But Hollywood was also calling. Alongside his stage career, he won the Best Supporting Actor Award for My Cousin Rachel in 1952, earning him the first of seven Oscar nominations, and a year later was shortlisted for Best Actor for The Robe. When he was invited to appear in Cleopatra in 1961, he was already living as a tax exile in Switzerland and had left the London stage permanently.
violent incident
Everything changed when he met Elizabeth Taylor on the set of a fiasco that nearly bankrupted the 20th Century Fox movie studio. Burton is still in her first marriage, while Taylor was still married to her fourth husband, singer Eddie Fisher. Their violent affair while filming in Rome became an international scandal, with the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano reportedly accusing Taylor of being an “erotic vagrant” and describing her as “a greedy villain who destroys families and devours husbands.” In 1974, when Burton was asked by BBC film critic Barry Norman whether he agreed that his career was divided by the era before and after Cleopatra, Burton instead suggested, “I think my life was changed by a woman named Elizabeth Taylor.”
Getty ImagesThe couple, who married in 1964, became a source of international glamor thanks to a world of extravagance that included flashy jewelry, private planes, and private yachts. Some wondered if this superstar lifestyle represented a waste of Burton’s talent. Burton admitted to critic Kenneth Tynan in 1967 that his early years after moving from the London stage to Hollywood “were not, from an artistic point of view, the most interesting period of my life.” But bad or indifferent reviews never bothered him. “I strongly believe that if people pay to see me in theaters or movies, it’s their responsibility, not mine. If they stop seeing me, or my box office numbers go down, or something like that, I think I’ll be perfectly happy and quit my job. I do it because I rather like being famous.”
Regardless, Burton rejected the idea that film acting was somehow an inferior art. Rather than needing to carry his voice to the rafters of the theater, Taylor — who, after all, had been a movie star since the age of 12 — taught him how movie acting requires “economy, economy of voice, economy of movement, economy of gestures, … pain.” He added, “As she explained to me, when you’re 38 feet tall on your face…you have to be very careful how loud you express every emotion, whether it’s laughter, silliness, joy, tragedy, whatever it is. Of course, she’s the best movie actress in the world.”
Source: BBC Culture – www.bbc.com
