contributed effectively to the atmosphere", something like that.

Except for an old friend of mine called Ken Tynan, who said,

"This is the first time in our experience,

"that we've ever seen Ferdinand played by a bull."

INTERVIEWER LAUGHS

You moved on from the English theatre to Hollywood when you were,

as many people said, on the threshold of greatness in the English theatre.

Did you leave for financial reasons

or has the cinema always held

a stronger fascination for you than the live theatre?

No. Not particularly. I went to Hollywood.

I made a couple of films, both of which were very successful.

One was called My Cousin Rachel and the other was called The Robe.

If you call that the threshold, I was on the threshold of earning a great deal of money.

And I was very sensible, I thought,

and played for a year at the Old Vic and therefore got into debt.

I played Hamlet and...Coriolanus

and the bastard in King John and Caliban and...I've forgotten.

Then I went back to Hollywood, did another film,

then went back to the Old Vic for another year.

I spread it out fairly evenly between the two worlds.

"Greatness" is a word I don't understand.

I asked the question because you seem to have spent a long time in cinema

trying to come to grips with the camera.

Critical success has eluded you until recently

in Beckett and Night Of The Iguana.

Yeah, the reason for that is my wife.

She knows a great deal about film acting and she persuaded me

that I mustn't pretend film acting is just a means

of filling in time between stage performances.

And, indeed, made me work at it, which I'd never done.

I really, I think, fundamentally, profoundly believed

that film acting was only an excuse for acting.

Until, as you kindly pointed out,

latterly, the last three or four years.

You feel you're now beginning to feel at home?

I wouldn't go as far as to think that I'm good or anything like that

in the film half of the business,

but certainly I've... I try much harder than I did.

Do you film more because, basically, you're Byronic,

and the location work and the travelling and the unreal atmosphere

makes just as big a contribution to your own personal happiness

as does the actual creating of a role?

Yeah, that's a dicey question.

"Byronic" is such an extraordinary word to apply.

I don't like travelling very much. You don't? No.

I like being in places. I hate getting there.

I hate planes. I don't mind trains and I don't mind boats.

Nowadays, one has to fly everywhere, so I hate getting from one place to the other.

Also, we have an enormous family.

Travelling from one place to the other with four children is not easy.

No, that has nothing to do, I don't think, with the film business,

my desire to travel or my lack of desire, it's just that one has to.

If I could change tack,

how important is the literature of theatre to you?

Immensely important. Much more important than anything else.

What do you read and who...?

I don't read plays very much.

I don't like plays to read, except, of course, Shakespeare.

My chief world, I suppose, as a reader,

is almost entirely poetic.

Or the opposite - detective stories.

I'm a voracious reader, omnivorous, I will read anything.

But the thing that draws me back all the time is poetry.

I'm not really interested in Brecht or any of the non-poetic writers.

People who are clearly instinctively poetic,

like John Osborne or Harold Pinter

who, despite the fact they write in prose are unquestionably poets,

are fascinating.

Or the man that I'm going to play next, that I've never played,

Edward Albee. Although he writes in prose,

there's no question about this man's stupendous eloquence and poetry.

But to play...some of those chaps who write Lonsdale comedies

never interested me at all.

If you wrote a play, would it be in verse?

It would be in monologue and I would play the central part.

LAUGHTER

Do you have any plans to return soon to the live theatre?

In England. I know you've done Hamlet recently on Broadway.

This was your first return to classical roles for a long time.

Are we going to...? Yes, I think next year I go back to Oxford,

to OUR university,

and play Marlowe's Faustus

with Dr Nevill Coghill directing, and the rest of the company,

apart from Helen of Troy - who shall be nameless -

will be played by the boys at Oxford.

'That performance of Doctor Faustus did go ahead,

'with Burton and Elizabeth Taylor waiving any salaries,

'and Taylor taking the non-speaking part of Helen of Troy.

'The pair of them also faced some prickly prodding from the press,

'once the production had ended.'

MAN: You must at some time, Richard Burton, have faced the question

of whether you should have continued as an imposing and even,

in the view of many people,

great stage actor, or moved into the world of films,

which is more commercially rewarding but perhaps not so rewarding artistically.

Do you ever regret having moved into the commercial cinema?

Oooh! Excuse me, Richard. That makes me so angry!

