Actors: The Man on the Billboard

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way. It seems to me that coming from where I come from, from the very depths of the working class, if I'm going anywhere, I must go as high as I possibly can."

His main technical asset was his in comparable voice. He hardly needed to do anything more than speak, and he became more skillful at using language as gesture than gesture as language. He was noted for his repose on stage; Philip Burton had taught him that if he kept still, attention would flow in his direction. He also had a faculty for staring unblinkingly at the audience or another actor until everyone on both sides of the footlights was hypnotized.

John Gielgud thought he was "an absolute natural." Laurence Olivier, seeing Burton's Coriolanus, said: "Nobody else can ever again play Coriolanus now." He was a perfect Prince Hal, the sort of youth who really would take up with Falstaff. His lago was so subtle that it provoked a commentary letter from Freudian Psychoanalyst Ernest Jones, and Terence Rattigan says it was the best lago he has ever seen. "We all thought he was the natural successor to Olivier," says Kenneth Tynan now. "We thought he could be another Edmund Kean, that he was going to be the greatest classical actor living."

Then as now, opening nights petrified him. He does not sleep at all before them. One evening in 1953 he left his home in Hampstead to walk, he thought, aimlessly; but toward 4 a.m. he was crossing Waterloo Bridge, beyond which was the Old Vic, some ten miles from his home. A policeman stopped him on the bridge and wanted to know who he was. Richard ex plained that he was a terrified actor. On the following night he was going to open as Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, at the Old Vic. "Oh, come now," said the bobby. "They won't know in Peckham Rye, will they? They won't know in St. John's Wood." Burton relaxed slightly and walked out the night with the bobby, making the rounds of Waterloo.

That his performance would be recorded far beyond St. John's Wood was largely due to a critical remark made more than midway in Hamlet's run. Burton's Hamlet was something like a corrida, good one night, disappointing the next. But when he had his color and gave it the full Welsh timbre, he thrilled audiences long accustomed to the tremulous Gielgud reading. He had completed about 60 performances and the box office was beginning to slide when the house manager came to his dressing room one evening and said, "Be especially good tonight. The old man's out front."

"What old man?"

"He comes once a year," said the house manager. "He stays for one act and he leaves."

"For God's sake, what old man?"

"Churchill."

As Burton spoke his first line—"A little more than kin, and less than kind"—he was startled to hear deep identical mutterings from the front row. Churchill continued to follow him line for line, a dramaturgical beagle, his face a thunderhead when something had been cut. "I tried to shake him off," remembers Burton. "I went fast and I went slow, but he was right there." Churchill was right there to the end, in fact, when Burton took 18 curtain calls and Churchill told a re porter that "it was as exciting and virile a