Richard Burton

[Moor Larkin]

How did this joker come up with he slept with 2500 women?

Found Burton's old bed on ebay maybe.....

[torinfan]

How did this joker come up with he slept with 2500 women? Did he interview 2500 women Burton slept with? Some women resisted him. He didn't sleep with Julie Andrews, but gave it his best college try.

I admit, Richard was a talented actor and I, like so many others, love his accent, but the rest of him - I'm afraid he doesn't cut it for me. And he made 3 movies with Torin nonetheless, one of which he play's Richard's father (The Robe, one of the best made films of all time on my side of the pond)

[DB7]

Richard Burton never wrote that 'last love letter'
In the 27 years since her husband’s death, Sally Burton has kept silent about the film star's turbulent relationship with Elizabeth Taylor. Now she has decided to speak out.

By Christopher Wilson

7:30AM GMT 09 Nov 2011

The storm may have passed, but the fire still rages. Just don’t stand too close to Sally Burton when you mention the name Elizabeth Taylor. A couple of weeks ago an innocent question posed by The Telegraph to the widow of Britain’s finest film actor triggered a Vesuvian reaction made all the more alarming by the fact that, for the 27 years since Richard Burton’s death, Sally has never said boo to a goose.

Not on this occasion. “I’m p----d off,” she snapped, referring to the legend-weavers whose elaboration of the Burton-Taylor story (“Hollywood’s greatest love affair”, etc) goes on and on. “I get p----d off with all the talk of a great love story. Yes, they were in love, but they got divorced twice – that means their marriage didn’t work.”

A neat summation, and one admirably free of sour grapes. For this gentle-voiced but steely English rose has rarely given interviews and never once expressed the least impatience that her husband’s name was so often linked with another woman’s. Maybe her time has come.

Now back in the Western Australian city of Perth, which has been her home for the past seven years, the 63-year-old blonde is amused by the shockwaves caused by her frank choice of words. “I’m sorry,” she says, sounding not in the least bit sorry. “I’ve felt it for some time. They were divorced twice, which seems to indicate there was a bit of a problem. It’s a wondrously romantic story, but there are other people involved here. There’s Sybil [Burton’s first wife], who was left. There were children who were left, and there’s also Susan [the former Suzy Hunt, Sally’s predecessor in the much-married Burton’s life].”

Her husband’s life, she is telling us, wasn’t all Liz Taylor – even though the actors famously made sparks onscreen and off.

What appears to have triggered the outburst is the publication earlier this year of Furious Love, a book by American writers Sam Kashner and Nancy Schoenberger based on the love letters between Burton and Taylor. Hidden in its pages came the startling assertion that, in his dying days, Burton had written one last letter to Taylor. According to the actress: “In it, he told me what he wanted. Home was where Elizabeth was, and he wanted to come home [to me].” According to the authors, this letter – unseen by them – was so cherished that it was buried with the actress after her death last March.

“There was no letter,” says Sally Burton, quietly but firmly. “My lawyer talked to … other lawyers… and there was no letter.”

In whose imagination, then, was this hurtful invention – Elizabeth Taylor’s, or the writers’? “The writers.”

You are left to wonder why they did it. Though Taylor was happy to share her private correspondence with the book’s authors, she withheld the crucial “last letter” from their sight and it is now – if it ever existed – conveniently beyond reach.

“Yes, I was fairly upset about that book,” says Sally. “And, of course, I was distressed about the idea of a final letter from Richard to Elizabeth.”

But at the time Burton was supposed to have written it, Sally was nursing him in his final illness – he died of a cerebral haemorrhage in Geneva in August 1984.

As if that issue were not enough, the jungle drums are beating once again – this time sending out the message that Liz Taylor’s fabulous collection of jewellery will be up for auction next month at Christie’s. Worth an estimated £18.8 million, the collection includes several important pieces given to the actress by Burton, and will go under the hammer in New York. The auction house is all too ready to remind us yet again of Hollywood’s greatest love affair.