Because he has NOT left the stage! That's absolute bloody rubbish...

Elizabeth, pull yourself together.

Last year, he was just doing a thing here for Oxford on the stage.

On Broadway, that was the stage. How can you say he's left the stage?

That is not a continuous stage career, in the sense, for example,

of Paul Scofield or Laurence Olivier.

HE's not continuous on the stage. He does film appearances for money!

So does Paul Scofield. Scofield has made one film in ten or 14 years.

Richard was, at one time, after Coriolanus particularly,

hailed as potentially the greatest stage actor England ever produced.

I wonder whether, in a way, your making of Faustus,

which is the story of a man who sells out for a dream, almost,

is perhaps comparable with your decision then.

No, I don't think so.

One of the differences between myself and some other actors

is the fact that they really have... almost an anguish.

For instance, Sir John Gielgud,

who's almost my favourite actor in the world.

John really is helpless, upset unless he gets onto the stage and gets his teeth into a part.

Even though it's a part he doesn't want to play. He has to be there.

I don't have that sense of compulsion.

Also, I need roughly six weeks of active playing after the rehearsals,

after you open, before the part matures as fully as I can make it.

And then it begins to crack and flaw.

I don't have...

I have enormous energy, but I don't have the kind of moral stamina

that Laurence Olivier has and Paul has and John has, to go on and on.

I want to ask Elizabeth Taylor if your irritation

was because you felt that the cinema was not

the creative medium... No... I wonder why you got so cross.

Because you said the exact phrase that I knew you were working up to,

"sold out", and it offends me to my soul.

I'm going to sell out, I hope one day, to the stage.

It's exactly the same thing. If I go on the stage, I'm selling out.

You feel the two arts are, in their own medium, just as comparable?

Of course they are. Quite.

Richard Burton's cinema performance is as creative as he could have done on the stage?

It's just as tasking, perhaps sometimes more tasking because it's more difficult.

I don't know about that... Technically.

You start a scene where you have a flow and you stop for two hours,

then you start again.

I promise you, your concentration has to be finely whittled down.

Anyway, David, I think usually that "sold out" business

is written in England.

By cheap journalists.

I left England in 1957. The last play I did in England was in 1957.

Since that time, I've done six plays,

five of which were enormous successes in New York.

Since you disappear from the London scene, they sometimes think you're not still acting on the stage.

And I don't care whether they think I've sold out or not.

One thing you have said, Richard, about your life with Elizabeth

is that it is a continuous excitement.

One can never really be sure what she's going to do next, as I found out just now.

Would you say that the excitement will continue?

We enjoy each other's company very much.

We're people of very high temperament,

as you may have noticed from Elizabeth.

LAUGHING: Indeed, yes.

We find it very difficult

to be apart from each other for more than two or three hours.

In fact, our film careers are absolutely - film and stage -

bound up in the fact that we must never ever be separated.

You don't mind being known as the "Laurel and Hardy"?

No, I named me that.

What's wrong with that? We should BE so lucky!

Do you ever wish you WEREN'T so beautiful?

Oh, God! I wake up every morning saying, "Jesus!

"If only I weren't so gorgeous!" What do you mean? Well, you are.

NEW MALE SPEAKER: Of course she doesn't wish she wasn't beautiful.

INTERVIEWER: But sometimes a woman who is an actress says,

"If I weren't, they'd take me more seriously," as Richard is saying.

One's heard of those mythical, apocryphal actresses

who jump into a bath of milk every morning and splash themselves,

"I AM beautiful!" Elizabeth doesn't do that. It's a bath of gin.

LAUGHS I don't like gin! Champagne!

'Richard Burton's marriage to Elizabeth Taylor would last into the next decade,

'but by 1974, the years of high living and hard drinking

'had taken their toll, as Barry Norman explored

'in an interview on the set of Burton's latest film, The Voyage.'

NORMAN: 'Burton has become as famous for his flamboyant purchases

'of yachts and aeroplanes and fur coats and fabulous diamonds,

'as for his acting.'

Wait a second.

'The Burton-Taylor marriage, as far as one can tell with such a volatile couple, is over,

'but it was exciting while it lasted.

'Quarrels, reconciliations and the frequent exchange of lavish presents

'and always, on Burton, the dominating influence of his wife.'

