One of the 20th century’s most iconic power couples, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton made 11 classic films together, including The Taming of the Shrew and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? But more than that, they created a sensation everywhere they went. In the definitive book about Liz and Dick, Furious Love: Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, and the Marriage of the Century, Sam Kashner and Nancy Schoenberger document the couple’s torrid beginnings and their extravagant life as “doomed nomads,” drinking their way through three continents, charming and challenging everyone they met—especially each other.
“When you are in love and lust like that,” Taylor would say in 1973, “you just grab it with both hands and ride out the storm.” Ride it out they did, through years of excess, turmoil, scandal, and bottles and bottles of booze.
Antony and Cleopatra
The first time Burton saw Taylor, in 1953, he was a Welsh upstart actor attending a tony Hollywood party at the home of movie stars Jean Simmons and Stewart Granger. “A girl sitting on the other side of the pool lowered her book, took off her sunglasses and looked at me. She was so extraordinarily beautiful that I nearly laughed out loud,” he wrote in his diary. “She was unquestioningly gorgeous...She was a dark unyielding largess. She was, in short, too bloody much.”
According to Furious Love, Taylor, already a seasoned movie star at 21, found Burton “swaggering and vulgar,” and chose to ignore him. Nine years later, when she found out that Burton was to be her costar in the epic Cleopatra, she was determined not to be another notch in the now legendary lothario’s belt.
On January 22, 1962, the two met again in full costume and makeup on set. “Has anybody ever told you that you’re a very pretty girl?” he asked condescendingly.
In her 1965 memoir, Elizabeth Taylor, she recalled her surprise at his lame attempt at negging. “Oy gevalt,” she exclaimed to her girlfriends. “Here’s the great lover, the great wit, the great intellectual of Wales, and he comes out with a line like that.”
But on the first day of shooting together, Taylor found herself endeared to a painfully hungover Burton, who trembled and blew a line. “With my heart I ‘cwtched’ him—that’s Welsh for ‘hug.’” Sparks began flying, lighting fire during a love scene. According to Kashner and Schoenberger:
In their first deep kiss, in Cleopatra’s boudoir…Burton found himself caught up, almost drugged, in her presence. They repeated the scene several times, their kiss lasting longer with each take. Finally, [director Joseph] Mankiewicz shouted, “Print it”—but the scene continued. “Would you two mind if I say cut?” he asked again. And then, “Does it interest you that it is time for lunch?”
Later that day Burton dragged Taylor’s chair next to his. It would remain there for the next 13 years.
Le Scandale
The couple’s obsessive affair, dubbed “le scandale” by Burton, soon consumed their respective marriages, the Roman set of Cleopatra, and the world. At one point Taylor’s fourth husband, the singer Eddie Fisher, called his home only for Burton to answer the phone. “What are you doing in my house?” he asked. “What do you think I’m doing?” Burton answered. “I’m fucking your wife.”
Fisher eventually overdosed, and there were rumors that Burton’s wife Sybil attempted suicide. Taylor also made two suicide attempts during Cleopatra’s filming, one in Burton’s presence. Another night she awoke to find Fisher standing over her bed with a gun. “Don’t worry, Elizabeth,” he said, per Furious Love, “I’m not going to kill you. You’re too beautiful.” (He later recovered sufficiently to perform with a dancer who sang the line, “I’m Cleo, the Nympho of the Nile.”)
Hounded by the legendary Italian paparazzi and titillated fans, Burton and Taylor holed up in a rented villa when not filming, drinking and playing endless rounds of Scrabble. (“When you get aroused playing Scrabble, that’s love, baby,” Taylor said.) According to gossip columnist Louella Parsons, the massive amount of publicity they received “ought to have killed them.”
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