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'Dad and Liz couldn't be together'

from Cathy (cathyvpreece@aol.com)
Saturday 15 March 2003

Telegraph

'Dad and Liz couldn't be together'

(Filed: 14/03/2003) Kate Burton talks to Elizabeth Grice about her father's alcoholism and his fiery relationship with step-mother Elizabeth Taylor

Kate Burton has seen the squalid church hall cubby-hole where it is proposed we might do the interview and refuses to go inside. It is little more than a cell, very cold, with a gaping hole in the ceiling.

Under a washbasin with no soap, there is a dirty grey towel, two half-used bags of sand and a bucket. The furnishings consist of two derelict microwaves, a large box of crockery, a trolley laden with unwashed glasses and a long, plastic-covered bench, grey with dust.

The company manager is suggesting the loan of a fan heater to take off the chill. "Can you believe it?" Burton asks. "We are rehearsing a West End play!" She is not being grand or actressy, just amazed, having come from New York, where rehearsal spaces are vast, purpose-built and presumably hygienic. We know about the backstage seediness of most West End theatres, so it shouldn't be a surprise to find that the church halls where actors rehearse are equally unappetising.

This one, in south London, is temporary home to the luminous cast of Chekhov's Three Sisters - Kristin Scott Thomas, Kate Burton, Madeleine Worrall, Douglas Hodge - and it is simply amazing that big-name stars are prepared to spend seven or eight weeks here, eating packed lunches or scouring the grim neighbourhood for a take-away. It must say something about the magnetic pull of the London stage.

As we adjourn to a pub across the road, Hodge, in crash helmet, flashes past on his bicycle. But Kate Burton, daughter of Richard, fresh from success on Broadway, has heroically travelled on the Northern Line to Kennington, possibly London Underground's most insalubrious station. She's uncritical, unfazed. She's a daughter of the Welsh valleys and she's here to make a late debut on the West End stage. "It's my favourite play. The cast is as good as it gets. It's just a dream."

Uncomplicated Kate. Practical, amused, unshrewish Kate. How does she do it? She was four when her father's grand passion for Elizabeth Taylor on the set of Cleopatra in 1962 broke up her family life and caused an international furore. Her mother, the actress Sybil Williams, fled to New York with her two small daughters to escape the publicity and begin a new life. She married Jordan Christopher, a rock musician turned actor, who was Kate's adored stepfather for 30 years.

Kate would spend several weeks every summer in the volatile Burton-Taylor menage. She tries to make it sound normal, but living on yachts and film sets and with visitors such as Ringo Starr, John Gielgud, Ava Gardner, Sean Connery and Peter O'Toole, how normal was normal? This is the little girl whom Jackie Kennedy famously helped to find her knickers during the New York City blackout of 1965.

Though fun at the time, the Burton-Taylor lifestyle seems to have left her unimpressed by celebrity. She couldn't understand how they coped with the lack of privacy, and witnessed the damage alcohol did to their marriage. "Things always went awry when they were drinking. They'd become caricatures of themselves. He'd brood and she'd become crazy and wacky," Kate once observed.

She says now that even when Burton's alcoholism "made things a bit touch and go, they were always dealt with with great humour and caring". After his death, Kate says she felt the vulnerability of being the child of an alcoholic and, even though she hardly drinks herself, attended Alcoholics Anonymous - "I felt the need to talk". She says her father would never have gone to AA. "It makes me howl with laughter to think of him sitting round sharing his experiences. He was the wrong generation."

Elizabeth Taylor was a "powerful", funny and generous step-parent, with whom she's still in touch - as she is with all her step-mothers and step-siblings and 50-odd Welsh cousins. "Dad was beloved for many reasons and we all feel very strongly about each other."

She had angry spats with her father but, before he died, of a cerebral haemorrhage in 1984, they had become very close and had just completed a television film together, Ellis Island.

"I was always able to take things in my stride," she says. "I spent my childhood on the jump-seat of a limousine but I was also perfectly happy on the subway. I was never one of those kids who expected anything other than what I had. I was happy with a sedate life - though 'sedate' is relative: my mother owned a discotheque and married a rock star.

"I could see all the pitfalls of showbusiness. Either you were a working actor or you weren't. There was no security whatsoever. I had one of the most famous actors in the world as my father and one of the most famous actresses in the world as my stepmother, so I saw what their lives were like. The celebrity part of it didn't appeal to me. There was nothing great about it from a child's point of view, constantly having people around. Dad and Elizabeth were two of the first victims of the paparazzi. My mom was a victim of the paparazzi. Why would I want to go into that? It was horrific."

As a small child, hurriedly leaving for New York, she remembers the explosion of flash-bulbs. Why, she asked her mother, did everybody want to take their picture? "Because you're so pretty," replied Sybil, whose complete lack of bitterness or public recrimination must have hugely shaped her daughter's easy outlook on life.

Sybil, now 74, and still running a small theatre, sounds a gem. There were no villains, she insisted, when her daughter was old enough to be told about the scandal; it was just something that happened. "I was incredibly well-adjusted because I was blessed with this extraordinary mom and with an incredible mafia of Welsh uncles and aunts. My mother knew that she was not going to be able to live in this country, the way the press were, always breathing down our necks, always at our front door. If she was going to survive and live and thrive, she had to leave. She did what she wanted to do, but she taught me how to live with grace under pressure. It's too bad she has never chosen to write something about it because it's great to let women know that, though cataclysmic and horrid things can happen, you can find a way out of the morass."

Burton doesn't claim that Elizabeth Taylor was necessarily the love of her father's life ("all Dad's wives came into his life at a time when he needed them"). "They had a very powerful relationship but - I think they would both say this - they couldn't be together any more. It wasn't great for either of them."

Kate Burton is now 45 and has two children of her own, Morgan, 15, and Charlotte, five. Her husband is the producer of the award-winning Williamstown Theatre Festival in Massachusetts. She is startlingly like her father, with a broad open face, greenish eyes and a stubborn jaw that she declares she will never submit to plastic surgery. She can look imperious, in a classic English way, but the paleness of her complexion and her red hair are pure Celt.

"My children are American, I speak with an American accent, but I am a British citizen." Her 100 per cent Welshness is a source of pride and she has just been to visit her relatives in the valleys with her daughter. "It reminded me of how incredible it must have been for Dad, to come from that place and to go where he went; and for my mom to come from that same place and go on to run a night club in New York in the Sixties."

Fluent in Russian and French, she intended to become a diplomat, but the dramatic gene got the better of a good education. "I decided to go to Yale School of Drama because, being Dad's daughter, I wanted to have training. I did not want to be floating around with people saying: 'She got that because she's Richard Burton's daughter' - though even with the training and all my credits, there are still people who say that. It's absurd."

Her stage and screen work has been steady rather than meteoric, but there was a big shift towards stardom when she played Hedda Gabler two years ago. The New York Times critic Ben Brantley saw her in an out-of-town theatre production and praised her "natural radiant air of ordinariness", calling it "one of those benchmark performances that redefine both a classic character and an actress". It was enough to launch the play on Broadway.

Suddenly, at an age when most actresses routinely grumble that they are being overlooked and there are no decent roles for middle-aged women, Kate Burton is in demand. "I've got the best parts of my career since I turned 40. Hedda is probably the greatest part written for a woman. It was a turning point for me. Without it, I would not have gone on to do Elephant Man. Without it, I would probably not be here.

"Who knows what will happen next?"

Three Sisters is at The Playhouse Theatre, London WC2 from March 20 to May 18 . Box office: 020 7369 1785

(posted 7685 days ago)

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