Free Furious Love by Sam Kashner Page B

short, they made love everywhere they could—in boats, in dressing rooms, once in a catamaran, once in a photographer’s studio. Burton was phenomenal in that way. Alcohol didn’t seem to tamp his ardor or his gifts as a lover, at least in the beginning of their grand affair.
    And she had already catapulted him into a higher sphere of fame, opportunity, and wealth. He was heady with the sheer dazzle of the life they had begun together, unreal as it seemed to one who might have otherwise entered the Welsh mines. Sir Laurence Olivier, whom Burton greatly admired, had earlier sent him a telegram, demanding, “Make up your mind—do you want to be a great actor or a household word?” To which Burton famously replied, “Both.” Now, it seemed as if both fates were within his grasp. But could he sacrifice Sybil—and his two beloved young daughters, Kate and Jessica—on the altar of his ambition?
    It turned out that he could, though, in the words of his friend, the actor Robert “Tim” Hardy, “it left him with an incurable wound.”
    Burton had met Sybil Williams in 1949 on the set of The Last Days of Dolwyn , Emlyn Williams’s movie about Welsh villagers under threat of being bought out and relocated to England so their valley can be flooded to bring drinking water to London. Like the 1986 movie Local Hero , the film has a moral dilemma at its heart: should the Welsh villagers give up their valley, their way of life, their centuries-old homes, their birthright, in exchange for modern flats in a big city and a little pocket money? Burton plays an earnest young villager who’s desperate to improve his English in order to impress the daughter ofthe English landowner. (Burton himself—when he was still known as Rich Jenkins—had fallen in love with the English tongue and the opportunities it offered a poor Welsh lad; he had practiced his diction as much as eight hours a day, reciting reams of poetry and speeches from Shakespeare’s plays.) The villagers, led by Burton’s adoptive mother in the film, played by Dame Edith Evans, resist the lure of easy money and cling to their beloved valley, until an accidental murder seals their fate. Burton is heartbreaking in the film—a poetic, virile youth full of hope and idealism, a country swain in love with a woman above his station, reciting his English verses to the wind, whose right action brings about a wrong result.
    Sybil Williams had been hired as an extra to play one of the Welsh villager girls. Though not a beauty, she was lively and intelligent. Robert Hardy, who capped his distinguished stage and film career by playing the irascible Siegfried in the long-running BBC adaptation of All Creatures Great and Small and is known to a new generation of fans as Cornelius Fudge in the Harry Potter movies, knew and admired Sybil. “She came from the valleys, but her brother was quite a smart lawyer. As a family and financial stratum, they were above [the Jenkinses].” Her father had been an official at the mines where Burton’s father, and all of his brothers, save one, had toiled. She was nineteen when she married the twenty-three-year-old Burton, and because she was Welsh, she kept Burton grounded in his Welsh life throughout his meteoric rise in the London theater and their more modestly successful jaunt in Hollywood. Burton’s huge family loved her, especially Burton’s idolized older brother, Ifor Jenkins. Indeed, everyone who knew her loved her, and despite Burton’s dalliances (including an intense love affair begun with Claire Bloom), Burton and Sybil seemed devoted to each other. “It was admirable, that marriage,” recalls Hardy, who used to visit the couple in their Hampstead home.
    Sybil adored Burton, but she must have known about his constant philandering. She allowed him his flings with actresses high andlow, as long as he returned to her in the end. It wasn’t