HEDDA STEAM Playing the lead in Hedda Gabler, Kate Burton has the role of her career. She was photographed at the National Arts Club in New York City on April 12, 2001.

Although she is lovely, with strawberry-blond hair and the faintest scattering of freckles across her porcelain skin, you wouldn't pick her out of a crowd. "I'm just an Upper West Side mom, except for this acting thing," says Kate Burton, who has been praised in The New York Times for "her natural, radiant air of ordinariness." But look closer and you realize you've seen this particular brand of Welsh magnetism before—on her father, Richard Burton. Intelligent and self-effacing, Kate planned to be a diplomat. "I couldn't see myself swanning around in some gown," she says modestly. "All the actresses I'd grown up with were very flamboyant."

It's hard to compete in the flamboyance department when your parents' divorce caused an international scandal and your stepmother was Elizabeth Taylor—twice. Kate's parents racked up seven marriages between them, giving Kate seven full, half-, and step-siblings. She did her homework at her mother Sybil's famous nightclub, Arthur, and spent summers on her father's film sets, from Rome to London to castles in Kent.

Kate's adult life is more conventional; she has two children with her husband of 16 years, Michael Ritchie, the producer of the Williamstown Theatre Festival. And now, at 43, "this acting thing" is bearing her triumphantly to Broadway on a wave of rhapsodic out-of-town reviews for her starring performance in Hedda Gabler, a brilliantly reimagined interpretation which promises to be the role of her career. "It's all downhill from here," she says with a grin. "That's it; I should retire." Or put on a gown and start swanning around.