The winter is forbidden till December, and exits March the second on the dot

Groo - Monday again, and it's raining...

Hey ho - we have a centenary to take our minds off it, that of the very lovely Richard Burton.

With his mellifluous deep Welsh-accented voice and piercing blue eyes, he was more-or-less destined to be an actor, and indeed he became lauded as one of Britain's (and the world's) finest! Despite his long and estimable career - from My Cousin Rachel to The Robe to Under Milk Wood to Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? to Jeff Wayne's The War of the Worlds - his acting accomplishments were somewhat overshadowed by his tumultuous and headline-grabbing relationship with Elizabeth Taylor...

On this Tacky Music Monday, by way of a tribute, here's the great man singing:

Richard Burton - Camelot

Have a good week, dear reader.

Art imitating life imitating art imitating life

Dominic West and Helena Bonham Carter are to play Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in a one-off 90-minute BBC4 drama (to be shown "later this year" - no broadcast date has yet been confirmed).

From an article by Anna Pukas in The Express:

In 1983 the hottest ticket in town was Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton on stage together for the first time. The play was Noel Coward’s Private Lives but the billboards might as well have read The Liz and Dick Show.

After all Private Lives is about a couple, divorced after a stormy marriage, who meet up again while honeymooning with their new spouses and realise they are still in love with each other. Remind you of anyone? If ever there were a case of art imitating life, this was it. The second wife was even called Sybil, like the first wife Burton had left for Taylor.

Taylor and Burton had divorced for the second time six years earlier. They had both made ill-advised new marriages – she to Virginia senator John Warner, he to model Suzy Hunt, ex-wife of racing driver James Hunt – which had also ended in divorce. It was no wonder that audiences thought Private Lives was about their lives.

But rather than a triumph the next year was to be a watershed. For the first time Taylor – a consummate film actress but with virtually no theatre experience – seemed out of her depth and for the first time in the tempestuous 20 years he had known her, Burton found her irritating and boring. Most poignantly they were to be the last months they ever spent together for Burton died the following year.

Now the story of that last turbulent year has been made into a TV film starring Dominic West and Helena Bonham Carter in a BBC project that might be described as art imitating life imitating art imitating life.

Unfortunately, according to The Guardian, this will be the last of the brilliant real-life documentaries that have made BBC4 such a compelling and watchable channel since it was launched in 2002...

The drama, written by William Ivory and directed by Richard Laxton, is something of a swansong for BBC4, the last in a successful series of biopics about public figures including Margaret Thatcher, Enid Blyton, Beatrix Potter, Kenneth Williams, Frankie Howerd and Barbara Cartland.

BBC4's budget was cut last year as part of the corporation's "Delivering Quality First" cost-saving initiative. As a result, the channel is commissioning less original drama.

Such a shame.

BBC4

Star

Richard Burton's star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame is to be unveiled on Wales' national day next to Elizabeth Taylor's, the movie legend he married twice.

The Welsh actor's star will be placed on Hollywood Boulevard on 1st March, St David's Day.

To celebrate the news, here's an appropriate piece read by the late, great Mr Burton - John Donne's Go And Catch A Falling Star:

Richard Burton reads John Donne's poem - Go and catch a falling star

A BBC film has just been announced looking at the Burton-Taylor relationship through their 1983 stage production together Private Lives, a year before his death.

Dominic West will play Burton, while Helena Bonham-Carter is to portray Taylor, who died in 2011.

Read the BBC article.

Total war, Martha? Total!

Who knew that Edward Albee was still alive? Celebrating his birthday today, at 81 Albee has certainly earned his title of "America's greatest living playwright".



Adopted by a high society couple as a child, Albee ran away from his constrictive upbringing to join the literary set of New York's Greenwich Village in the 1950s. And his phenomenal legacy began there, with critically-acclaimed works such as Zoo Story and The Death of Bessie Smith. He was awarded the Pulitzer prize for A Delicate Balance, Seascape and Three Tall Women, and continued to produce award-winning plays over five decades, including The American Dream, and most recently with the 2002 hit Broadway and West End play The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?.

"I'm loud, and I'm vulgar, and I wear the pants in this house 'cos God knows, somebody has to! But I'm not a monster, I'm not!!"

But it of course for his masterwork Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? that he is (rightly) most admired and remembered. This tortuous dissection of a stifling relationship between two headstrong (and drunken) characters is held up today as a classic of world drama. It caused massive controversy in the straight-laced early 60s for its uncompromising use of vulgar language and uncomfortable scenes of verbal humiliation and implicit "sexual decadence".

The 1966 film adaptation was a massive success, featuring possibly the very best cinematic performances of all the leading players' careers - Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Sandy Dennis and George Segal. All four were nominated for Oscars (the film itself having been nominated in all thirteen eligible categories, unprecedented at the time), and Miss Taylor and Miss Dennis won Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress respectively.

In the hands of these masters, the movie is a brilliantly disturbing and engrossing example of modern film noir, as the viewer "eavesdrops" on the agonies of Martha and George's spiteful attacks on each other, and experiences the stifling discomfort of their humiliated guests.

The film, as the play before it, caused uproar in an age when cinema censorship was still rife, and apparently Jack Warner chose to pay a fine of $5,000 in order that it would remain as faithful to the play (with its profanity) as possible. His faith in the project certainly paid off.

Here are just a couple of clips from this, one of my and Madame Acarti's favourite films ever:

Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? - "Getting angry, Baby?"

Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? - "I am NOT a Monster!"

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf on IMDB

A moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black

"You can hear the dew falling, and the hushed town breathing. Only your eyes are unclosed, to see the black and folded town fast, and slow, asleep."

The greatest Welsh poet (and one of the greatest in history) Dylan Thomas would have celebrated his 94th birthday today.

In an interesting piece of news apparently his childhood home 5 Cwmdonkin Drive in Swansea has been restored to how it would have looked on the day of the poet's birth, and is now open to the public as self-catering holiday accommodation.

Read more about the project

What better excuse on this cold damp Monday morning to share with you a couple of gems from the great man's work, the complete classic Under Milk Wood and one of my all-time favourite poems Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night, both read by Richard Burton.

Richard Burton reads Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas

Richard Burton reads Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night by Dylan Thomas

Bliss.