Richard, looking back on your career,

it seems to be divided in two almost exactly by Cleopatra.

Would you agree with that,

that it changed course completely after Cleopatra?

I don't know. I think my life was changed by a woman, you know,

who was called Elizabeth Taylor.

I'm not entirely sure what exactly she did to me.

But certainly...

I don't know exactly what to say.

Those people, you know, like Laurence Olivier and Paul Scofield

and...Marlon Brando and Elizabeth Taylor and people like that,

they're very rare, very strange, very odd, very perverse.

And they obviously believe that they are very extraordinary people,

in their odd way.

They believe firmly, of course, that they are...

..gifted by God or something like that.

Unfortunately, I don't believe that, you see - I mean, about myself.

There's unquestionably a kind of passion, a strange idiocy,

where you...

..you walk on the stage or you walk on the screen or whatever it is,

and you feel a strange kind of power.

I defy the power, of course.

What would you say it is that YOU do, when you're in front of the camera?

I think I'm a sort of animal.

I get on there and I chunter out the words.

I have a reasonable voice and so on.

I just get out there and become an animal, in some strange way.

In the same way that the other people become animals.

Except that they believe

that they are fundamentally powerful and beautiful and so on.

I don't believe that at all. Certainly, I'm not powerful.

Certainly, I'm not beautiful.

I don't understand what these fellows do.

Except that I appreciate what they do, if you know what I mean.

What keeps you going in the same profession?

Money.

But you don't need the money now, surely?

You've got to be joking!

I've got about 50,000 people to take care of.

I have to pay everybody off.

I have to pay lawyers...legends...

I have to keep this dog.

At the moment, I'm doing all right.

I pick up a lot of money for films and, I don't know.

It's absolute nonsense.

The whole idea of the film business is nonsense.

On the stage, of course, I'm absolutely sure, I'm certain.

I can go anywhere and play anything.

But I don't REALLY know what prompts the imagination of the public...

DOG WHINES Shut up.

It's a funny Chinese dog. The only Chinese dog who speaks Welsh.

NORMAN LAUGHS

No, I really think it's very odd and very perverse.

Laurence Olivier once said that were it not for the fact that he were an actor,

he would have gone mad.

I'm beginning to think that I would have gone mad, too.

But I don't put myself in the same category as Laurence Olivier,

because he really loves the theatre.

He's obsessed by it, and so on.

I'm not.

On what basis do you choose the roles you're going to play in movies?

Sometimes, you seem to make very curious choices,

films like Bluebeard and Hammersmith Is Out.

One wonders why you chose to do those films. Yeah.

I long to be a failure(!) NORMAN LAUGHS

And...?

And I AM a failure. Well, yeah, but a really successful failure.

No, I manage. I get along.

I'm afraid that, in about five or six months,

I'm going to go back on stage.

It terrifies me. It appals me.

But I go back on stage. SIGHS

Why? Is it sheer masochism?

Perhaps, perhaps. Never thought of that.

Richard, where do you go from here? How do you envisage your future?

Are you going to go back to the stage, continue making movies?

You once told me you were going to retire.

I think, er...that the, er...essential, er...

..thing that I must do is, um...

quietly, er...

..room myself into the grave, you know.

Sleep, sleep, sleep. Sleep is so fundamental.

Did I ever tell you that poem about sleep? I bet I didn't.

No, I don't think you did. Oh, yeah.

But... BURTON CHUCKLES

Is it going to be back to the theatre or more movies?

No, no. The only thing that's important are the children

and Elizabeth

and, er...

being alive, I suppose, in a sort of extraordinary way.

I don't know. I don't know. I really don't.

That sounds a very depressed attitude for you to be taking.

I would have thought that the position you're in now

you would be feeling much more bucked-up about things.

You must understand, Barry, that I'm sending you up.

I thought you might be. Yeah(!)

Er...

I think I'm reasonably...intelligent,

er...clever,

good, kind.

Sweet.

Nasty.

Gifted?

Oh, no. I'm not gifted, no.

MAN GIVES INSTRUCTION IN ITALIAN

'Do you feel very vulnerable, then, when you're acting?

'Oh, I HATE acting.

'You did tell me a few years ago that you planned to give it up.

'But you've made a lot of films since then.

