These days she may not have much to say in the matter. After a 20-year acting career in which she has toiled without much fanfare on-stage (An American Daughter) and on TV (The Practice) and done voice-over work for Estée Lauder commercials, Burton, 44, has finally broken through in a Broadway production of the Henrik Ibsen classic Hedda Gabler.
"Hedda is putting me on the map in a major way," says Burton, who has received critical acclaim for her turn as a 19th-century woman trapped in a loveless marriage. "It's changed the way people perceive me." But it hasn't changed Burton's opinion about stardom. "I am completely an Upper West Side mom," she says, referring to the Manhattan neighborhood where she can be seen taking her two children, son Morgan, 13, and Charlotte, 3, to school or Central Park. In the four-bed-room apartment Burton shares with her husband of 16 years, Michael Ritchie, 44, director of Massachusetts's Williamstown Theatre Festival, the only hint of her glamorous roots is in the bathroom, where a photo of Burton with her father hangs. "She is an enormously healthy woman," says Hedda director Nicky Martin. "You don't see the dark corners of her the way you did in her father—Kate is always looking for the light."
Born in the Swiss village of Céligny to Richard and actress Sybil Christopher, now 72, Burton saw her home life shattered after Richard fell in love with Elizabeth Taylor on the set of 1963's Cleopatra. Their tempestuous affair created such tabloid buzz that Kate, then 5, fled with her mother to New York City, where Sybil started a nightclub called Arthur. (Richard and Sybil's other daughter, Jessica, now 41, is autistic and is institutionalized in the U.S.) Summers, however, were spent with her father. In 1966, on the set of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolff?, Burton first met Taylor, to whom she still talks several times a year. Burton, who says she was too young to be bitter over her parents' breakup, instantly bonded with the screen star. "She had painted a picture of my father," Burton says, "and she put my hair on top of it and said, 'You know, you look just like him.' "
The famous couple, who married and divorced twice, tried to create a normal home life for the young Kate when she was visiting. Taylor would cook, but, says Burton, "let's just say she was not put on the planet to be a chef." Then there was the drinking, which Burton believes ended the couple's two marriages—and drove her as a college student to "drink my father's drinks so he couldn't. I just wanted to help him."
When they worked together in the 1984 miniseries Ellis Island, father and daughter became closer. "We were able to be with each other in an adult kind of way," Burton says. Two weeks before filming wrapped, however, Richard died of a cerebral hemorrhage at age 58. "As painful as it was," she says, "I was able to deal with it because we had come to an understanding of each other."
Richard had been less understanding five years earlier, when Burton, who acted in class plays en route to a B.A. in Russian studies and European history from Brown University, decided to enroll at the Yale School of Drama. "He knew how hard the profession was," Burton says. And her name helped only so much, says Yale classmate (and Malcolm in the Middle star) Jane Kaczmarek: "If Kate had an advantage in the beginning, she has certainly paid her dues. She deserves everything she gets."
Her father realized that after he caught her performance as an Irish schoolgirl in the 1983 Off-Broadway play Winners. "He said, 'Oh, my God, I didn't know you could do that,' " Burton recalls. "He gave me the seal of approval." Now, finally, Broadway has too.
Galina Espinoza
Rebecca Paley in New York City
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- Rebecca Paley.
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