Why so obsessed with money?

Richard Burton's diaries reveal an odd side to the actor.

Richard Burton's waspish diaries, which have just been published, are dominated by drink, money, and Elizabeth Taylor. As Craig Brown noted in The Mail on Sunday, they are full of savage judgements of people he knew Laurence Olivier: "a shallow little man with a very mediocre intelligence"; Tennessee Williams: "a self-pitying pain in the neck". But what's oddest is his obsession with money, an obsession he shared with Taylor.

On one day in 1967, for example, he bought Taylor a jet they had flown in the day before. "It costs, brand new, $960,000. She was not displeased," writes Burton. They then set off for a film premiere, surrounded by eight guards because Taylor was wearing jewellery worth "roughly $1,500,000".

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