Non Fiction
Category: Biography, Drama, Non Fiction
Number of pages: 130
ISBN: 9781854110404
Publication date: January 1, 1991
Price: £10.95
The story of Richard Burton’s life is well known: from son of a Welsh miner and ward of a local teacher to international superstar. He became as famous for being Richard Burton and husband of Elizabeth Taylor as for the extraordinary acting abilities which made his name. A globe-trotter with a Swiss home, Burton never forgot his Welsh origins and identity.
In this study, cultural historian Peter Stead shows how Burton’s Welshness shaped his character and his career. He reviews Burton’s stage and film careers, showing how bad luck and his own character left him isolated in the face of dramatic and cinematic change. Stead also describes the phenomenon of the Burton-Taylor marriages, and how Burton was transformed from actor into jet-setter.
Richard Burton: So Much, So Little places him fully in his English, American and Welsh contexts, to produce the most interesting book on Burton yet published.
Peter Stead
Peter Stead was born in Barry in 1943. He was educated at Barry and Gowerton Grammar Schools and at University College, Swansea. He has twice been a Visiting Fulbright Scholar in the USA, at Wellesley College, Massachusetts, in 1973-4 and at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington in 1988-9. He is the author of Coleg Harlech (1976), Film and the Working Class (1989, 1991) and Richard Burton: So Much, So Little (1991). For BBC Wales he wrote and presented a television film on How Green Was My Valley (1991) and Dennis Potter (1993). A former History lecturer at Swansea University, Peter Stead is now a freelance broadcaster and writer.
