How did Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton meet?
Decades before Tom and Nicole or Brangelina captured the public’s attention, there was the so-called “marriage of the century” between Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. The two Hollywood A-listers famously married twice during a turbulent 12-year relationship while also starring in 11 films together.
Taylor, who married eight times in total, later commented, “All the men after Richard were really just company.” She and Burton were entangled in a passionate affair that they both apparently wanted to escape but also couldn’t resist in equal measure, which was only inflamed further by the sparks flying between them on screen.
Take the tortuous tension of 1966’s screen adaptation Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, for instance. The two actors spend two hours sparring as Edward Albee’s unhappy Ivy League married couple, during which the lines between cinematic fiction and reality seem to blur. Or John Waters’ arthouse adaptation of the Tennessee Williams play Boom!, which shows the two descending into a neurotic spiral that they seem a little too comfortable with.
Their on-and-off-screen partnership may have been one for the ages, fiery and fraught yet built on a profound mutual affection. “I love her not for her breasts, her buttocks or her knees,” Burton once said, “but for her mind. It is inscrutable. She is like a poem.”
So, how did they get together?
As two of the biggest stars in the acting world, it was only a matter of time before Taylor and Burton rubbed shoulders at some Tinseltown gathering or other. As it happened, they crossed paths at a house party hosted by celebrity couple Jean Simmons and Stewart Granger in 1953.
At the time, the considerably younger Taylor was already one of the biggest names in Hollywood, off the back of her lead performances in the box office smashes A Place in the Sun and Father of the Bride. Burton, meanwhile, was a critically acclaimed but little-known actor in the United States.
Biographers Sam Kashner and Nancy Schoenberger quote Burton’s account of the two budding actors first catching each other’s eye in his diary. “A girl sitting on the other side of the pool lowered her book, took off her sunglasses and looked at me,” he wrote. He then added that Taylor was “so extraordinarily beautiful” he could have laughed.
Unfortunately for Burton, Taylor didn’t have the same opinion of him. She found his presence at the party rather obnoxious and stayed away from him. The two wouldn’t actually meet until almost a decade later.
They were both cast in Joseph L Mankiewicz’s Roman epic Cleopatra in late 1961, by which time Taylor was an actor of great acclaim who could command a $2 million fee for the title role movie. Opposite heras Mark Anthony, Burton was one of Hollywood’s most sought-after leading men and a seasoned performer in epics such as The Robe and Alexander the Great.
The first day of shooting for Cleopatra took place on January 22nd 1962, at which point Burton approached Taylor to introduce himself. “Has anybody ever told you that you’re a very pretty girl?” he asked, infuriating Taylor. Her dislike of Burton wouldn’t last, though.
When he turned up to the set hungover one day, she took pity on him, and the two embraced. “With my heart I cutched him,” Taylor wrote in her memoir, using the Welsh term for “hug”. In a later shoot, an on-screen kiss between the pair long outlasted the director’s repeated cries of “Cut!”
Despite both being married to other people, Taylor and Burton would never look back from there. Their whirlwind romance blossomed into a Hollywood love story, the like of which we’ve never seen before or since. It produced more than its fair share of great cinematic moments, too.