'I have to make the money. I have to make the money.

'If you give your wife a jewel

'or something costing, shall we say,

'about $100,000 or whatever it is,

'what the hell are you going to do?'

No, no. I just count the shekels, I count the money.

Do you really do it just for the money, Richard?

Now, Barry. I mean...

We're in a very, very, very strange state today.

Who knows...what happens?

I don't know.

May I have a cigarette? By all means. Yes.

Do you enjoy this superstar status, the tremendous celebrity,

the fact that you can't move without being mobbed?

Do you really enjoy it, that kind of life?

If it stops, I'm dead...

'Just two months later, Burton was divorced

'and had just spent six weeks in hospital

'battling his legendary alcoholism.

'But he was still able to undergo another interview,

'this time with Michael Parkinson.'

APPLAUSE

Richard, welcome. Let's talk about that background of yours,

because it does interest me.

The path you've come has been quite extraordinary.

You'd think a novelist had written it and if a novelist did write it,

you could accuse him of over-exaggeration.

All right, the background - humble, comparatively so.

We've agreed on that. Yeah.

What, in fact, did it give you, that background, do you think?

I think a tremendous sense of...

..strength, I suppose.

Because I presume that if you survive such a...

I'm talking like Churchill. Isn't it funny?

If you survive such a background, you must have come from an extraordinary...er...

race of people.

I'm enormously proud, of course, of being Welsh.

This extraordinary voice of yours,

would you say that it's a kind of Welsh voice? Is there such a thing?

Oh, yes. It's the deep, dark answer from the valleys to everybody.

LAUGHTER I can't help the voice.

It is part of me and I didn't cultivate it or anything.

It was given to me and I'm very lucky to possess it, I suppose.

Er...certainly, it's...

..it's not a gift that I would wish on anybody else.

Why?

Too powerful. LAUGHTER

Too much competition, perhaps?

Can we go back to something...? AS PARKINSON: Can we go back to...?

You ARE a mimic. You can mimic most people quite accurately.

No, I can't. Well, I can do some. LAUGHTER

I might do you, Michael, by the end of the day.

Who can you do?

Oh, I suppose I can do...

I can do quite a few actors and so on. Like who?

Well, I can do...Laurence Olivier.

Could you? Yes. Right now? Please. LAUGHTER

I have to pitch my voice up a bit,

because his voice is rather higher toned than mine. So...

I have to do it physically. Do you mind? Can you pick the camera up?

They'll follow you, that's what they're there for.

Here he comes.

LAUGHTER

Richard III, right? LAUGHTER

LAUGHING: Brilliant!

AS OLIVIER Now is the winter of our discontent

made glorious summer by this SUN of York

and all the clouds that lour'd about our house

in the deep bosom of the o-ce-an buried.

APPLAUSE

Who else, Richard?

Well, I don't think I'll do anybody else in case I get into trouble.

Do that marvellous... Over lunch, you did a marvellous Lee Marvin.

It must be the other extreme.

Well, yes. Lee Marvin's a very strange man and very beautiful

and very extraordinary,

but he becomes, when he's had a few drinks,

he's become...he becomes...

..incoherent in the most splendid possible way.

He makes a series of nouns...

CHUCKLING: ..sounds that really take one's breath away.

Sorry, I'm not going to be able to speak because I'm getting incoherent the way that Lee Marvin does.

And he says to... We just did a film together in the United States.

He said to OJ Simpson, who is probably the greatest athlete in the world,

er...enormous, fantastic, splendid black man.

Lee was trying to explain to him how to act.

He started off all right, Lee. He was very good.

Started off perfectly well

and then his language degenerated into a kind of noises.

He said to OJ...

AS LEE MARVIN: You know what acting's about, it's kinda...

Shht! Swsh!

Whoo! Kkkkkk!

LAUGHTER That's the we we do it baby, huh?

LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE

I look fat on that monitor. I'm not fat, actually.

No, indeed you're not. You're looking very trim. Yeah.

You mentioned earlier Dylan Thomas. He had a most remarkable voice.

I remember the first time I heard that voice.

I'll tell you what struck me about him. It was rather a posh voice.

Yes. He used to call himself "plus fours and no breakfast" or "chiffon and cut glass",

his particular accent.

