Eight Things Richard Burton Did to Acquire "That" Voice

Film critic Antonia Quirke visited Richard Burton's South Wales birthplace – Pontrhydyfen – to discover how the actor developed his cinematic voice.

As Richard Jenkins, the 12th of 13 children, Burton was brought up in a Welsh-speaking home, like practically all the households in Pontrhydyfen. But all seven Oscar-nominated film performances he gave were delivered in English with no trace of a Welsh accent. So where did "the voice" come from?

1. Start young

Within the village the Jenkinses were renowned for having beautiful voices. Burton himself said, "Our voices were born with coal dust and rain."

2. Take me to church

Every Sunday the young Burton would spend all day listening to the preachers in chapel. This was a performance culture, and anyone who had any talent would be in the pulpit singing or reciting.

3. Moving pictures

As a child, Burton loved going to the cinema where he was exposed to some of the most characterful and idiosyncratic voices of the time: actors like James Mason, Marilyn Monroe, James Stewart and Cary Grant. Burton realised that a unique voice was crucial to a particular level of stardom.

4. All change

To go to secondary school, he moved to Port Talbot to live with his sister and met frustrated actor and BBC producer Philip Burton, who became his producer, mentor and guardian. Recognising his potential as an actor, Philip Burton knew that Richard’s voice and accent would have to change and that this would require huge amounts of methodical hard work. Richard’s response was, "All right. Change it."

5. Project voice

Theatre microphones were unheard of, and remarkably Richard’s voice was relatively weak, so Philip Burton would take the teenager walking into the mountains and make him shout Shakespearean speeches for hours and hours. It was a residential vocal boot-camp that went on every day for three years.

6. How now brown cow

Once he’d made "the voice" louder, Philip Burton then had to train him out of his Welsh accent. He taught him to remove the long vowels of the Welsh accent and introduced received pronunciation.

7. Too much too soon

The exercises successfully took away his Welshness, but they perhaps went a little too far, Philip Burton believed. When Richard was asked to speak and sing in Welsh in "The Last Days of Dolwyn" his Welsh accent sounded false and exaggerated.

8. A life of its own

"The voice" soon became Burton’s stock-in-trade and his habitual tone (he also adopted Philip Burton's less Welsh-sounding surname as his own). Gwyneth Petty, a Welsh actress who appeared with him in the first performance of "Under Milk Wood" as a girl, said it wasn’t an inauthentic voice: "that was just how he sounded, all the time." Sian Phillips, who appeared with Burton many times, said she did wonder sometimes "whether he was occasionally sacrificing the meaning to the beauty of the sound. There weren’t that many Welsh actors on the world stage. People were simply captivated."

With the advent of the "kitchen sink" dramas that followed Burton, it suddenly became a benefit to have a regional accent. His was one of the last of those distinctive voices but it is fitting that a man who "pitied inarticulacy over everything else" gave us his beautiful, shimmering tones to listen to forever. His voice – low, measured, weary, full of the sound of cigarettes, women and "condensation in martini glasses" – is his gift to us.

Cinema's Secret History: How Richard Burton Got His Voice is available now on the Radio 4 website.