Richard Burton's diaries are worth reading. He was an intelligent man who despised the trappings of stardom and what it and big money had done to him and he had little respect for or interest in acting. His main passion in life was reading. And screwing Liz was number two. He used acting to buy quiet time to read. But his lifestyle consumed him and ate him up along with his heavy drinking and depression. I don't think he ever was a great actor like Brando. I saw Burton twice, once in a bookstore at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel (he looked surprisingly small and gaunt) and once while he was shooting the scene of a young Latina being exorcised and going up in flames in EXORCIST II: THE HERETIC, a great film. The shooting of that scene with the fire effects was very tense. My admiration for THE HERETIC is a minority position; I have counted nine other people who like it. It's a film with profound spiritual themes and one of the few surrealistic films ever made in Hollywood. John Boorman told me he made it to attack the original EXORCIST, which he thought exploited and glorified child abuse (I loathe it for that reason as well). Boorman said Max Von Sydow shared that view, and so he had to talk Max into making the sequel by promising that they would attack the original. That violates the first rule of sequels, which is to more or less replicate the audience's experiences with the first film.