Reaching the peak of his fame in the middle of the last century, Richard Burton was one of the first in his profession whose acting prowess was equalled by his celebrity profile. Both for his commanding roles on stage and screen, and his tempestuous marriages to Elizabeth Taylor, he seemed to disproportionately exist in the public sphere, foreshadowing how major celebrities conduct their lives today. Marc Evans’ film Mr Burton, released in the UK earlier this year, and playing in competition at the Dinard British & Irish Film Festival, provides a cogent origin story for this notoriety, returning to Burton's roots in wartime Wales and musing on how much his Hollywood persona was manufactured, or truly innate. 

The actual “Mr Burton” for most of the film is Toby Jones’ character of Philip Burton, the eventual star’s English and Drama teacher in Port Talbot, and later his theatrical mentor, role model and adoptive father. Tom Bullough and Josh Hyams’ screenplay is accurate to the transformative effect the older Burton had on the younger (when he was more modestly known as Richie Jenkins), yet turns him into a more tragic figure, advanced in age, his playwriting and acting ambitions unfulfilled, and with his sexuality deeply suppressed. Harry Lawtey makes a convincing Richie, first portraying him as an uncorrupted blank slate, before flecks of his sexual confidence and famous self-destructiveness reveal themselves. 

Evans achieves a tonal coup, where the sundering of Richie from his family (he lives with his sister and her coal miner husband, with his actual father an unstable alcoholic) feels like a positive and appropriate step in his development, yet the only hope of his acting ambitions being fulfilled lies in excising every element of his regional working-class background. British actors a generation or so after Burton, whether through 60’s social mores or the Method's influence, could be more authentic to their origins. Through his own good faith, and with no sexual motive cautiously assumed by the screenplay, Philip’s Pygmalion-like moulding prepares Richie for the Royal Shakespeare Company’s stages and beyond, as the actor calls upon his services before performing in Henry IV Part 2 early in his career. 

In addition to a Best Actor prize for Lawtey, the film also won the Audience Award at Dinard, attesting to the watchability but also the unthreatening familiarity of its heritage filmmaking style. Whilst the film delves into the complexity and detail of Burton’s artistic apprenticeship, it’s still hagiographic–printing the legend, and not deconstructing it. Indeed, for younger audiences unfamiliar with Burton's work, a bolder or self-reflexive approach might have beeen a more exciting way of memorialising his career: perhaps a Holy Motors or Todd Haynes-style riff, showing the Angry Young Man of Look Back in Anger mutating into Mark Anthony in the megaflop Cleopatra, and then his later valedictory roles in 1984 and The Exorcist II: The Heretic. Mr Burton ultimately doesn’t last in the memory, yet for its duration, it gets us thinking about our unceasing fascination with great actors, equally as role models and cautionary tales.

Mr Burton is a UK-USA-Canada co-production, staged by Severn Screen, in association with Promise Pictures and Brookstreet Pictures. World sales are handled by Independent Entertainment.