Burton and Taylor
BBC4
So, farewell then, the BBC4 biopic – unless the high-ups wake up and give you a reprieve. (Come on Tony Hall! Save the BBC4 biopic, get Test cricket back on the BBC, find a way to trim the salaries of Jeremy Clarkson and a few others, and you’ll be a hero: it’s that simple.) Will we miss you? Yes, I think we will.
Naturally, there have been a few misses. I wasn’t mad about Christopher Eccleston doing John Lennon (creepy), and it was hard to care too much when Trevor Eve played the TV host Hughie Green, magnificent though his performance was. But there were tons of hits, too. My highlights: The Long Walk to Finchley, starring the scuttling Andrea Riseborough as a young Margaret Thatcher, and Fantabulosa! in which Michael Sheen, flared of nostril and tight of trouser, was a dead ringer for poor, sad Kenneth Williams.
The last ever BBC biopic starred Dominic West as Richard Burton and Helena Bonham Carter as Elizabeth Taylor (22 July, 9pm). Wow. I didn’t entirely buy Bonham Carter as Taylor, though her acting was superlative (film-star spoilt is harder to play convincingly than you might think). But West, I totally bought. It was like watching Burton only . . . better. West is a more accomplished actor than Burton, or at any rate, a less hammy one, and he is twice as sexy, if you ask me. The voice – coal wrapped in velvet – was perfect (“the theatrical equivalent of a big cock,” said this version of Burton, when Taylor praised it), and the manner was suitably retro: Terry-Thomas meets Dylan Thomas. I can’t believe there is a man alive who looks better in a camel pea coat than West.
The best biopics are built around an extended moment, not the entirety of a life. In this case, its writer, William Ivory, had landed on 1983, when Burton and Taylor, already twice married and twice divorced, appeared together on Broadway in a production of Noël Coward’s Private Lives. The production was a commercial smash hit – the crowds longing, as Burton put it, “to see us happen in front of them” – but a critical disaster, the press lining up to laugh at Taylor’s bizarre accent and weird posture (she was addicted to various pills by this stage).
Shortly after the production ended, Taylor was admitted to the Betty Ford Clinic for rehab. Burton, meanwhile, retreated to Switzerland with his new wife, Sally – where, nine months later, he died of a cerebral haemorrhage at the age of just 58.
Ivory’s writing was great. I’ve never had a problem understanding why Taylor was attracted to Burton; he was a real man – “You’re all the men who ever lived,” as Ivory had it – and he wouldn’t let her get away with stuff. But only as I watched this film did I grasp why he kept coming back for more. As Ivory had him explain, he was able to trust Taylor with his most abject side – being such a mess herself, she was not one to judge. And the best stage actor of his generation admired her way with the camera. He felt, unlike some, that she really could act. In one scene of the biopic, he told his assistant about Cleopatra, the 1964 picture on which he and Taylor first met. She was, he recalled, “all tits and make-up” and she seemed, as they said their respective lines, hardly to be moving at all: “I thought she’d had a bloody stroke, or something.” But then he saw the rushes, and he realised that she didn’t have to move. “She just became Cleopatra.”
Somehow, you believed this line, for all that it followed an excruciating rehearsal scene in which Taylor appeared with her entourage and promptly admitted that she hadn’t yet read Private Lives. (Burton was exasperated by this but not for his own sake so much as for hers: he knew she was about to make a fool of herself and couldn’t bear it.)
But perhaps this feeling – one’s sense that Burton’s fondness for Taylor was realitybased and ongoing rather than a romantic fiction – also had something to do with the fact that, naughtily, the BBC costume department had made Bonham Carter look more Taylor circa 1973 than Taylor circa 1983. No cliff-sized shoulder pads, no megaperm, no radar-sized dangly earrings: this was a good taste version of Eighties Taylor and it made you feel sad for her, rather than – as was really the case – ever so slightly repulsed.
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