HEAT: Grant Bowler (top and inset) first saw Richard Burton at a drive-in in Australia. He plays him on Sunday. (
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Actor Grant Bowler was a young lad in Australia when he first saw Richard Burton.
It was at a drive-in with his parents where he saw “Where Eagles Dare,” an action film co-starring Clint Eastwood and based on Alistair MacLean’s best seller.
He remembers Burton because his father — a man Bowler describes as “quintessentially Australian and who had driven an armored personnel carrier” — respected him.
Back in Australia in the 1970s, Burton was a bigger star than his famous wife, Elizabeth Taylor.
“He had that gravitas that comes with being a peer of the stage. He had that authority that came with having played a seminal Hamlet,” says Bowler, 44.
Now, all these years later, Bowler is playing Richard Burton in the overripe Lifetime movie “Liz & Dick,” which airs Sunday night at 9.
The film covers about 30 years of the Welsh actor’s notorious life, from the moment he first saw Taylor to their first meeting on the Rome set of “Cleopatra” to the last letter he ever wrote her, shortly before his death at age 58 in 1984.
Liz and Dick lived large. Gigantic diamonds. Yachts. Original Van Goghs. They made several rotten movies along the way to pay for all these enjoyments. But the cost of living was never something that crossed Taylor’s mind. Eventually, Burton, a product of the harsh Welsh coal mines, learned to ignore the excess as well.
“Coming from that small village in Wales, she was innately everything he dreamed of,” says Bowler in the lounge at the Trump SoHo hotel.
“She was a true star. She would walk in a room and stop everything. She had that freedom of knowing that she was the center of everything. Burton was an incredibly talented man who was shedding this little Welsh village.”
Burton and Taylor’s story is the stuff of Hollywood legends; Bowler’s co-star, Lindsay Lohan, is the stuff of Hollywood tabloids, and the actor was apprehensive about working with someone whose volatility has practically been captured in the cement outside of Graumann’s Chinese Theatre. But his anxiety was relieved during the film’s many love scenes.
“They were great,” says Bowler of the many bed (and trailer) sequences. “They show the passion between them.”
“Liz & Dick” portrays Taylor’s famous jealousy. After all, if your lover was reciting Shakespeare while seducing you, would you want him running off to make a movie with Sophia Loren?
“He had a terrible habit of getting cast opposite the most beautiful leading women in the world.
“He had a bit of softness for the ladies, which she knew,” she says. “So she didn’t trust him as far as she could throw him.”