The glamorous marriage of Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor was a real-life soap opera played out on the global stage. Burton, who was born 100 years ago this month, was often accused of drowning his dazzling natural talent in booze and bad choices. In 1966, a BBC interview with the couple saw a furious Taylor come to her husband's aid.

At their extravagant peak as a Hollywood super-couple, Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor took the unusual step in 1966 of trading the movie business to appear for free in a student production at Oxford University. The play was Christopher Marlowe's Dr Faustus, a tragedy about a man who sells his soul to the devil. Burton was asked on the BBC if he had done something similar by betraying the promise of his early theatrical career, as "potentially the greatest stage actor England ever produced", to take Hollywood riches?

Before the defiantly Welsh Burton had a chance to correct the error, Taylor leapt in. "Excuse me, Richard. That makes me so angry! Because he has NOT left the stage! That's absolute bloody rubbish..."

Burton stepped in to say, "Elizabeth, pull yourself together" but she carried on regardless. "Last year, he was just doing a thing here for Oxford on the stage. On Broadway, that was the stage. How can you say he's left the stage?"

The pair were being interviewed alongside Nevill Coghill, the Oxford professor who two decades earlier had championed Burton's acting talent when the young Welshman was studying English Literature there. The offending interviewer was Daily Mail critic David Lewin, who – possibly unwisely – persisted with his line of questioning. Asking Taylor if she got so cross because she felt cinema was "a less creative medium", she said it was "because you said the exact phrase that I knew you were working up to, 'sold out,' and it offends me to my soul". Burton insisted he was not bothered. "I don't care whether they think I've sold out or not," he shrugged.

In History

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If Burton was guilty of taking the money and running, few would blame him; his ascent to stardom was almost literally a tale of rags-to-riches. Born Richard Walter Jenkins in the impoverished Welsh mining village of Pontrhydyfen on 10 November 1925, he was the 12th of 13 children. As his second birthday approached, his mother died on Halloween, just days after giving birth to his brother Graham. With his father largely absent during his childhood, Richard was taken in by his older sister and her husband. A bright child with a passion for performance, the young Jenkins was the first of his family to go to secondary school. His teacher Philip Burton, a keen dramatist and frustrated actor, encouraged this natural talent and became his mentor. When Richard was 17, Burton became his legal guardian, and the teenager changed his surname to match his as well.

Now officially "Richard Burton", the working-class miner's son secured a place at the........

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