Joe Warik in a recent publicity still, left, and as Burton at Open Stage Theater. Click photo for larger image. 'Burton' Where: Open Stage Theatre at 2835 Smallman St., Strip District. When: Friday through May 21; Fri.-Sat. 8 p.m., Sun. 2 p.m.; gypsy night performance May 15. Tickets: $13-$18; 412-394-3353; info at 412-257-4056.

Joe Warik is a career actor. He started out 65 years ago in McKeesport as Joseph Klimowski, went to Carnegie Tech and was soon playing Shakespeare with the best actors in America. Without ever hitting the heights of stardom, he's worked on Broadway and off, in New York and the provinces, here and there, always making a living as an actor, except for a couple of working stints in fancy Manhattan and Los Angeles liquor stores to tide him over.

For the past five years he's been back in Pittsburgh, still a working actor. And now he harvests that experience in interpreting the life of a very starry actor who did run off the rails now and then, Richard Burton.

Starting Friday, Warik stars in the Pittsburgh premiere of Paul Harvey Aurandt's "Burton," a one-man play directed by Ruth Willis that concludes the Open Stage Theatre 2005-06 season.

"Burton" is set in 1976, when the actor, then 50, was trying to resurrect his stage career, playing the conflicted psychiatrist in "Equus." He looks back to his start in theater after leaving the coal mines of Wales, his triumph as Hamlet, life with Elizabeth Taylor and more.

Warik didn't start out in a coal mine, but McKeesport wasn't so far from it. And he actually saw that performance in "Equus," since, as Josef Warik, he was at that time standing by for Nick in the Colleen Dewhurst-Ben Gazzara revival of "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" That was at the Music Box Theatre on 45th Street, right beside the Plymouth Theatre, where "Equus" was playing.

Since determining to do this play, Warik has been pursuing Burton with a collector's zeal. He has 50 of Burton's 60 movies, all his LIFE magazine covers and "just about all the recordings."

	Joseph Klimoski kneels at right as Douglas Campbell takes center stage "Shoemakers Holiday" for a 1967 magazine spread on the Tyrone Guthrie Theater. Click photo for larger image.

The latter have given him the wherewithal to study that famous Burton voice. "I decided not to do an imitation," he says. "That's for comics. ... I lowered my own voice a bit to give a suggestive re-creation."

In McKeesport, where Joseph Klimowski grew up, there was St. Mary's Polish and St. Mary's German. "I went to the first, of course." Then he went to St. Vincent Prep, with the expectation that he'd become a priest.

What happened? "Puberty," he says, "and the St. Xavier girls across the highway." When he graduated in 1958, he went to Carnegie Tech.

He credits Father Omar, under whose tutelage he won the state forensic championship as a junior, doing "the same speech from 'Pickwick Papers' that James Dean did in school." From that point, he knew he wanted to be an actor, and his parents were supportive. His father, a doctor in Brownsville, paid the $400 semester fees at Tech.

	The four faces of Joe Warik as "Mr. Sherlock Holmes, Consulting Detective." Click photo for larger image.

There he encountered, as everyone did, the formidable voice teacher, Edith Skinner. "It was right out of 'The Corn Is Green,' " he says. "There were no L's in my speech; I had the worst Pittsburgh accent."

Among the teachers he recalls favorably are Allan Fletcher, Charley Moore ("from the show biz side") and Mary Morris, who had supposedly been Eugene O'Neill's mistress and for whom he'd written "Desire Under the Elms." "She was all about the passion, which is not to be mocked. For her it was real, in a 19th-century, Sarah Bernhardt way."

Around then he changed his name, because that's what actors did, discarding the ethnic. "I wanted something hard, simple, two syllables. I thought of all those Dukes of Warwick in Shakespeare and just compressed the spelling."

Following his sophomore year, Warik auditioned for the American Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Conn., and to his amazement was cast in a company that included Robert Ryan, Morris Carnovsky, Will Geer and Sada Thomson. "I was 19 and looked 13," he says. He jokes that in "Antony and Cleopatra" he played Various -- messengers, banner boy, etc.

	Joe Warik, then known as Joseph Klimowski, portrays Tony Lumpkin, with Ann Casson as Mrs. Hardcastle in a publicity still for a 1967 Tyrone Guthrie Theater production of "She Stoops To Conquer." Click photo for larger image.

Contemporaries at Tech included Rene Auberjonois, Jules Fischer, Mel Shapiro, Frank Converse, Robert Foxworth, Mariette Hartley ... and Toni Taliaferro, who has long been Mrs. Joseph Klimowski.

From Tech, Warik went to spend three seasons at Minneapolis' Guthrie Theater, while earning an MFA at the University of Minnesota. Then "I gradually worked my way back East."

Settled in New York, Warik met Michael Kahn, which took him back to Stratford, Conn., in 1970-71. "Othello" with Moses Gunn took him to Broadway, got him his New York agent and earned great reviews, but Gunn left to do "Shaft" and it closed.

Along the way he spent a few years in Hollywood, where he did just one network show, "From Here to Eternity," where "I started World War II -- I called in the first sighting of a Japanese plane, but they didn't believe me." The last residual check he recalls from that was for 37 cents, which he framed.

	Joe Warik, seated next to Georgia Engel and wearing a dark shirt, in the cast photo for a Kansas City production of "Lunch Hour." Click photo for larger image.

Warik was back in New York in 1980s, but by then the available work was in the developing regional theaters -- Kansas City, Florida, Bucks County, although never Pittsburgh, where he'd return just to visit family.

He and Toni decided to move here in 2000 to establish a home, partly because there were now more theaters to work in and partly because they had restored a Victorian house near New York that could be sold for a profit. When they bought their Pittsburgh house, they paid cash -- a rare feeling of security for an actor.

In Pittsburgh, Warik has worked most steadily at the Public Theater and also St. Vincent, "coming full circle, back to that same stage" where, at 14, he played Brother Petunia in "Brother Orchid."

Along the way, there have been 34 productions of 22 different Shakespeare plays. And now, "Burton."

	Martha Swope Joe Warik, center, with Jan Miner, right, in "Merry Wives of Windsor," in Stratford, Conn. Click photo for larger image