Blue plaque at Hampstead house where Richard Burton lived

The son of a Welsh miner – one of 13 children – he moved to London after being demobbed from the RAF and made his screen debut in 1948 in the Welsh film The Last Days of Dolwyn.

Critics praised Burton’s ‘”acting fire, manly bearing, and good looks” and during filming he met and fell in love with Welsh actress Sybil Williams.

Richard Burton and his first wife Sybil in 1954. The couple moved into Lyndhurst Road, Hampstead in 1949 and left in 1956. (Image: PA) They were married the following year and moved into 6 Lyndhurst Road, Hampstead, going on to have two daughters, Jessica and Kate.

During their seven years there, Burton earned a reputation as one of the foremost Shakespearean actors of his generation, playing Coriolanus, Hamlet, and Henry V at the Old Vic and recording Dylan Thomas’s landmark radio play Under Milk Wood.

Of his Prince Hal, influential critic Ken Tynan said: “This shrewd Welsh boy shines out with greatness,” while John Gielgud, who directed him, said: “he had the most wonderful instinct”. The actor Alec Guinness said after seeing him in The Lady’s Not For Burning in the West End in 1949: “I couldn’t take my eyes off Burton, then I heard the same from other people, that’s a rare gift, a presence.”

Burton as Coriolanus opposite Clare Bloom in 1954. (Image: PA) As a rising film star, his big screen debut was opposite Olivia de Havilland in 1952’s My Cousin Rachel, earning him the first of seven Oscar nominations, but he also made Green Grow The Rushes, The Desert Rats and The Robe while living there.

But after the close of his Old Vic season in 1956, Burton settled in Switzerland. In 1962 by now a huge star, Burton was cast opposite Elizabeth Taylor in the budget-busting Cleopatra.

Burton and Taylor, pictured at Wembley at the 1963 title fight between Henry Cooper and Cassius Clay (Muhammad Ali) were an internationally famous couple. (Image: PA) Taylor was coincidentally born in Wildwood Road, Hampstead Garden Suburb, and lived there until the age of seven – but their passionate on-set romance became a media sensation that led to the end of both their marriages.

Internationally famous, they were followed everywhere, but despite that the 1960s proved a golden decade for Burton, who starred in The Night of the Iguana (1964), Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966) and Where Eagles Dare (1969).

In 1964, he enjoyed huge success playing Hamlet in New York, in a production directed by John Gielgud – the subject of the recent hit play The Motive and The Cue.

The tempestuous Burton Taylor relationship spanned 11 years. Burton eventually died in Switzerland in 1984 at the age of 58 after years of heavy drinking.

His former seven-bed home in Lyndhurst Gardens went on the market in 2023 for £7.95 million.