From unruly Co-op boy to the world's biggest star

As the hardscrabble early life of Richard Burton comes under the spotlight in a new film starring Toby Jones and Lesley Manville, writer ROB CROSSAN reveals his humble beginnings in haberdashery... and the early mentor who saved him from criminality

- 

THE year was 1941 and in the mining community of Taibach in South Wales, a novice assistant in the local Co-op was fast making a reputation as one of the most unenthusiastic employees the store had ever known.

Having recently left school, he deplored the humdrum direction life had taken.

The unprepossessing boy was Richard Jenkins, yet within a decade he would be known as Richard Burton, the most charismatic and magnetic screen and stage star of the last century and a man whose private life remained resolutely and wildly public until his premature end in Switzerland where he died at the age of 58 in 1984.

For now, however, he was a novice haber-dasher with an emerging sideline in fraudulent behaviour.

This lesser-known period of Burton's life has come under the spotlight with the release of new biopic, Mr Burton, starring Toby Jones, Lesley Manville and Harry Lawtey, 28, as the wild young Jenkins who is mentored to an Oxford scholarship.

The film reveals much about the hardship of Burton's early life. Born the 12th of 13 children to a hard-drinking, often absent miner father, Richard Snr, he lost his mother when he was just two, so it's hardly surprising he felt almost duty-bound to do whatever it took to survive in his early years.

Toby Jones plays the role of Philip Burton, the teacher who would take the young Richard Jenkins under his wing and eventually adopt him, while Lesley Manville plays Ma Smith, Philip's landlady. But prior to Phillip Burton's grounding influence, there was an earlier mentor, Meredith Jones, who steered him onto the path to success and away from wrongdoing...which began in earnest after he started work at the Co-op.