Richard Burton

Richard Burton, CBE (November 10 1925 – August 5 1984) was a seven-time Academy Award-nominated, double BAFTA- and double Golden Globe-winning Welsh actor. He was at one time the highest-paid actor in Hollywood. Richard Burton was born Richard Walter Jenkins in the village of Pontrhydyfen, Wales, UK, near Port Talbot. He grew up in a working-class, Welsh-speaking household, the twelfth of thirteen children. His father was a short, robust coal miner, a “twelve-pints a-day man” who sometimes went off on drinking and gambling sprees for weeks. Burton later claimed, by family telling, that “He looked very much like me...That is, he was pockmarked, devious, and smiled a great deal when he was in trouble. He was, also, a man of extraordinary eloquence, tremendous passion, great violence”. Burton's mother, Edith, died after the last birth, before he was two years old. In 1927, his sister Cecilia 'Cis' and her husband Elfed, in nearby Port Talbot (an English-speaking steel town) took him... full article at wikipedia