After Sherlock and Star Trek, Cumberbatch is now about to play Hamlet. It was all so different for a previous generation of actors, for whom stardom on the screen meant the end of a career on the classical stage

In 1974, Richard Burton appeared on the chatshow Parkinson. He was not long out of a six-week spell in hospital, having virtually drunk himself to oblivion, caught in a self-destructive spiral after the death of his brother Ifor and the collapse of his marriage to Elizabeth Taylor. He had thinning hair and looked frail, even though he was not yet 50.

But the charm of the man, the roll and rip of his voice, were undiminished as he told one of the great Hamlet stories about the night in 1953 when Winston Churchill came to see him perform the part at the Old Vic. “I came on stage, feeling absolutely diabolical, and I hear this extraordinary rumble in the front row of the stalls,” Burton recalled. “I wondered what it was. It was Winston speaking the lines with me. And I could not shake him off … in ‘To be or not to be’ he was with me to the death.”

When he told that story, Burton’s days as a great Shakespearean actor were long over. The Old Vic season marked both the high-water mark and the end of his London stage career. His last appearance in Shakespeare on stage was in 1964, in New York, again as Hamlet in a production directed by John Gielgud, who used his star’s hatred of tights as a reason to set the play in a rehearsal room.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Richard Burton in Hamlet (1964). Photograph: Rex

It was performed and rehearsed at the height of Burton’s affair with Taylor. Gielgud, quoted in Melvyn Bragg’s Rich, a biography of Burton, remembered: “That sort of celebrity is very hard to cope with. They had to exercise the dogs on the roof. There was a man with a machine gun in the corridor outside their room.” Despite the circumstances, he said Burton was adored and never vain. “And it went on to be the most enormous success, you know, broke my own record in New York – rather upset me.”

Indeed it did. On opening night – celebrated at a party for 600 of the rich and famous – the police had to block off the street so that Burton and Taylor could walk in safety to their stretch limousine. When it closed after a record 134 performances (the longest run in the play’s Broadway history), the box office interest suggested it could have played for 134 more. A film of the production made $6m.

I thought of Burton’s last Hamlet when tickets for Benedict Cumberbatch’s 12-week run in the part sold out in minutes last August, setting a new British theatrical record. The anticipation surrounding Lyndsey Turner’s production at the Barbican theatre has reached a fever pitch that obliterates even the excitement surrounding David Tennant’s 2008 portrayal of the Prince of Denmark for the RSC. But though both actors have been trapped by armies of fans besieging the stage door, desperate to catch a glimpse of Sherlock or Doctor Who, respectively, neither has yet needed, as far as I know, a man with a machine gun on guard.

A comparison with Burton and other actors of his generation reveals just how much has changed when it comes to our attitude to stardom. I remember my parents watching that Parkinson interview and sighing deeply at the way in which Burton had squandered his genius. This was the commonly held view of a man who had been seduced by Hollywood to make a lot of indifferent films for a lot of money, rather than strutting his stuff on the boards and building a career as a “serious actor”.

In fact, Burton’s attitude to drink played a major part in his apparent misuse of his talent as even a cursory reading of his riveting diaries reveals. This was a man who thought nothing of downing three bottles of spirits a day and even during his triumphant run of Hamlet was not always entirely sober. Yet it remains true that in the 1960s if you chose to work in film, you were in some sense not seen as a proper actor. It persists even today: the second sentence of one obituary of Peter O’Toole, the last of that hard-drinking, hell-raising generation, who died in 2013 at the age of 81, said: “… he seemed destined for greatness on stage until in 1962 David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia turned him into a film star”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Peter O’Toole as Macbeth (1980). Photograph: Lesly Hamilton/Getty

According to Robert Sellers, whose biography of O’Toole will be published in September, stardom was always his aim. When he joined Peter Hall’s opening season at the RSC in Stratford in 1960, to play Shylock and Petruchio, Hall was shocked to see he had had a nose job. “What have you done?” asked Hall. “I’m going to be a film star,” O’Toole answered. Yet apparently as a result of a drunken bet with Burton, O’Toole also played Hamlet, in the opening production of Laurence Olivier’s National Theatre in 1963 to mixed reviews. His performance terrified Derek Jacobi, who had to fight him as Laertes in the final scene. O’Toole was often drunk and always dangerous. “If he gave me a wink, and he usually did, this wild Irishman, it meant a very hard fight.”

