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7 November 2023

The madness of Burton and Taylor

Roger Lewis’s book about the lives of the married actors isn’t really a biography – it’s a fever dream.

By Tanya Gold

Roger Lewis’s ideal reader will not have heard of Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor: it is part of his sense of possession. The couple will be “beings… whom I have entirely imagined, as a by-product of insomnia, anxiety, lowered oxygen and benign prostatic hyperplasia”. Isn’t that, he asks, what they were all along? This is the opening of this deranged biography, which isn’t really a biography but a fever dream. Reading it is like being presented with a series of offcuts of forgotten (or invented) films in words.

Lewis began the book drugged in a Cornish hospital, which suits his subjects – Burton was usually drunk, Taylor usually high. They don’t need another chronology, Lewis insists: and most biographies are all wrong. (He has a long section dealing with rivals’ errors, which compound the unreality.) He wants, rather, to isolate Burton and Taylor, “culturally, as carnal and fantasy figures who floated about in a world of child stars, faded grandeur, alcoholism, promiscuity and Lassie”. Lewis interacts with them and loves them tidally (Burton especially: they are both Welsh). Lewis is as present as his subjects and he is honest enough to acknowledge it. A typical line is: “I’d give a lot to have seen Humphrey Bogart and Frankie Howerd encountering each other,” and, since the thought is planted, the reader would too. Lewis should also be there. He thinks he is.

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This article appears in the 08 Nov 2023 issue of the New Statesman, The Age of Fury