The Man on the Billboard

Friday, Apr. 26, 1963

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frightened me. His mind was extraordinarily perverse. No one quite knew what he was going to do next, which can be quite frightening to a child, you know."

Daddy Ni died six years ago, never having seen Richard in a play or movie. He tried once—setting out to see My Cousin Rachel when it was playing in a Port Talbot cinema. On the way down the valley he stopped in 17 pubs. Finally settled in the theater, he watched the film begin. One of the first things Richard did on the screen was to pour himself a drink. "That's it," said Daddy Ni, and he was up and off to pub No. 18.

Two Fathers. Daddy Ni cared more about education than anything else, even Rugby football, and from Richard's earliest memory, Daddy Ni and Richard's brothers Ivor, Tom, Will and Dai fixed their attention on Richard and said, "You shall go to Oxford." All the brothers save Graham had worked the coal face (Richard himself never worked in the '""s), and some of them went on to other positions in local government, the police, and the army. In Richard, however, the family planted its dream of something better beyond the valley. "The idea of a Welsh miner's son going to Oxford University," says Richard Burton, "was ridiculous beyond the realm of possibility."

First, Richard was one of 30 who were admitted to grammar school out of some 600 applicants. He was also a natural athlete and, of all things, a gifted soprano who took prizes in the eisteddfod, singing, as his sister put it, as if "he had a bell in every tooth." In a sense, he outgrew his family, being something more than life-size even then. A teacher-writer named Philip Burton, drama coach and English master at the Port Talbot grammar school, offered him a room in his lodgings. Cecilia and her husband agreed.

Richard describes himself as "mock tough" when he first knew Philip Burton. Burton, for his part, was chiefly impressed—in Richard's first awkward go on a stage—by the boy's "astonishing audience control. He could do anything he wanted with the audience." This is one talent that can only be found, never developed, and since Richard had it, Phil Burton trained him dramatically, put an English polish on his voice without obscuring the Welsh vitality, fed him a reading list of great books, prepared him for his try for Oxford, and directed him in all his early plays. In 1943, Richard officially became Phil Burton's ward, taking his name. Years later when Richard was told that his father was dead, he asked: "Which one?"

Druid Wanted. Phil Burton, now director of the Musical and Dramatic Theater Academy of America (in Manhattan), trained Richard with some novel devices. He made him talk on five telephones at once, doing a scene from a play about a busy bank manager who could hold five separate conversations, darting from phone to phone. The exercise was repeated a thousand times to teach the boy coordination and mathematical precision in speaking. Today, Richard understandably hates telephones; but he speaks with fantastic precision. Also, Phil Burton would take Richard to the summit of Mynydd Margam, the last high mountain between Pontrhydyfen and the sea, and have him loft arias from Shakespeare into the wind. As Phil Burton moved farther and farther away from the spot on which Richard stood,