Richard Burton’s power was in his weakness

When Richard Burton died in 1984 at the age of 58, after decades of excessive drinking had decimated his health, the headline in The Times – “Career madly thrown away” – summed up the widespread perception of lost potential. Without the drink, he could have had decades longer. If he had stayed away from Elizabeth Taylor and out of the headlines that came with being with her, or chosen projects for their quality rather than the pay cheque, then he could have had a more consistently rewarding professional life.

Burton was well aware of his reputation, and sometimes claimed affection for it –  his New York Times obituary quoted him as saying: “a drunk, a womanizer; it’s rather an attractive image”. Indeed, his offscreen behaviour, combined with his booming baritone and the raft of powerful figures he played in movies and on stage, made him an icon of commanding masculinity.

Nevertheless, throughout that much discussed and opined upon career, Burton often proved at his most compelling as men who were powerless, weak and sometimes desperately vulnerable.

In Look Back in Anger (1959), a perpetual outward storm of booming rage barely masks his character’s inner weakness – it would be a recurring pattern for Burton’s characters. He’s Jimmy Porter, a university graduate stuck working on a market stall. His disillusionment with life has curdled into a relentless fury, of which his wife Alison (Mary Ure) bears the brunt.

Burton makes Jimmy’s anger an erratic, combustible, dangerous thing – and yet it’s never portrayed as an expression of power, but as his reaction to a lack of it. He says it himself when talking to the woman he hates (Claire Bloom) but who he will soon attempt to love out of fruitless aspiration: “You see, I learnt at an early age what it was to be angry. Angry… and helpless.” As much as he makes his wife’s life miserable and exhausting, she seems to find him more pitiable than frightening.

In Cleopatra (1963), it’s the Burton character’s obsessive love of a woman that weakens him. In the first half, Cleopatra (Elizabeth Taylor) marries Julius Caesar (Rex Harrison), who’s later assassinated. In the second, she and Caesar’s right-hand man, Mark Antony (Burton), fall dizzyingly for each other.

The affair between Burton and Elizabeth Taylor had captured global headlines during the film’s notoriously protracted production, and Cleopatra was sold on the audience’s chance to see the pair together on screen for the first time.

While Burton and Taylor have abundant chemistry, coming after Julius Caesar, Mark Antony is a pale imitation. Caesar and Cleopatra’s relationship was a meeting of minds; two master tacticians facing off, together. Cleopatra and Antony’s relationship is formed in their mutual grief. Caesar and Cleopatra were equals, but Burton’s Antony is stuck in both Caesar’s shadow and Cleopatra’s thrall, wandering around lost to the world in her wake. Burton’s vigorous portrayal of Antony’s love-struck frustration helps ground the grand historical epic in something recognisably and messily human.

The Burton-Taylor dynamic would shift in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966). Burton is George, a lowly history professor at the university his wife Martha’s (Taylor) father runs. One night, over far too many drinks with a younger couple, Nick and Honey (George Segal and Sandy Dennis), their marriage implodes.

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is a vicious, searing battle between spouses intent on slaughtering each other. Burton’s George is a wilted man, consistently disparaged by a wife who cannot hide her disappointment in him (“I swear, if you existed I’d divorce you!”).

Much as in Look Back in Anger, Burton’s character’s fury is pitched as an expression of hopelessness – an emotional eruption of the resentments that have been festering for years. His words are cruel and lacerating, but they’re borne from unlanced personal boils; the only thing he seems to be good at is identifying the open sores in his victims, and prodding at them until they cry out in pain. But there’s no skill in his cruelty. He takes no pleasure in it.

It’s a contradiction requiring an actor of Burton’s calibre to pull off: although George is mesmerising whenever he’s in full, furious flow, the more vicious he is, the smaller and sadder he looks.

The film of Burton’s that’s most explicitly about weakness is John Huston’s Tennessee Williams adaptation The Night of the Iguana (1964). He’s the Reverend T. Lawrence Shannon, who, defrocked after sexual impropriety, is forced into leading tour groups of church ladies in Mexico. At the end of his tether, he finds solace in the jungle hotel of his bawdy friend Maxine (Ava Gardner) and with enigmatic fellow guest Hannah (Deborah Kerr).

Many of Burton’s biggest characters are defined by their anger, and use their roiling fury as a shield to hide behind. Shannon isn’t, and doesn’t. Without it, he’s an exposed, shuddering wreck of a man, clutching at his booze like a baby does a bottle. As Shannon puts it himself: “A man has got just so much in his emotional bank balance. Mine has run out – it’s stone dry.”

Burton often plays Shannon as a comic character, all the actor’s vaunted dynamism siphoned into someone teetering right on the edge of a nervous breakdown, wild-eyed and dripping with sweat, shocking his parishioners and bemusing his old friends, narrating his inner turmoil with Williams’ vivid words. Beneath all the fireworks of self-pity though, in the way Shannon’s hope for a future has been all but extinguished, there’s a quieter core of genuine despair to his performance that really sears. It’s a three-course meal of a role, and Burton devours it.

Both in the weaknesses they shared – women and alcohol – and how they share them, Shannon reads as perhaps the most Burton-like character of Burton’s career. Burton was never quiet about his failures, either as an actor or as a human being. He spoke often about his troubles with drinking and infidelity, about the roles in bad films he took just for money he didn’t even need. Again and again, he opened his own wounds to the press and the public, inviting all to poke their fingers in.

Yet the way he wore those mistakes so close to his surface, his intimate connection to the vulnerabilities shared by all human beings, is one of the main reasons why Burton’s acting still feels so visceral today, 100 years after his birth. Like Shannon ultimately does in The Night of the Iguana, Burton has endured.

Our season of Richard Burton films, Richard Burton: Muse of Fire, is at BFI Southbank in December.