Sally Burton

Sally Hay Burton (born Sally Anne Hay; 21 January 1948) is a British author and theatre producer. She was the fourth wife and widow of actor Richard Burton. Personal life Burton was born Sally Anne Hay in Braintree, Essex, the daughter of journalist Jack Hay. She was working as a freelance production assistant on the set of the TV mini-series Wagner when she met Richard Burton. During a seven-month tour of the United States with Noël Coward's play Private Lives, in which Elizabeth Taylor was Richard Burton's co-star, Burton and Hay married on 3 July 1983 in Las Vegas; it was Burton's fifth marriage and her first. After the tour, they went to rest in Hawaii for several months before returning to their home in Céligny where Burton died on 5 August 1984; Sally Burton was then 36. In 2012 Burton published the diaries of Richard Burton. She said her motivation was to show Burton's "love for words". In her review of the book, Barbara Ellen in The Guardian wrote The suspicion forms that Sally's unspoken motivation was to derail, once and for all, the Liz-Dickie show. To demonstrate that, despite all those tales of Burton's sending secret final love letters to Taylor, in which he wrote of yearning to "come home" to her, in truth, he had gone right off her, and, considering what he was writing, near despised her. To my mind, this none-too-subtle attempt to undermine the Burton/Taylor-myth looks a bit vindictive – especially considering that Taylor is dead now, and can't flash those violet eyes, and open that fabulous fishwife mouth, in reply.Simon De Bruxelles wrote of the diaries in 2012, "The depth of Richard Burton's passion for Elizabeth Taylor is laid bare in diary extracts to be published for the first time this year ... beautiful beyond the dreams of pornography." The diaries had been kept since 1965 and Burton, "... always maintained that they were personal and not intended for publication."