Was Richard Burton abused by his adoptive father? The grim truth behind Mr Burton

Telegraph

20-03-2025

Four decades after his death, the tumultuous personal and professional lives of Richard Burton have become fair game for fictitious exploration. In the past few years alone, Dominic West has played the Welsh actor on television (opposite Helena Bonham Carter as his grand inamorata, Elizabeth Taylor), and, on stage, Johnny Flynn's Burton struck sparks off Mark Gatiss's John Gielgud in Jack Thorne's play The Motive and the Cue. Now, it's Industry's Harry Lawtey's turn to take on the mantle of the great man in Marc Evans's new film Mr Burton.
However, although the film revolves around the young Richard Burton (still Richard Jenkins at this point), striking out in what would become a legendary career on stage and screen, the hero of the film is not the thespian but the titular mild-mannered schoolmaster Philip Burton, played by Toby Jones. The film's narrative cleaves closely to the received narrative about their relationship, namely that the young Jenkins, the twelfth of 13 children, became the protégé and informal adopted son of Philip Burton, a bachelor who had been frustrated in his ambitions to become a professional actor himself. Burton was, however, no ordinary mentor. He wrote television and radio scripts for the BBC, served as commanding officer for the Port Talbot ATC during WWII and, when Richard Burton became a global star, continued to act as counsellor, stand-in director and inspiring father figure.
The two had first met when Richard Jenkins had won a scholarship to the academically selective Port Talbot Secondary School in March 1937, where Philip taught him English and Welsh literature. Jenkins's mother Edith had died when he was two, of postpartum infection brought on by the birth of his youngest sibling Graham. His father Richard, aka 'Daddy Ni' – a coal miner, '12 pints a day man' – was barely capable of looking after any of his children, which meant that Richard Jr needed surrogate parents. He found them first in the form of his elder sister Cis, who he lived with in Port Talbot after leaving his birth village of Pontrhydyfen, and then Philip Burton.
It is a good, heart-warming story, and one that the film sticks to, mindful of the apparent admiration that Philip and Burton expressed for one another. The actor said, 'I owe him everything'. And publicly at least, he celebrated his mentor, who returned this affection. Philip later recalled in his memoir Richard & Philip: The Burtons – A Book of Memories, 'One day in 1964 when Richard was playing Hamlet on Broadway, he and I were interviewed jointly in a private corner of an Eighth Avenue bar and restaurant much frequented by theatre people… One of the questions aimed at me was, 'How did you come to adopt him?' [...] Richard jumped in with 'He didn't adopt me; I adopted him.'' Philip concluded, 'there was much truth in that. He needed me, and, as I realised later, he set out to get me.'
This is the language of a lover, rather than a boy searching for a parent – or vice versa. While the film Mr Burton raises the idea that Philip's interest in the young man was sexual rather than purely professional, it does so in order to reject such an undeniably scandalous suggestion out of hand. After all, if you're going to cast Toby Jones – the personification of screen integrity, after his award-winning role as the campaigner Alan Bates in Mr Bates vs the Post Office – you are flagging to the audience that your protagonist is a noble and decent man, rather than one who has embarked on his scheme to groom a young man with base intentions. Mr Burton, therefore, succeeds admirably as an uplifting and noble tale of male friendship. The truth may have been rather more complex, and less impressive.
Throughout his life, Burton was tormented by fear of repressed homosexuality. Despite being married five times in the 58 years he lived – twice to Elizabeth Taylor – he once suggested that 'many actors are gay, and we just cover it up with drink', and said that 'I drank because I was afraid of being a homosexual... I was a homosexual once but not for long.' He played several overtly gay roles – including a gangster in the 1971 British crime thriller Villain and a hairdresser in the 1969 comedy-drama Staircase – but did so with sufficient detachment to make it quite clear to his audience that he, the legendary Lothario, was very different to these characters.
In his diaries, he was scathing about many of the gay people he worked with throughout his career. He wrote of one friend, Raymond Pike, that he was 'camping around with every conceivable signal of blatant homosexuality' and sighed 'Any minute or dark day now he is going to look his age. Terrible to be a middle-aged pouf.' Still, not everyone was taken in. Burton's friend and co-star Peter O'Toole remarked, with a heroic lack of political correctness, 'It looks as though you cornered the limp wrist market, duckie.'
Richard never publicly speculated about Philip Burton's sexuality. Roger Lewis, whose recent biography of both Burton and Taylor, Erotic Vagrancy, makes a fair claim to be the most authoritative account of their chaotic, glamorous lives, suggests explicitly that Philip was not only gay but a pederast, describing him as 'drab and creepy, a snail or whelk curled inside its shell'.
