Richard Burton was born Richard Walter Jenkins in the village of Pontrhydyfen, Wales, UK, near Port Talbot. He grew up in a working-class, Welsh-speaking household, the twelfth of thirteen children. His father was a short, robust coal miner, a “twelve-pints a-day man” who sometimes went off on drinking and gambling sprees for weeks.

Burton later claimed, by family telling, that “He looked very much like me...That is, he was pockmarked, devious, and smiled a great deal when he was in trouble. He was, also, a man of extraordinary eloquence, tremendous passion, great violence”.

Burton's mother, Edith, died after the last birth, before he was two years old. In 1927, his sister Cecilia 'Cis' and her husband Elfed, in nearby Port Talbot (an English-speaking steel town) took him into her mining family where he was raised a Presbyterian and remained for many years.

Burton said later that his sister became “more mother to me than any mother could have ever been...I was immensely proud of her…she felt all tragedies except her own”. His father would make occasional appearances at the homes of his grown sisters but was otherwise absent.

Also formative in his early life was his older brother Ifor, nineteen years his senior, who became Burton's idol and protector. A miner and rugby star, Ifor would continue to be a close companion later in Burton's life.

In the 1940s and early 1950s Burton worked on stage and in cinema in the United Kingdom. Before his war service with the British Royal Air Force, he starred as Professor Higgins in a YMCA production of Pygmalion. He earned his first professional acting fees doing radio parts for the BBC.

He had made his professional acting debut in Liverpool and London, appearing in Druid's Rest, a play by Emlyn Williams (who also became a guru), but his career was interrupted by conscription in 1944. Early on as an actor, he developed the habit of toting around a book-bag filled with novels, dictionaries, a complete Shakespeare, and books of quotations, history, and biography, to stoke his mind and stimulate conversation. He was also an enthusiastic crossword puzzle solver. His Welsh love of language was paramount, as he famously stated years later, with a tearful Elizabeth Taylor at his side, “The only thing in life is language. Not love. Not anything else.”

In 1947, after his discharge from the RAF, Burton went to London to seek his fortune. He immediately signed up with a theatrical agency to make himself available for casting calls. His first film was The Last Days of Dolwyn, set in a Welsh village about to be drowned to provide a reservoir. His reviews praised him for his “acting fire, manly bearing, and good looks.”

Burton met his future wife, the young actress Sybil Williams, on the set, and they married in February 1949. They had two daughters, but divorced in 1963, after Burton's widely reported affair with Elizabeth Taylor.

In the years of his marriage to Sybil, Burton appeared in the West End in a highly successful production of The Lady's Not For Burning, alongside Sir John Gielgud and Claire Bloom, in both the London and NewYork productions. He had small parts in various British films: Now Barabbas Was A Robber; Waterfront (1950) with Robert Newton; The Woman with No Name (1951); and a bigger part as a smuggler in Green Grow the Rushes, a B-movie.

Reviewers took notice of Burton, “he has all the qualifications of a leading man that the British film industry so badly needs at this juncture: youth, good looks, a photogenic face, obviously alert intelligence, and a trick of getting the maximum of attention with a minimum of fuss”.

In the 1951 season at Stratford, he gave a critically acclaimed performance and achieved stardom as Prince Hal in Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part 1 opposite Anthony Quayle's Falstaff. Philip Burton arrived at Strafford to help coach his former charge, and he noted in his memoir that Quayle and Richard Burton had their differences about the interpretation of the Prince Hal role. Richard Burton was already demonstrating the same independence and competitiveness as an actor that he displayed off-stage in drinking, sport, or story-telling.

Kenneth Tynan said of Burton's performance, “His playing of Prince Hal turned interested speculation to awe almost as soon as he started to speak; in the first intermission local critics stood agape in the lobbies”. Suddenly, Richard Burton had fulfilled his guardian's wildest hopes and was admitted to the post-War British acting circle which included Anthony Quayle, John Gielgud, Michael Redgrave, Hugh Griffith, and Paul Scofield. He even met Humphrey Bogart, a fellow hard drinker, who sang his praises back in Hollywood. Lauren Bacall recalled, “Bogie loved him. We all did. You had no alternative." Burton bought the first of many cars and celebrated by increasing his drinking. The following year, Burton signed a five-year contract with Alexander Korda at £100 a week, launching his Hollywood career.

In 1952, Burton successfully made the transition to a Hollywood star; on the recommendation of Daphne du Maurier, he was given the leading role in My Cousin Rachel opposite Olivia de Havilland. Burton arrived on the Hollywood scene at a time when the studios were struggling.

