The actor who pulled a gun on Elizabeth Taylor: “I’m not going to kill you, you’re too beautiful”
Few Hollywood starlets had careers and lives as wild as the great Elizabeth Taylor. Born in London, but very much a symbol of American glamour on screen, Taylor broke out as a child star before becoming one of the most desirable performers of her day, both as a box office draw and as a sex symbol. Her well-documented private life can be best summed up in her attitude towards marriage; she tied the knot eight times to seven different men.
Her most famous husband was Welsh actor Richard Burton. The pair’s first marriage was Taylor’s longest, lasting between 1964 and 1974. They reconciled the following year, but marriage number two would be over by 1976. Their relationship began during the making of the 1963 film Cleopatra, in which Taylor played the legendary Queen of the Nile, while Burton was aptly cast as one of her lovers, Marc Anthony. Both stars were married to other people at the time, and their affair was one of the first to be highly publicised by the tabloid press.
Burton was married to fellow Welsh performer Sybil Christopher, while Taylor was part of a more high-profile couple with actor and singer Eddie Fisher. A chart-topping star and host of his own TV show, Fisher was married to famous actor – and one of Taylor’s best friends – Debbie Reynolds when they first met. Fisher, who is the father of Star Wars actor Carrie Fisher through his marriage to Reynolds, began an affair with Taylor whilst he was still married. Clearly, this was just how things were done back in the day. This infidelity destroyed Taylor’s friendship with Reynolds, leading to one of the first major feuds in Hollywood history.
Things came full circle for Fisher when he discovered that Taylor and Burton had fallen in love on the set of Cleopatra. According to Furious Love: Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, and the Marriage of the Century by Sam Kashner and Nancy Schoenberger (via Vanity Fair), Fisher phoned home one day, only for Burton to pick up. When he asked, “What are you doing in my house?” Burton replied with the immortal line, “What do you think I’m doing? I’m fucking your wife.”
The effects of ‘Le scandale’ reached far and wide. Sybil Burton allegedly tried to take her own life upon learning of her husband’s unfaithfulness and retired from acting altogether shortly thereafter. Taylor also attempted suicide twice, once in front of Burton. As for Fisher, the prominent nature of his wife’s betrayal drove him down a dark path. According to Taylor, she woke up one night to find her ex-husband standing over her bed with a gun in his hand. Nothing happened, as Fisher apparently put it, “I’m not going to kill you. You’re too beautiful.”
Fisher, whose career had already been tarnished by the initial Taylor scandal, faded even further from public view. He got married three more times across his life, including to actor and singer Carrie Stevens, with whom he had two children, Joely and Trisha Leigh Fisher. He died in 2010, aged 82.
The Taylor-Burton scandal is one of Hollywood’s most famous for a reason. It caused a massive chain reaction that engulfed the industry and enthralled the public, selling millions of newspapers and magazines. Eddie Fisher ended up being a small part of the story, but if things had gone differently that night, he might have been in the headlines for a very sinister reason.
