Richard Burton

Mark Monahan Published: 1:03PM GMT 19 Feb 2010

Incomparable: Richard Burton in "The Spy Who Came in from the Cold"

By the time Richard Burton made his screen debut in 1949s The Last Days of Dolwyn he was already one of the most dynamic and celebrated actors on the British stage.

Received wisdom has it that the boy from Pontrhydyfen, christened Richard Walter Jenkins, never quite managed to carve out the screen career that his intelligence and talents deserved and besides, for much of the time, his movie roles were eclipsed by even more dramatic goings-on between him and Elizabeth Taylor. Yet few would deny that Burton was one of the most magnetic screen presences of the Fifties and Sixties and several of his performances remain immensely and enduringly enjoyable.

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Both The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and Becket date from the end of Burtons golden period in the mid-Sixties. In the former, adapted from John Le Carrs bestselling novel, Burton won his fourth Oscar nod (of seven) for his role as Alec Leamas, an MI6 agent who becomes involved in an elaborate plot to bring down an East German spymaster. Its a grittily involving film, shot in black and white, the polar opposite of the James Bond films then at the height of their popularity its uncompromising message is that Cold War spying was a shady, amoral business.

The previous year, Burton made Becket, a starry historical drama about the relationship between Thomas à Becket, played in severe, restrained fashion by Burton, and Henry II, played more histrionically by Peter OToole. It received an impressive 11 Oscar nominations, including one for Burton. Other memorable outings include Cleopatra (1963), notable not just for its massive scale, but as the picture that first drew Burton and Taylor together, igniting one of Hollywoods most notoriously volatile liaisons. In 1966, Whos Afraid of Virginia Woolf? saw their relationship spill caustically and superbly on to the screen Burton was never more magnetically bitter. But only two years later, the evergreen boys own romp Where Eagles Dare saw him have great fun as the British major asked to take on pretty much the entire Wehrmacht.

Even when the roles let him down think of Sea Wife (1957), Divorce His Divorce Hers (1972), The Medusa Touch (1978) Burton always held the attention. Those eyes, hinting at a man beset by demons; that voice crystal-clear, almost aggressively masculine, but with a warming hint of a Welsh burr; and that indefinable but ever-present sense of poetry. Not only do they not make film stars like Burton any more. He was, even in his own era, simply one of a kind.