Actors: The Man on the Billboard

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Two Gods. Today, his profession views Burton with melancholy. "When the movie career is finished," sighs Gielgud, "he will have lost his romantic years, his vigorous years." His friend and agent, Harvey Orkin, says roughly, "This is a man who sold out. He's trying to get recognition on a trick. He could have been the greatest actor on this planet." It was Olivier who first warned Burton, "Make up your mind. Do you wish to be a household word or a great actor?" Paul Scofield renders judgment, gauging his language with extreme care: "Richard professionally is the most interesting actor to have emerged since the war. I think his qualities of heroic presence are not seen to their full advantage in movies. He appears not to be attracted by the best that there is in the cinema. As for his future, he should return quietly to the theater."

Whether Burton ever does return to the theater— in more than a token way—will be determined by something considerably deeper than the fate of the liaison he has recently formed. Two little gods within his frame are warring—one that builds with sureness and power, and another that impels him, like his late companion and countryman Dylan Thomas, recklessly toward self-destruction.

Either way, he is a man and a half. He has a wild mind with a living education in it. He is bright and perceptive to an alarming degree, a rare and dangerous thing in an actor. He laughs honestly. He lies winningly. He trusts absolutely, and he is as pretty as a hill of granite. He can make anyone laugh. He can talk a man under the table about literature, displaying huge sophistication and no cant. He reads rapidly, but he gives a book its due: a novel like Anglo-Saxon Attitudes costs him only two hours, but Moby Dick is worth four days, and Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy took him "just over three months." He is a walking concordance to Shakespeare. His mind rings with English verse from all centuries and of all qualities, both great and frivolous.

"Edward VII was ill," he will say with a brooding smile, "and the poet laureate—this bloody fool—wrote:

Along the wires the electric message came: 'He is no better, he is much the same.'"

Primal Gloom. He can drink almost anyone under the table too. When Burton's emotional life was particularly eruptive one day earlier this month, he drank half a gallon of cognac, being careful not to let it interfere with his work before the cameras in a new picture called The VIPs. His heroes are Scofield, Olivier, Gielgud, Alec Guinness—and a Lancastrian he once met who could down twelve pints of beer while Big Ben was announcing midnight. "I am one of the few people I know," says Burton, "who drinks only when he works." And this is true. Between plays or films, his intake dwindles toward zero. But when he is working, he has "to burn up the flatness—the stale, empty, flat, dull deadness that one feels when one comes off a stage."

He is 37. He stands 5 ft. 10½ in., has broad, heavy shoulders and a deep chest that is 45 in. around. This accounts for the tympanic resonance of his voice, which is so rich and overpowering that it could give an air of verse to a recipe for stewed hare. His