Richard Burton, CBE (10 November 1925 – 5 August 1984) was a Welsh actor. He was nominated seven times for an Academy Award (without success) and was at one time the highest-paid actor in Hollywood. He remains closely associated in the public consciousness with his second wife, actress Elizabeth Taylor; the couple's turbulent relationship was rarely out of the news.

Richard Burton was born Richard Walter Jenkins in the village of Pontrhydyfen, Wales, UK, near Port Talbot. He grew up in a working-class, Welsh-speaking household, the twelfth of thirteen children. His father was a short, robust coal miner, a “twelve-pints a-day man” who sometimes went off on drinking and gambling sprees for weeks. Burton later claimed, by family telling, that “He looked very much like me...That is, he was pockmarked, devious, and smiled a great deal when he was in trouble. He was, also, a man of extraordinary eloquence, tremendous passion, great violence”.:23

Before Burton was two years old in 1927, his mother, Edith, died after the last birth; his sister Cecilia ('Cis') and her husband Elfed took him into their Presbyterian mining family in nearby Port Talbot (an English-speaking steel town). Burton said later that his sister became “more mother to me than any mother could have ever been... I was immensely proud of her... she felt all tragedies except her own." Burton's father would make occasional appearances at the homes of his grown daughters but was otherwise absent.:7, 10 Far more present in and important to young Richard's life was Ifor, the brother 19 years his senior. A miner and rugby star, Ifor would continue to be a close companion later in Burton's life.