From the man who adopted him, Philip Burton, and from his closest family we have new material on the boyhood of this twelfth child of an alcoholic Welsh miner. This fascinating portrait is filled out by fresh insights from those who knew him best. Here too we see a man of crippling melancholy and illness, of grand ambitions, of a reckless, restless, combative spirit, tortured by self-awareness of his own immense flaws. Here we see a man of extraordinary brilliance, wit, and learning, who read omnivorously but deeply, and who wrote with remarkable insight on such topics as his craft as an actor, his meetings with such luminaries as Kissinger, Tito, the Windsors, and Dylan Thomas, his daily life, and, with great passion and frankness, his relationship with Elizabeth Taylor. What Burton's 'notebooks' in particular reveal is that Burton was as gifted a writer as he was an actor.

From unpublished letters and memoirs, from interviews with those who have never before spoken, above all from the extraordinary cache of diaries kept by Burton-some 350,000 words never read by anyone before-there emerges a portrait of a man whose inner life was astonishingly different from the public image, but one that is in every way as fascinating and compelling. In addition to the life of the celebrity, there were many other lives of Richard Burton, and what elevates this biography above all others is that Bragg has discovered and summed up a man hidden until now from all but a few close friends, and even to them a mystery. Now, this legendary public and private life has found the perfect chroniclers-not only the biographer Melvyn Bragg, but also Richard Burton himself, whose personal notebooks are a key part of this extraordinary book. His formidable talent, his golden voice, his two marriages to Elizabeth Taylor-acted out against a spectacular material excess-his drinking, his womanizing, his infectious delight at outraging society, made him the number-one box office attraction in the world, and guaranteed for years that his every turn would be front- page news. Book Summaryįew actors in modern times have come close to the fame and glory enjoyed by the late Richard Burton. The book appears to have a mild damp stain along the top cloth edged spine but overall the book is in good condition, with crisp clean pages. The dust jacket has some chips and tiny closed tears along the edges.

Richard Burton: A Life by Melvyn Bragg is a 533-page hardcover published in 1988 by Little, Brown and Company, and is a s tated first US edition.

Melvyn bragg richard burton