Dylan, of course, was a very extraordinary man,

a genius, I suppose.

And...

I'll give you an example of what Dylan was like.

We all had to go to a poetry reading.

I was there and Dylan

and, um...Dame Edith Sitwell

and Dame Edith Evans...

and Louis MacNeice.

It was at the Lyric, Hammersmith, I remember that.

John Gielgud was the overall director of the whole thing.

So I said, "Could you get Dylan," I said, in my subtlest way...

"..to speak Tennyson?" Because I know he hates Tennyson.

So John arranged it so that Dylan spoke Tennyson and the poem was...

"A splendour falls on castle walls And snowy summits old in story:

"The long light shakes across the lakes

"And the wild cataract leaps in glory.

"Blow, bugles, blow Let the wild..." something.

"..And answer, echoes, answer dying, dying, dying."

So it goes on, and the envoi is always "dying, dying, dying".

Dylan was suddenly forced to speak this poem.

Again, I can only do things physically.

I have to do it. All right?

LAUGHTER So he gets now,

"The splendour falls on castle walls

"And snowy summits old in story:"

And of course, an eternal Woodbine in his mouth!

"The long light shakes across the lakes

"And the wild cataracts leap in glory.

"Blow, bugles, blow, set the wild echoes flying

"And answer, echoes, answer, dying, dying, dying."

Then he gets to the last verse. I thought, "What's he going to do to show his hatred of Tennyson?

"He's got to show it in the words that he says."

He says, "Oh, love, they die on yon rich sky,

"They faint on hill and field and river:

"Their echoes roll from soul to soul And go for ever and for ever.

"Blow, bugles, blow, set the wild echoes flying

"And answer, echoes, answer,

"dying,

"dying...

"Oh! Dying." LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE

He was, ultimately, a very tragic man, wasn't he? I suppose so.

He sought his own death and he found it, which is not entirely tragic.

He certainly...

wrote, of course, the most magical things.

And he's alive.

Yes. He's alive.

One gets a sense of waste, though, surely, when you think?

He left behind him stuff that will live for ever, but he might have left more.

No, I don't think so. I think he's the same as...

Well, Michael, you say a sense of waste. I wouldn't quarrel with that.

But I think he probably burned himself out.

He fulfilled the notion a lot of people have

about the Welsh, the Celts, actually, generally,

about this death wish they have, the creative people.

Do you, first of all, accept that they have this...kind of...

headlong rush toward... toward the edge?

Yes, I think that we rather love precipices.

We go towards them and withdraw, now and again.

Temporary. Sometimes, we go over the edge.

Certainly, it's true in Dylan's case. Hm.

I wouldn't pretend to know what went on in his extraordinary head,

but certainly, he searched for...destruction.

Have you ever felt yourself going toward the precipice and pulling back short of it?

Well, yes, I have.

I think we all do, we Celts.

Um...

Would you care to tell me how? In what circumstance?

Well...

There was a second or two, I think,

perhaps about a year ago

when, er...I didn't fancy much staying alive.

Really?

You contemplated suicide? Oh, no!

UNCERTAIN LAUGHTER No! I wouldn't kill myself.

In the ordinary sense of the word. I wouldn't take pills or drugs.

Or anything, really, in that sense.

But I did suddenly wake up one morning

and found how splendidly rich and extraordinary the world was

and that I couldn't bear its richness

and its beauty.

And in order to obviate

the idea of the richness and extraordinary beauty of the world,

I thought it's best to leave it.

We're all... We all know that we're going towards...

an inevitable doom.

It's rather interesting to deliberately go towards it

and then withdraw,

because nobody else has been there and withdrawn.

But I've been there.

I've seen that dark wood. I know how terrible it is.

How frightful it is and how frightening it is.

But I went there and came back.

'Coming back would eventually mean three more weddings.

'One, a short-lived reunion with Elizabeth Taylor,

'and then to Susan Hunt and finally to Sally Hay.

'Coming back also meant some notable career successes.

'Equus earned Burton rave reviews on the stage,

'and his role in the movie version that followed won him a Golden Globe.

'He narrated the smash hit that was Jeff Wayne's War Of The Worlds

'and scored a huge box office hit with the film The Wild Geese.

'In fact, in spite of his health problems,

'he found it impossible to stop working,

'as he explained in a documentary in 1983.'

