Richard Burton

Richard Walter Jenkins Jr. was born in Wales on 10 November 1925 and became Richard Burton, a Shakespearean force in the 1950s with a baritone that Kenneth Tynan believed marked him as "the natural successor to Olivier." His 1964 Hamlet was the performance by which others would be judged. The Academy nominated him seven times - for My Cousin Rachel in 1952, The Robe in 1953, Becket in 1964, The Spy Who Came In from the Cold in 1965, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in 1966, Anne of the Thousand Days in 1969, and Equus in 1977 - but never gave him the statue. By the mid-1960s he was a box-office giant, and by the late 1960s he commanded fees of $1 million or more plus gross points, among the highest-paid actors alive. He won a Tony for Camelot in 1960, collected a BAFTA, a Golden Globe, and a Grammy, yet the narrative clung to waste: the heavy drinking, the turbulent twice-married-twice-divorced union with Elizabeth Taylor, the sense that he had not become what he might have been. He died 5 August 1984, widely regarded as one of the finest actors of his generation and haunted by the gap between that regard and the ultimate prizes.