An Incident in the Life of Richard Burton

I see that it was 100 years ago today that Richard Burton (né Richard Walter Jenkins Jr) was born – that would explain why I happened upon Under Milk Wood on the radio the other day (and felt not kindlier towards it for having heard it again). Blessed with preposterously good looks and a superb baritone voice and cursed with an insatiable thirst for hard liquor, Burton had what might best be called a tumultuous life, dominated for some years by the Great Hollywood Romance: Burton and Taylor. His relationship with the The Most Beautiful Woman in the World was the stuff of legend, and was of course doomed to implode. 
  It was while Burton and Taylor were still together that R.S. Thomas's son Gwydion, an aspiring actor, worked with the Great Man on his film of Doctor Faustus. Byron Rogers – who wrote a wonderful biography of R.S. Thomas, The Man Who Went into the West – takes up the story: 
'On set, when served tea, Burton, he [Gwydion] recalled with awe, had to have the cup glued to the saucer, because his hands shook so much the rattle was picked up on sound.
Then there was an extraordinary lunch after the actor had asked to meet Gwydion's father. In the course of this, R.S. Thomas tried to interest Elizabeth Taylor in small talk. The poet did this by broaching the subject of flatfish. "And have you tried plaice?" he asked the Most Beautiful Woman in the World.'
Her answer is not recorded.