Bring on the Burtons! Three screen versions of legend’s life
YOU wait years for a film about Richard Burton — then two (and a TV series) come along at once.
I can reveal that the life story of the legendary Welsh actor, who was married to Elizabeth Taylor (twice), is to be told in three separate projects. All should come out next year, to coincide with the centenary of his birth in 1925.
One film will feature Michael Sheen as Burton; another has landed rising star Harry Lawtey to play the Welshman... and the third may go in a completely different direction, with either Leo Woodall or Richard Madden portraying the actor, who died in 1984.
The drama series, Elizabeth Taylor vs The World, is being developed by producer Dominic Treadwell-Collins, who was behind A Very English Scandal, which told the story of the Jeremy Thorpe scandal.
It is an adaptation of Erotic Vagrancy, the blockbuster book about Burton and Taylor by Roger Lewis which dug into their excesses: the diamonds, the private jets, the art, and the morning-to-night boozing, brawling and bedding.
Times columnist Caitlin Moran is writing the script.
Author Lewis tells me: ‘There are two people whom I think would be brilliant as my Burton: that boy who was in One Day, Leo Woodall; or Richard Madden. The important thing is to be [as Burton was] incredibly sexy.’
Meanwhile, documentary maker Alex Sibley is working on a film about Burton’s life.
It will be based on existing footage and photographs but will also feature dramatised passages . . . in which Michael Sheen will appear as Burton.
The third project is the most controversial. Called Mr Burton, it stars Toby Jones as Philip Burton, the teacher at Port Talbot Secondary School who spotted the potential and ‘obvious virility’ of Richard Jenkins, played by Harry Lawtey.
The teacher formed a close bond with his student, and in 1943 — after paying the boy’s father Dick, a miner, £50 — assumed custody of the teen.
MR BURTON, an English and Drama teacher, steered his ward towards a career in acting. And Richard took his mentor’s name.
But biographers have speculated that the teacher may have groomed and sexually abused his charge, who in later life remarked that he drank ‘to overcome the shame’ and told an interviewer he’d had a homosexual period but that it ‘hadn’t worked’.
Shooting on the film is scheduled to begin at the end of July.