Actors: The Man on the Billboard

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he kept calling, "Make me hear you. Don't shout; but make me hear you." Ten years later, as Richard would all but whisper, "O! what a rogue and peasant slave am I," every princely syllable went special-delivery to the outermost rafters of the Old Vic.

The academic training succeeded as well. Richard was accepted by Exeter College, Oxford. The R.A.F. conveniently provided a scholarship, indenturing him to air service later on. He had to wait two terms before he would actually be in statu pupillari, so he answered an ad in Wales's Western Mail, placed by Actor Emlyn Williams, seeking a young Welsh actor for a play called The Druid's Rest. He got the part and spent five months in the West End, going up to Oxford as a slightly seasoned professional.

Up at Exeter. It was wartime Oxford, but no war to date has changed the ways of the university, and Burton was soon climbing into the college after late and beery forays. He boasts that he broke the Exeter sconce record, a complicated dining-hall punishment for bad etiquette in which the offender was forced to drink nearly two pints of beer in 30 seconds or pay for it. He learned to drink without swallowing and could put down a sconce in ten seconds. "So far as I know," he says, "no one has ever whacked that feat."

He was ostensibly reading English Literature and Italian, and he even went to lectures "with all those pustular, sweaty, hockey-playing, earnest, big-breasted girls"; but he found his real interest in the Oxford University Dramatic Society. Nevill Coghill, don, critic, and man of the theater, was directing Measure for Measure. When Burton asked for a part, Coghill said he was sorry but the play was all cast. Burton's native aggressiveness flashed to the surface. "Let me understudy the leading man," he said wickedly. Undermine would have been a better word. When Measure for Measure opened—with people like John Gielgud and Terence Rattigan in the audience, for the O.U.D.S. was as important then as now—guess who was striding the boards as Angelo.- Binky Beaumont of H. M. Tennent Ltd., London's most powerful theatrical producer, was also there. He told Richard to stay alive and look him up when his Oxford and R.A.F. days were done.

"Absolute Natural." Burton trained as a navigator, but the war ended before he could fly missions. He spent the next two years playing rugger for the R.A.F. He has never saved a single theatrical notice, but he will unblinkingly refer anyone to "page 37, paragraph i of Rugger, My Life" a book by Wales's own Bleddyn Williams, the Red Grange of Rugby. "I played with a wing-forward," writes Williams, "who soon caught the eye for his general proficiency and tireless zeal. His name: Richard Burton. But it was in CinemaScope that he caught the eye after the war. A pity, because I think Richard would have made as good a wing-forward as any we have produced in Wales."

Binky Beaumont gave Burton a contract when he was demobbed in 1947, and within a year he was an established actor. "I would like to be recognized as a great actor on the stage," he was saying before long. "The chances of that coming off are extremely remote, but it's a chance I'll take, which is why I don't want to sign film contracts. It impedes, it gets in the