But Hollywood was also calling. In tandem with his stage career, in 1952 he received the first of his seven Oscar nominations with a best supporting actor nod for My Cousin Rachel, following it up a year later by making it onto the best actor shortlist for The Robe. By the time he was invited in 1961 to appear in Cleopatra, he was already living as a tax exile in Switzerland and had left the London stage forever.
Fiery affair
Everything changed when he met Elizabeth Taylor on the set of the epic flop that would almost bankrupt the 20th Century Fox film studio. Burton was still on his first marriage while Taylor was on to her fourth husband, the crooner Eddie Fisher. Their fiery affair during filming in Rome was an international scandal so great that the Vatican’s newspaper L’Osservatore Romano is reported to have denounced Taylor for her “erotic vagrancy”, describing her as “an avaricious vamp who destroys families and devours husbands”. When Burton was asked in 1974 by BBC film critic Barry Norman if he agreed his career was divided by the eras before and after Cleopatra, the actor instead suggested: “I think my life was changed by a woman called Elizabeth Taylor.”
Getty ImagesBurton and Taylor met on the set of Cleopatra in 1961 (Credit: Getty Images)
Married in 1964, they became an international source of fascination thanks to their lavish world of ostentatious jewellery, private planes and personal yachts. Some wondered if this superstar lifestyle was a sign of Burton’s squandered talent. Burton admitted to the critic Kenneth Tynan in 1967 that his early period after swapping the London stage for Hollywood was “not the most interesting period of my life, from the artistic point of view”. However, bad or indifferent reviews never bothered him: “I firmly believe that if people pay money to see me in the theatre or in films, that’s their responsibility and not mine. If they stopped seeing me, if my box office ratio went down or something like that, I’d be perfectly content to stop working. I do it because I rather like being famous.”
Anyway, Burton rejected any idea that film acting was somehow a lesser art. Rather than needing to project his voice up to the rafters in theatre, he was taught by Taylor – after all, a movie star since the age of 12 – how film acting required “economy, a spareness of voice, of movement, of gesture, of… agony.” He added: “When your face, as she explains to me, is going to be 38-feet high… you have to be very careful how massively you register any emotion of laughter, of idiocy, of delight, of tragedy, whatever it is. She is, of course, the best film actress in the world.”
