Sure, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie made a media splash when they met on the set of Mr. and Mrs. Smith, carrying on a torrid love affair that led to the break-up of Pitt and Jennifer Aniston. But they weren’t exactly breaking tabloid ground.
The trailblazers are arguably Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, the married stars who famously met on the set of Cleopatra in 1960 and carried on an epic love affair that still captures the public’s interest half a century later.
The extent of their passion has long remained speculative, but now the public gets a direct peek at their dedication for one another as Taylor has allowed two authors of the upcoming book Furious Love: Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton and the Marriage of the Century, access to the treasured — and at times turbulent — love letters Burton wrote to her before his death in 1984.
“You must know, of course, how much I love you,” reads one letter in the book, excerpted in the July issue of Vanity Fair. “You must know, of course, how badly I treat you. But the fundamental and most vicious, swinish, murderous, and unchangeable fact is that we totally misunderstand each other … we operate on alien wave lengths.”
Perhaps that is why the couple could not sustain their union either time they tied the knot: first in 1964 before divorcing in 1974, then remarrying in 1975 in a marriage that lasted less than a year.
Taylor has gotten a lot of criticism for all her trips down the aisle — eight, to seven different men — but the infamous actress seems to reveal that Burton is the man who truly captured her heart.
“Richard was magnificent in every sense of the word,” she told Vanity Fair, according to an excerpt on People.com. “From those first moments in Rome [on the set of Cleopatra] we were always madly and powerfully in love.”
In his last letter to Taylor — just days before he died suddenly of a brain hemorrhage — he hints at a possible reconciliation and says his days with the violet-eyed actress were the best of his life. Taylor did not release that letter for publication, but did read it to the authors, and admits she keeps it in her bedside drawer.
Taylor and Burton might have confused us all by their multiple marriages and divorces, but it’s nice to know that despite their unorthodox approach to matrimony, they still believed in the old-fashioned concept of true love.
Photo by Trailer screenshot via Wikimedia Commons.
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