In from the Cold? A Portrait of Richard Burton

9/27/2026

As biographical critiques of a film star go, this has to be one of the most honest I've ever seen. It operates within the scope of a broad-based chronology, but thereafter it follows different themes in the life of Richard Jenkins - the tenth of twelve children born to a Welsh mining family in the midst of the 1920s. His mother didn't survive for much longer so he was brought up by his elder sister before being adopted by his English tutor Philip Burton and thence heading to Oxford where he began to develop his more Thespian roots and then hit Hollywood via London's Old Vic. There are plenty of contemporaneous contributions from the likes of biographer Melvyn Bragg and fellow actorrrrs Robert Hardy and Sir John Gielgud, but the two that stand out more for me come from his daughter with fir