Does Sally, now a successful theatre producer, feel there are forces at work trying to rewrite history and airbrush her out of Burton’s life? “I don’t think they can blank me out. I ascribe a greater intelligence to the public – they see what’s going on. The jewels are being sold, so out it comes again, the great love story, just to keep things going.”

So what about her own love story, with Burton? At first she’s reluctant to discuss it, but there can be no question that she remains devoted to the man and his memory. A quarter of a century has elapsed and she has not remarried – although she adds, deadpan, “I don’t want you to think my life has been devoid of romantic attachment.”

Then, slowly, she reveals her feelings about the love of her life. Asked what she would have done if someone else had come into her life, she says: “No one else did. I wouldn’t have shut out the possibility. At the time it was horrible, it was awful. I can remember one of those middle-of-the-night conversations with Richard, with me saying, forgive me, I want to be married again – because I so enjoyed being married. But it didn’t happen for me again.”

Then, remarkably, her guard drops. “I’ve found it difficult. But the world hasn’t realised that, and I just don’t know why. Oh dear, oh dear…” Her voice trails away in a wave of emotion. “My love for him has never diminished.”

While her so-called rival Liz Taylor went on to marry two more husbands after Burton (she’d had four before) , Sally remained single. Richard Burton was her one-and-only. The space and time given to her after his death allowed her to devote her life to setting up scholarships and other memorials in her husband’s name, acts of altruism that evidently never occurred to the besotted, and infinitely richer, Miss Taylor.

But Sally Burton is wise enough to avoid mentioning, even by the merest hint, her own feelings about Taylor even though the actress is now dead. In conversation you get no sense of triumphalism, only a wary but polite determination not to upset Miss Taylor’s myriad fans.

Meanwhile she offers the first explanation for her sudden disappearance from the London scene seven years ago. Slim, soignée and desirable, she was a permanent fixture at A-list parties for some time after Burton’s death. But she was also trying to find a new direction for herself. She wrote a highly acclaimed novel, The Barren Patch, and much more was expected from her on the literary front.

Suddenly, without announcement, she relocated to Perth, Western Australia. “I was disenchanted with London. The gilt was wearing thin; I don’t think that life was very real. It’s probably a horrible thing to say, but I’m not sure I was ever really a part of it [the social scene].

“I’d looked at living in the country, I’d looked at living in New York or Monaco, but Perth seemed in the end the best option for me. My youngest brother David lives here, running a diving-equipment import business.”

She threw herself into her adopted nation’s cultural life, establishing the Richard Burton Award for New Plays, Australia’s richest prize for playwrights. She became a patron of the local ballet and symphony orchestra, and established the Sally Burton Awards, for young people performing Shakespeare. “I think I have quite a nurturing instinct, possibly because I don’t have children. I just love helping people at the beginning of their career.”

She also launched her own theatre company, Onward, whose production of Terence Rattigan’s The Deep Blue Sea has been nominated for five awards – not bad for someone whose first introduction to acting came as a lowly film production assistant on the set of Wagner, the 1982 television series which starred Richard Burton as the composer. Within a year of meeting on set the couple were married in Las Vegas; he was 57, she in her early thirties.

They set up home in Switzerland but within a year Burton became unwell, then died. To Sally was left the task of unravelling, then bundling up, the remnants of the hell-raising actor’s rackety life.

To this day, she manages her husband’s estate, apportioning some of the royalties to the various charities she supports, though she shuns the idea of being seen as a do-gooder: “That has become the relationship, actually – my relationship with Richard. Keeping it [his name] going.”

Matched against the sometimes hysterical outpourings of the late Elizabeth Taylor, Sally Burton’s memories and her devotion to her husband seem by comparison earnest, diligent, quietly determined.

“I think this is now my life,” she says. “I wouldn’t discount a return to Britain – I would never discount anything. We should be open to change, and when people ask me what was the best time of my life, I say now.”