“You must decide”- the great Laurence Olivier told a young Richard Burton- “whether you want to be an actor or a household name.” “Both” he replied. Richard Burton spent the rest of his life living up to that promise.

Richard Jenkins was the twelfth of thirteen children born to a poor family in Pontrhyhdyfen, a small mining village just north of Port Talbot. The name Burton came later, taken from the influential schoolmaster who would march him up the hillside and have him recite lines of Shakespeare above the howling wind.

Phillip Burton’s efforts helped Richard win a scholarship to Oxford, from where his acting abilities propelled him onwards to the London stage. His first film, Emlyn Williams’ Last Days of Dolwyn, cast him - appropriately enough- as a valleys boy made good.

His rich voice and magnetic presence paved the way to Hollywood and global recognition. As well as starring in the biblical epics and war movies so popular in the 1950’s, he was also the definitive ‘Angry Young Man’ with an epoch-making performance in John Osbourne’s Look Back in Anger.

His private life became the focus of attention when he began an affair with co-star Elizabeth Taylor on the set of Cleopatra in 1963. Over the next twelve years the pair – who married twice having divorced briefly in the early ‘seventies- were the world’s most famous celebrity couple.

The Burton-Taylor saga and its attendant media circus, along with his prodigious alcohol intake, often attracted more attention than his later work. Yet the talent with which he was so abundantly blessed shone through in productions such as Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf, Equus and his last film, 1984.

A friend and admirer of Dylan Thomas, he returned to Wales to produce and star in Under Milk Wood in 1972. Like the poet, Burton’s “hellraising” image should never be allowed to detract from his greatness as an actor.