Kate Burton is "so sick" of father Richard Burton being labelled a hellraiser

But Richard’s English teacher, Philip Burton, sees something in the lad and mentors him, with Richard eventually becoming his legal ward and taking his name.

Of course, Richard Burton went on to become a global star of both screen and stage until his death in 1984 at the age of 58. He was not only nominated for seven Academy Awards, but was also, according to critic Kenneth Tynan, "the natural successor to [Laurence] Olivier".

Married five times, he was half of one of the first celebrity power couples when wed – twice, consecutively – to Elizabeth Taylor (who herself was married an impressive eight times). It is his hellraising years with Taylor that usually generate interest, but a new film, Mr Burton, eschews the rock ’n’ roll part of Burton’s life in favour of zooming in on his tricky teens.

The biopic, starring Toby Jones as Philip Burton, Harry Lawtey as young Richard and Lesley Manville as Ma Smith, Philip’s landlady, is a fascinating journey through those early years.

We know Jones and Manville are sublime actors, but Lawtey, whose breakthrough role was in Industry, is a revelation: at the start he’s a gangly kid with a broad Welsh accent, but Philip Burton takes him into the mountains to shout Shakespearean speeches into the air for hours on end and, by 1951, he’s performing Hal in Henry IV, his voice mellifluous, modulated and rich.

Kate Burton, the 67-year-old daughter of Richard and his first wife, Sybil Williams, who was also an actor, usually makes a point of not watching films about her dad, but Mr Burton is different. "There have been so many biopics through the years," she says. "I know the one with Dominic West and Helena Bonham Carter [Burton & Taylor] is apparently very good and I love those two actors very much, but as the child of… well, I’m happy if everyone is so fascinated by Dad and Elizabeth, but what’s thrilling about Mr Burton is that it’s about Dad when he was young. Philip did an extraordinarily beautiful thing for Dad – we all have great teachers who make a difference, but he was something else. I’m proud to refer to him as my grandfather."

Is she bored of her father’s reputation as a hellraiser? "Oh, my God! I’m so sick of it! Look, it was definitely part of his life. I accept that Dad and Elizabeth ushered in the notion of the paparazzi. It’s just funny to me because I had a very stable childhood in New York with my mother and stepfather, and I spent part of my summer holidays with Dad and Elizabeth. They were always in magnificently interesting places, which I loved visiting, like the set of [the 1966 film] Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Elizabeth had four children, to whom Dad was stepfather, and I remain incredibly close to them. I guess we’re so connected because no one else could possibly know what our lives were like."

A great force of life – who doesn’t care when the Zoom link fails to work and happily resumes our interview on WhatsApp – Kate Burton is a celebrated actor in her own right, with a master’s degree from the Yale School of Drama. She is a regular on Broadway, but outside the States is perhaps more widely known for her roles in Grey’s Anatomy and Scandal – "Shonda Rhimes put me on the map!"

Yet her father, to whom she refers both as Dad and Dada, tried to put her off acting. Why? "Dada had very ambivalent feelings about being an actor. He just thought of it as a rambunctious, weird, strange life. And he was totally right!"

Still, they had a chance to act together before he died, both in a 1983 iteration of Alice in Wonderland for the American Great Performances series (Kate played Alice, her father the White Knight – "it was the sweetest little scene") and in a TV series called Ellis Island a year later. "I played his troubled daughter. He came in and gave me a hard time." Did he give her acting advice, solicited or otherwise? "Dada just told me to do as little as possible!"

We discuss nepo babies and she says that she wasn’t initially accepted into Yale – where classmates included Oscar winner Frances McDormand and Malcolm in the Middle’s Jane Kaczmarek – because Richard Burton was her dad.

"If anything, I’d say being my dad’s daughter has always been a strike against me. Perhaps it’s easier to get through the door, but it’s harder to stay in the room because you are always being judged," she explains. "I’ve spent a lot of time with Jared Harris [son of Richard] and Kate O’Toole [daughter of Peter] and we’ve talked about how our fathers’ reputations amounted to one small aspect of them. Everybody is judged by their worst behaviour, even if most of the behaviour was pretty good. Those three actors were three of the greatest who ever trod the earth!"

It makes sense, then, that Kate was thrilled to be invited to be a kind of informal adviser on Mr Burton. She had long chats with director Marc Evans and one of the producers, Ed Talfan, whose own father was friends with hers. "My attitude towards the film, as an actor who happens to be Dad’s daughter, was to say, ‘Off you go!’ The script is superb – they handle grandfather Philip’s homosexuality beautifully – and the cast is great. The first time I visited the set, I watched a scene in which Steffan Rhodri, who plays my birth grandfather, is in the bar and my dad comes in to talk to him.

I almost fell to my knees when I met Steffan – who doesn’t love him as Dave Coaches in Gavin & Stacey?" But what about Harry Lawtey, playing her father as a young rascal? Kate is, for a moment, quiet. "It was hard for me, as you can imagine. But, by God, Harry is extraordinary. Astonishing. He transitions from 16 to 26 during the film. It was also quite something to see how hard it was for Dada at the start. He came from abject poverty. His mother died when he was just two. He had to live with his sister and brother-in-law to have some semblance of a normal family life. It’s a pretty Dickensian epic when you think about it.

"It’s unbelievable to think that Dada came from a small Welsh mining town and ended up in Hollywood. And it’s all thanks to Philip Burton, who looked at that bright young boy and decided to help him. Mr Burton has been an emotional journey for me, but I love the film. Of course I do!" Because it’s not about the hellraising? She laughs. "Because it’s about Dada!"

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Mr Burton is released in UK cinemas on Friday 4th April 2025.

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