“Without Philip Burton there would never have been a Richard Burton,” Richard’s some-time wife Elizabeth Taylor observed. “That great rolling voice that cracked like wild Atlantic waves would never have been heard outside the valley.”
Early in Mr Burton, an absorbing origin story of the Welsh star, Richard Jenkins, as he was then known, appears in an amateur production of Pygmalion. It’s a neat reference for a chronicle of the young man’s mentorship by Philip Burton, his schoolteacher, vocal coach and lifelong friend. There are no marbles in the mouth, but there is roaring in the valley as Jenkins learns to modulate his baritone.
Harry Lawtey, lately wasted as Harvey Dent in Joker: Folie à Deux, is tremendous as the budding actor. He doesn’t simply inhabit the role: he metamorphosises. When asked to commit Henry V’s prologue to memory, the young Burton breathlessly recites it while running off the rugby pitch and undermines his teacher’s use of Shakespeare as punishment: “I bloody loved it!”
Jenkins’s promise as both a student and a performer is jeopardised by wartime necessities. The neglected son of a hard-drinking miner is dependent on his doting sister Cecilia (Aimee-Ffion Edwards) and her grumbling coalminer husband, Elfed (Aneurin Barnard).
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It falls to the nurturing Philip Burton (Toby Jones) and Ma (Leslie Manville), his kindly landlady, to intervene so the youngster can leave the dreary co-operative job and return to school.
Jenkins would become Burton’s legal ward and take his surname, an arrangement that inspires suspicion. “Looks like the boys were right,” Richard’s father says scornfully. “They said you’ve turned into a poofter.”
Marc Evans’s film is a lovely thing. The glistening score, composed by John Hardy, was recorded by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales. A note-perfect screenplay from the Tom Bullough and Josh Hyams follows the great actor from 1942, when he was a 17-year-old Port Talbot schoolboy, to 1951, as he hellraises his way to Stratford-upon-Avon for a breakthrough performance as Prince Hal in Henry IV. Jones and Manville are predictably excellent.
In cinemas from Friday, April 4th
