The Richard Burton Diaries (5 page)

4 Richard, studying the text of
Hamlet
,
c
.1953–4, in his London home at Lyndhurst Road, Camden, where he and his first wife Sybil lived from 1950 to 1957. On his bookshelves are a number of volumes about actors, acting and playwrights.

5 Richard, Sybil and their first daughter Kate, at their home –
Le Pays de Galles
– in Céligny, Switzerland,
c
.1958.

6 Richard improving his French in conversation with owner/manager Paul Fillistorf at the Café de la Gare in Céligny,
c
.1958. Richard would return to the Café's unpretentious comfort with regularity for the next quarter century.

7 T. H. White's gift of his ‘Vodka Poem’ is mentioned by Burton in his diaries, 26 May 1969. ‘Richard ap Richard’ is Welsh for ‘Richard son of Richard’. ‘Gwalia’ is ‘Wales’.

8 A month before the end of filming
Cleopatra
, Richard and Elizabeth spent time together on a yacht off the island of Ischia, Naples, June 1962. The paparazzi's long lenses revealed that ‘le Scandale’ had far from run its course.

9 Richard and Elizabeth were based in the small Mexican coastal town of Puerto Vallarta while Richard was filming
The Night of the Iguana
in autumn 1963. They bought Casa Kimberley and returned there frequently over the next decade.

10 Richard, Maria Burton, Liza Todd and Elizabeth at Chalet Ariel, Gstaad, December 1968. ‘I am very excited at the thought of going home and seeing the two girls in their various [school] plays’, Richard had written a few days earlier.

11 Richard and his older brother Ivor, whom he admired and respected greatly, in the mid-1960s. Ivor's death in 1972 precipitated a catastrophic decline in Richard's personal and professional fortunes.

12 Directed by John Gielgud, Richard's
Hamlet
ran for 134 performances on New York's Broadway in 1964, following a successful run in Toronto. A version was broadcast in cinemas across the USA and a long-playing record released.

13 While working on
The Comedians
in the South of France, Richard and Elizabeth discovered that Elizabeth had won her second Best Actress Oscar for
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf ?
Richard's third nomination in three years for Best Actor was not successful.

14 Elizabeth shows off the 33.19 carat Krupp diamond, which cost $305,000, while in Britain for the filming of Harlech Television's ‘Opening Night’ in May 1968. Richard and Elizabeth were both directors of HTV.

15 Richard and Elizabeth arrive at RAF Abingdon, Oxfordshire in their Hawker Siddeley HS.125, in preparation for the film premiere of
Doctor Faustus
, October 1967. Elizabeth is wearing her
The Night of the Iguana
brooch, a present from Richard from four years earlier.