- Awards
- 19
Boy, did Burton drink his looks away...
- Awards
- 8
I think Burton squandered everything. He seemed to have the requisites to be both a great actor and a great film star, but his actual work always seems lazy to me. Like Brando, he always seemed to be coasting. But unlike Brando (who, at least, had a few brief periods of greatness), I have no idea what Burton was coasting on.
- Awards
- 19
Ditto, on every point.
I've always been lukewarm on Burton, for exactly those reasons. Perhaps on stage he was brilliant, but most of his screen performances are just too tight somehow. With Brando, there were flashes of brilliance which made it to film; yet Burton and his presence seems to promise potential greatness that you're always waiting for but never quite seems to materialize -- and that's probably what people sense about him.
I like him kinda-sorta in somethings --- BECKET and, perhaps my favorite Burton movie, THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD -- but I remain mostly ambivalent about his acting. (He's okay, too, in WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOLFE where he probably gave the best performance among the principles, yet was the one denied the Oscar -- just like Brando in STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE).
As a footnote, while Burton praised Brando and asserted he could have been a silent star (well, 80% of the silent stars were Aries) Brando didn't like Burton because, while on a yacht with Richard and Elizabeth, an inebriated Burton teased Brando about all his multi-cultural offspring. (Fortunately, Elizabeth didn't wash up on the shores of Catalina that night, but then Burton wasn't the fey wannabe that R.J. was).
Also: one very experienced interviewer -- I now can't recall whether it was Parkinson or Kenneth Tynan or somebody else --- said that of all the people he'd ever interviewed, Burton was only one of two or three celebrities he'd came away having a better opinion of after the conversation than when he went into it... I mean, Burton is, after all, the only man Taylor actually married twice. (And her children adored him; his children by Phyllis, naturally, were devastated by their divorce -- a divorced Richard didn't really want, but Cleopatra demanded, and what the Queen of the Nile wants, the Queen of the Nile gets).
