Richard Jenkins was born into a poor Welsh mining family in a grey and grimy mining village, the son of a widowed alcoholic father. But he had intelligence, a love of language and a kind of unfocussed ambition to escape the dreary fate that awaited so many like him who came of age during the war – most likely a life down the mines.
Thanks to the mentorship and devotion of teacher Philip Burton (played by the excellent Toby Jones) he rose to become one of the greatest classical actors of the twentieth century and a Hollywood superstar.
Young Richard had been living with his sister because there was no room for him in his impoverished family home. His sister loved him but her husband resented the presence of this burdensome teenager he saw as work-shy and up himself.
It was Burton who eventually took young Jenkins into his own lodgings. Burton had a background in theatre and performance and had actually been to Hollywood and met some stars, which mightily impressed the young fellow. As well as teaching him the theatrical arts – projection, diction, delivery – he knocked the rough edges off his young charge by teaching him table manners, dress sense, how to stand, how to lose his working-class Welsh accent when necessary. All serious actors at the time had to sound like upper-class Englishmen. Think Lawrence Olivier. They were even teaching it to American actors at the time!
It wasn’t all beer and skittles. Burton and his landlady (the wonderful Lesley Manville) were worried about the propriety of taking a teenage boy into the home of a bachelor. There was gossip about sexual impropriety, which young Richard felt keenly and it almost turned him away from Burton.
That’s the way it’s told here. Online commentary will tell you the film takes some liberties with the story, mainly by way of invention for dramatic purposes. Philip Burton was in fact gay, and you do feel the tension in scenes when he comes into the young man’s bedroom in his nightclothes and sits on the bed.
But throughout his life Richard Burton expressed nothing but respect and praise for the man whose mentorship set him on the path to fame and glory. He certainly never showed any signs of being anything but enthusiastically heterosexual.
The film also shows Richard encountering a certain amount of hostile snobbery from the Shakespearean establishment in England, but it’s short-lived and soon swept away in the tide of public adulation of him.
This is the kind of biopic I like – one that takes us from rags to riches and stops there. When the film ends in 1951 Richard Burton has just had his first great theatrical triumph, playing Prince Hal at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre (the precursor to the Royal Shakespeare Company) in a production of Henry V. Instant acclaim, from the kind of audience he wanted it from.
It’s thrilling and moving. His life is full of promise. I do so love a happy ending. The rest of Burton’s life – the years of Hollywood fame, the turbulent marriages to Elizabeth Taylor, the slide into dissolute alcoholism – are well-documented elsewhere and we all know the story. Mind you, I would go and watch a full-on biopic about Richard Burton’s life any day.
Relative newcomer Harry Lawter plays the young Richard Burton. He’s best-known (but not by me) for playing Harvey Dent in the 2024 film Joker: Folie à Deux, where he plays the District Attorney who later becomes Two-Face.
At times Lawter’s facial features look uncannily like those of the famous actor, but he has the problem, in his early twenties, of having to play a gangly teenage schoolboy. He does a reasonable job, but he’s obviously more convincing as a self-confident young adult actor, which is what Lawter is. Unfortunately he doesn’t quite nail that glorious rich resonant fruity voice. But who could?
In 1978 a musical/audio version of War of the Worlds was released as a double vinyl album. I think it’s still the best version ever made of HG Wells’ classic sci-fi story. If you want a quick example of Burton’s vocal art at its powerful best, have a listen to him reciting the open lines:
No one would have believed, in the last years of the nineteenth century, that human affairs were being watched from the timeless worlds of space……. across the gulf of space, minds incredibly superior to ours regarded this earth with envious eyes. And slowly and surely, they drew their plans against us.
You should be able to find it easily enough online. It’s absolutely spine-tingling. My spine is tingling right now just thinking about those words and that voice!
Give it 4 out of 5 stars.