Television's rise was drawing away viewers and the studios looked to new stars and new film technology to staunch the bleeding. 20th Century Fox negotiated with Korda to borrow him for this film and a further two at $50,000 a film. The film was a critical success. It established Burton as a Hollywood leading man and won him his first Academy Award nomination and the Golden Globe Award for New Star of the Year - Actor.

In Desert Rats (1953), Burton plays a young English captain in the North African campaign during World War II who takes charge of a hopelessly out-numbered Australian unit against the indominable Field Marshal Erwin Rommel (James Mason). Mason, another actor known for his distinctive voice and excellent elocution, became a friend of Burton's and introduced the new actor to the Hollywood crowd.

In short order, he met Judy Garland, Greta Garbo, Stewart Granger, Jean Simmons, Deborah Kerr, and Cole Porter, and Burton met up again with Humphrey Bogart. At a party, he met a pregnant Elizabeth Taylor, then Mrs. Michael Wilding, whose first impression of Burton was that “he was rather full of himself. I seem to remember that he never stopped talking, and I had given him the cold fish eye”.

The following year he created a sensation by starring in The Robe, the first film to be shot in the wide-screen process Cinemascope, winning another Oscar nomination. Tyrone Power was originally cast in the role of Marcellus, a noble but decadent Roman who finds Christianity through his wife Jean Simmons and his Greek slave Victor Mature. It marked a resurgence in Biblical blockbusters.

Burton was offered a seven-year, $1 million contract by Darryl Zanuck at Fox, but he turned it down, though later the contract was revived and he agreed to it. It has been suggested that remarks Burton made about blacklisting Hollywood while filming The Robe may have explained his failure to ever win an Oscar, despite receiving seven nominations.

In 1954, Burton took his most famous radio role, as the narrator in the original production of Dylan Thomas' Under Milk Wood, a role he would reprise in the film version twenty years later. He was also the narrator, as Winston Churchill, in the highly successful television documentary series The Valiant Years in 1960.

He was nominated six times for an Academy Award for Best Actor and once for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor - but he never won. From 1982, he and Becket co-star Peter O'Toole shared the record for the male actor with the most nominations (7) for a competitive acting Oscar without ever winning. In 2007, Peter O'Toole was unsuccessfully nominated for an eighth time, for Venus (however, O'Toole also received an "honorary" Academy Award in 2003).

Burton was married five times, first to Sybil Williams from 1949 to 1963, and had two children with Williams, actress Kate Burton and Jessica Burton. He was married twice, consecutively, to Elizabeth Taylor (15 March 1964 – 26 June 1974 and 10 October 1975 – 29 July 1976). Their second marriage occurred sixteen months after their divorce, in the Chobe National Park, Kasane, Botswana. The relationship between them portrayed in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was popularly likened to Burton and Taylor's real-life marriage.

On the Parkinson show in 1974, Burton acknowledged homosexual experiences as a young actor on the London stage in the 1950s. He also suggested that perhaps all actors were latent homosexuals, and "we cover it up with drink". In 2000 a biography of Elizabeth Taylor suggested that Burton may have had an affair with Laurence Olivier.

Burton was also notorious for his unrestrained pursuit of women while filming. Joan Collins wrote that when she rejected his on-set advances he embarked on a series of liaisons with other women including an elderly black maid who, according to Collins was 'almost toothless'. Collins playfully told Burton that she believed he would sleep with a snake if he had the chance, to which Burton is alleged to have replied 'only if it was wearing a skirt, darling.'

He was an insomniac and a notoriously heavy drinker. However, ongoing back pain and a dependence upon pain medications have been suggested as the true cause of his misery. He was also a heavy smoker from the time he was just eight years old, sustaining at least three packs of cigarettes a day.

His father, also a heavy drinker, refused to acknowledge the son's talents, achievements and acclaim. In turn, Richard declined to attend his funeral, in 1957. Like Richard, his father died from a cerebral haemorrhage, but at 81.

Burton was banned permanently from BBC productions in 1974 for questioning the sanity of Winston Churchill and others in power during World War II – Burton reported hating them "virulently" for the alleged promise to wipe out all Japanese people on the planet. Ironically, Burton had got along well with Churchill when he met him at a play in London, and kept a bust of him on his mantelpiece.

Burton courted further controversy in 1976 when he wrote a controversial article about his late friend and fellow Welsh thespian Sir Stanley Baker, who had recently died from pneumonia at the age of 48.

Burton's fourth marriage was to Suzy Hunt, former wife of Formula 1 Champion James Hunt, (maiden name Suzy Millar, whose father was a judge in Kenya) and his fifth was to Sally Hay, a make-up artist who later became a successful novelist. While married to Sally, he died suddenly of a cerebral hemorrhage at his home in Switzerland, where he is buried. He was 58 years old. Burton was buried in a red suit, a tribute to his Welsh roots.