Richard Burton - biography

“Actors should keep their mouths shut and hope for the best.”

“An actor is something less than a man, while an actress is something more than a woman.”

“Clint Eastwood appears to do nothing and does everything, reducing everuthing and everybody - like Mitchum and Tracy.”

“I’ve done the most awful rubbish in order to have somewhere to go in the morning.”

“I’ve done the most unutterable rubbish, all because of money - when the lure of the zeros was simply too much.”

“I’ve played the lot, a homosexual, a sadistic gangster, kings, princes, a saint, the lot.  All that’s left is a Carry On film.  My last ambition.”

“If you’re going to make rubbish, be the best rubbish in it.”

“In a film, you’re a puppet.  On a stage, you’re the boss.”

“Stanislavsky helps the weak.  The idea of a Stanislavskian self-indulgence is anathema to me.  I hate this public display of a personal rat biting a personal stomach.”

“The Welsh are all actors.  It’s only the bad ones who become professional.”

“When I played drunks I had to remain sober because I didn’t know how to play them when I was drunk.”

“The minute you start fiddling around outside the idea of monogamy, nothing satisfies anymore.”

“Elizabeth [Taylor] is a pretty girl but she has a double chin and an overdeveloped chest and she’s rather short in the leg.  So I can hardly describe her as the most beautiful creature I’ve ever seen.”

“The only fight Elizabeth and I had over the divorce was when I said: ‘You take everything’ and she replied: ‘No, you take it all.’”

“False friendship, like the ivy, decays and ruins the walls it embraces; but true friendship gives new life and animation to the object it supports.”

“When the chips are not exactly down but just scattered about, you discover who your real friends are.”

“A spoiled genius from the Welsh gutter, a drinker, a womaniser.  It’s rather an attractive image.”

“How strange are the tricks of memory, which, often hazy as a dream about the most important events of a man’s life, religiously preserve the merest trifles.”

“I am Richard, son of Richard - for I am both my father and my son.  Devious, difficult and perverse.  A mess of contradictions.”

“I might run from her for a thousand years and she is still my baby child.  Our love is so furious that we burn each other out.”

“I’m a Communist at heart.”

“The more I study religions the more I am convinced that man never worshipped anything but himself.”

“The weak rely on Christ, the strong do not.”

“A man that hoards up riches and enjoys them not, is like an ass that carries gold and eats thistles.”

“Indeed he knows not how to know who knows not also how to un-know.”

“Little islands are all large prisons: one cannot look at the sea without wishing for the wings of a swallow.”

“My father considered that anyone that went to chapel and didn’t drink alcohol was not to be tolerated.  I grew up in that belief.”

“They lard their lean books with the fat of others work.”

“This diamond has so many carats it’s almost a turnip.”

“Travellers are like poets.  They are mostly an angry race.”

“You may be as vicious about me as you please.  You will only do me justice.”

Richard Burton has appeared in the following films:
The Last Days of Dolwyn (1949)
Now Barabbas (1949)
Waterfront (1950)
The Woman with No Name (1950)
Green Grow the Rushes (1951)
My Cousin Rachel (1952)
The Desert Rats (1953)
The Robe (1953)
Thursday’s Children (1954)
Prince of Players (1955)
The Rains of Ranchipur (1955)
Alexander the Great (1956)
Bitter Victory (1957)
Sea Wife (1957)
Look Back in Anger (1958)
Sen noci svatojanske (1959)
March to Aldermaston (1959)
Ice Palace (1960)
The Bramble Bush (1960)
The Longest Day (1962)
Cleopatra (1963)
The V.I.P.s (1963)
Zulu (1964)
Becket (1964)
The Night of the Iguana (1964)
Hamlet (1964)
What’s New, Pussycat? (1965)
The Sandpiper (1965)
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965)
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966)
The Taming of the Shrew (1967)
Doctor Faustus (1967)
The Comedians (1967)
Boom (1968)
Where Eagles Dare (1968)
Candy (1968)
Staircase (1969)
Anne of the Thousand Days (1969)
Raid on Rommel (1971)
Villain (1971)
Under Milk Wood (1972)
The Assassination of Trotsky (1972)
Hammersmith Is Out (1972)
Bluebeard (1972)
Sutjeska (1973)
Rappresaglia (1973)
Il Viaggio (1974)
The Klansman (1974)
Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977)
Equus (1977)
The Medusa Touch (1978)
The Wild Geese (1978)
Absolution (1978)
Steiner – Das eiserne Kreuz, 2. Teil (1979)
Circle of Two (1981)
Lovespell (1981)
Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984)