Certainly, it seems likely that Philip was homosexual. After leaving Wales in 1954, once his adopted ward had become an international star, he moved first to New York and then settled in Key West, the gay-friendly district of Florida. And when Richard Burton was drunk – a frequent occurrence – he would make slighting remarks about his mentor's proclivities. He said to one girlfriend, Rosemary Kingsland, that Philip was 'a bloody arse-bandit. If I wasn't sitting on it, studying all those bloody books he set me, he would have stuffed himself up it.' He also commented, 'There was someone [who had] been in love with me for ages and I knew it. I played him like a fish on a hook to get what I wanted.' This is not very far from Philip's own belief that Burton 'set out to get me'.
Kingsland claimed to have had a brief relationship with Burton when he was 30 and she was 14 – 'I was like a little puppy on heat'. She was nonetheless clear Burton felt unhappy about his involvement with Philip. 'I absolutely think Richard had a sexual relationship with Philip Burton, because of what he said to me, and how he said it. If he'd just been prick-teasing him, he might have felt a bit embarrassed or guilty about it. But when he'd had a lot to drink, he was very, very black and angry about Philip. He kept saying that he'd led Philip along and teased him. But he also said, 'Why would anyone take you into their house unless they wanted your arse?''
When interviewed in 2003, 13 years after Philip's death in 1990, Kingsland was also the first person to say publicly that he was less than saintly. 'I just got the impression [Burton] felt things hadn't been quite right, or normal. Richard had built up a deep anger within himself and much of it was directed at Philip Burton. He never mentioned him with affection. There was always a feeling of angst or regret.'
Philip attempted to adopt Burton as his son, but was not allowed to. The reason that he gave was that they were too close in age – Philip was born on 30 November 1904, Burton on 10 November 1925, and there needed to be a clear 21 years between them – but it may also have been that the authorities felt uncomfortable about such an association being legalised. Philip had previously formed another close friendship with another young man, Owen Jones, who had similarly benefitted from his tutelage, but died in an accident at his airbase in 1940. Philip was said to be 'broken-hearted', and looked around for another suitable subject, which he found in the form of Burton.
Philip paid Burton's father £50 – around £2500 today – and, in exchange, became the legal guardian of the boy, allowing him to take his surname and live with him in 'uncontrolled custody'. The 17-year-old, now named Burton, moved in with Philip on March 1 1943, St David's Day, and reportedly celebrated the anniversary every year with a heavy drinking bout, whether out of fond nostalgia or guilt-ridden anger. Yet shortly afterwards, he began an acting career, under Philip's tutelage. The two worked together particularly closely when Philip was at the BBC as a producer in the 1940s, casting his protégé in such Welsh-themed dramas as The Corn is Green and The Last Days of Dolwyn. This led to Burton being noticed, and he was making films by the end of the decade. Less than 10 years after he had become Philip's ward, he was a leading Shakespearean actor and a Hollywood star.
Philip undoubtedly saw serious acting potential in the young man, and, as someone who had his own connections at the BBC and elsewhere, was in a position to nurture and develop this talent, which he duly did. Without Philip, there would have been no 'Richard Burton'. He offered him a respectable, cultured middle-class life, along with access to literature and theatre that Burton would not have otherwise had.
It is also likely that Philip was physically attracted to his younger ward and that he was motivated by both artistic and carnal desires alike. It is impossible to be certain as to whether the relationship ever took on a physical dimension. Even in Burton's drunken ranting and the privacy of his diaries, he never explicitly accused Philip of rape. However, there may have been a degree of coercion that took place that he then repressed, out of shame at his heterosexuality being impugned.
In any case, the two men continued to be close until Burton's death in 1984, bar a falling-out that supposedly occurred because Philip was angered by his ward's decision to leave his first wife, Sybil Williams, for Elizabeth Taylor while filming the notorious flop Cleopatra. Burton left his guardian money in his will. He refers to him relatively few times in his diaries, but always in a neutral or faintly positive fashion.
Still, this may have been done through a desire to repress a greater feeling of guilt. Whatever did occur between the two in Philip's home in the Forties, and possibly beyond, can only be the substance of conjecture. But it seems likely that Philip Burton was an altogether more complex character than even the great Toby Jones might suggest through his performance on screen.