His acting career began when he won the title role in the San Francisco stage production of You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown.

While performing in You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown, Burton was seen by director Alan J. Pakula and was chosen over hundreds of more experienced movie actors to star opposite Liza Minnelli in the role as Jerry Payne, the young college student with whom she falls in love in The Sterile Cuckoo (1969).

[1] In 1970, he went on the road with the national touring company of Leonard Gershe's Broadway hit Butterflies Are Free, co-starring opposite Eve Arden as her son.

Burton accepted the role as Smitty in the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer drama film Fortune and Men's Eyes (1971), portraying an inmate who was raped shortly after entering prison, then turned into a sexual predator himself.

[2][better source needed] That same year, he appeared in the role as Joel Clements in the anti-drug TV movie Go Ask Alice co-starring William Shatner and Ruth Roman.

In 1986, he played "Osgood", a mild-mannered man who fights Burt Reynolds in the big screen action crime drama Heat.