This riotous egocentricty also affected O’Toole’s return to Shakespeare in 1980, in a theatrical disaster of a Macbeth that looms large in the minds of all who saw it either at the Old Vic or on tour. Instead of fear or pity, it provoked laughter and boos, particularly when O’Toole tottered at the top of a staircase, covered in fake stage blood. Michael Billington described him as “barking his lines as if playing to an audience of deaf Inuit”.

But perhaps the reason the production was so shockingly bad was it represented the last gasp of uninhibited actor power in theatre. Timothy West, who was running the Old Vic at the time, discovered when he studied the contracts that O’Toole had been given total artistic control. “This arrangement is a sure recipe for dissent if not disaster,” he remarked. It was also, by 1980, almost unprecedented. Directors such as Hall and Trevor Nunn were the forces that shaped the plays; actors such as Ian McKellen and Jonathan Pryce placed their careers and their performances at the service of an overall concept of a play. The old idea of star performers who shone more brightly than those around them had been consigned to history.

This, it seems to me, is just one of the cultural shifts that has ensured the Cumberbatch generation of actors gets the best of both worlds. Theatre has recognised that celebrity casting sells seats and generates excitement, but it has learned that directors and production concepts matter too. With rare exceptions (and I am thinking of you, Madonna) the wattage of brightness at the centre is calibrated to serve the play.

Simultaneously, however, our view of movie stars has changed. Actors no longer have to choose. They are allowed to make films and yet still be taken entirely seriously as stage actors; they do not have to sacrifice one in order to achieve the other. This is true even when they appear in productions that, once upon a time, would have been regarded as unworthy of them. It is perfectly possible for Cumberbatch to play the villain in a Star Trek movie, voice a dragon in The Hobbit and sign up as Doctor Strange in a new Marvel adventure because in our post-ironic age we accept that great actors can have fun as comic book characters without sacrificing their integrity.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Tom Hiddleston as Loki in Thor (2011). Photograph: Allstar/Marvel Studios

In fact, the power flows in the opposite direction, provided the actor is talented enough. Tom Hiddleston’s enormous success as wicked Loki in Thor and in The Avengers may have made him “hotter than Cumberbatch” (if the Popsugar website is to be believed), but it also makes him a brilliant choice to play Coriolanus. In a tightly directed and magnificently focused Donmar theatre production, his fame and charisma fed into the part rather than detracting from it – bringing a new audience to an always tricky Shakespeare play. In the same way, Keira Knightley is parlaying Pirates of the Caribbean stardom into a Broadway debut in Thérèse Raquin and Hayley Atwell has vowed that playing Agent Carter won’t keep her away from the stage.

This new ability to move between genres is helped, an agent friend suggests, by the fact that it is now far more difficult than it was in the 1960s to settle in Los Angeles. Green cards are hard to come by, and create tax and lifestyle problems for British actors who want to keep their links to their homeland. What many do, therefore, is to work on visas on a project-by-project basis, which has the unintended but entirely beneficial consequence of maintaining their links with the theatre scene that produced them.

Benedict Cumberbatch as Hamlet: the first rehearsal photos - in pictures Read more

Above all, however, the barriers that stood for so long between the different cultural worlds of stage, film and TV have dissolved entirely. Television has become as powerful as film, with actors such as Kevin Spacey and Matthew McConaughey producing some of their best work in that medium. Sherlock did not diminish Cumberbatch: in fact, it sent the career of a man who had delighted theatre audiences in Terence Rattigan’s After the Dance and viewers in Parade’s End absolutely stratospheric.

What is thrilling is what he seems to feel he is capable of doing with that fame – not just commercial undertakings, but the same challenging mix of work as he took on before. It is a brilliant sign of our times that someone who could pick almost anything he wanted, wants to play Hamlet – at the comparatively late age of 39 – and is bringing his mass of fans along with him. Down the line, there should be nothing to stop him doing Chekhov and Lear, as well as Marvel comic remakes and perhaps a big action movie. For Cumberbatch and his peers, the world is their oyster, and they have the talent, discipline and intelligence to make the most of that opportunity.

When Burton first went to Hollywood he was determined to succeed on his own terms. “All I wanted to do was to live, pick up a new Jag, and act at the Old Vic,” he declared. As Bragg points out, the stuffy British theatrical establishment puzzled over “to live” and “pick up a new Jag.” The stage should have been all he wanted. In the much-changed Britain of 2015, we know different. You really can have it all.