Once, Elizabeth said, "It would be a good idea if you took a year off,

"because you never stop." She's only done 30-something films.

35 films.

And she's been a star since she was eight.

And... But she takes time off.

I never have.

I've done the most utter rubbish,

in order to have somewhere to go in the morning.

So she said, "Take a year off."

I said, "OK." We had a lovely house in Mexico, sunny, everything.

I lasted five weeks.

I was off. I did a film.

CHUCKLING: I won't bother to tell you about it.

INTERVIEWER: Ah, come on. Let's hear it.

A man came to see me and he said,

AMERICAN ACCENT: "We've got a lot of wastage on the floor

"out of a film called Tobruk."

I said, "Oh, have you?"

He said, "It made six million bucks."

I said, "Did it? Who's in it?"

He said, "Rock Hudson and... George Peppard."

He said, "What I did was, I picked up all these bits off the floor.

"I put them all together and I got all the writers in."

It was Universal Studios.

Universal Studios is still run like the old studios were,

with a big boss and all that.

"So I said to the ten writers,

"make outta this, make a script so we can use the long shots

"and use Burton in the close-ups."

And they did it. And they made a do-able film!

I was so fascinated, I couldn't resist it.

We went off and we shot the film

in three weeks and two days or something.

The film went out and was successful.

It's called Raid On Rommel.

All the long shots, it's Rock Hudson

and all the close-ups, it's an Englishman called Green.

And all the long shots, it's George Peppard

and all the close-ups it's me.

One year, I earned $8 million.

For one film.

I got paid a million for the film and the film was so successful

that another seven million came in.

I remember getting a cheque just before Christmas,

about three days before Christmas, for $1 million.

Which added to the rest.

And it's not that I'm frightened of the money or anything like that.

It's not my province. I give it away.

I give it to my family

or I buy enormous presents for Elizabeth Taylor.

Or did. Or for Susan.

Or for Sally -

who's the next one up.

I just, I cannot hold on to it.

I hold on to a little piece of property

with a roof on the house and that's all.

What's the worst film you've made? I don't know.

I made some lousy ones in my time.

I always start off - not that one - with very good intentions.

The script seems very good,

the director has a tremendous reputation.

The producer's a good producer.

You start off and you suddenly realise, after two weeks,

you're in a piece of rubbish and there's nothing you can do about it.

In a play... Oddly enough,

I've done almost exactly the same number of plays as I've done films.

In a play, I've only had one really, real failure.

Which was, er...in New York.

We only ran for two weeks or something like that.

And a good play, too, by Anouilh.

I think it was misdirected and miscast.

And I don't think I was very good and all that.

But whether that is the fact that you, yourself, can change a play

without benefit of director, as long as you've got a good lighting man,

we light the damn thing properly, and good actors around you,

you can actually do things with an indifferent piece

which you can't do with a film.

I've never thought much of myself as an actor.

I don't mean to be mock modest.

At the same time,

I don't think there's been any particularly successful thing

that I've ever done, that one particular one,

that gave me any...

..special pleasure.

I think the fact that I was able to take care

of a certain amount of people has given me SOME pleasure.

The fact that I had the power to do it.

But then, there are some people, maybe three or four in the world -

outside my family - whom I love.

You know, I trust them with my life.

And have had to, sometimes.

And all the things, the troubles that they've gone through,

you can imagine, as a result of the enormous publicity I've had,

never once have they ever...worried me about it,

or said, "Stop doing this," "Stop doing that,"

or "You're being a bad boy."

They've been terribly good with me, always.

They're a marvellous family.

Apart from my family and two or three other people,

there are very few people I would trust.

With anything.

'This was Richard Burton's last interview for the BBC.

'His final role, for which he was critically acclaimed,

'was as the menacing O'Brien in the movie of George Orwell's 1984,

'in which he co-starred with John Hurt.

'Two months before the film premiere,

'Burton suffered a brain haemorrhage and died at home in Switzerland.

'He was 58.

'In the obituaries, one of the most quoted anecdotes

'was his response to a telegram he received from Sir Laurence Olivier

'that said, "Make up your mind, dear heart.

'"Do you want to be a great actor or a household word?"

'Burton's answer was immediate.

'He simply said, "Both."

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