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"You are cordially invited to Liz and Dick's for an evening of fun and games..." Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton could lash out at each other with the intensity of caged animals, but for a decade, they proved to be Hollywood's most colorful couple, onscreen and off. Passion and jealousy, lust and longing...together, Burton and Taylor proved as dramatic as any film they ever appeared in. Garbo and Gilbert or Bogie and Bacall couldn't hold a candle to the fiery intensity of Burton and Taylor.
They were a mismatched couple if ever there was one. She grew up in the lap of luxury, in the public eye. Elizabeth Taylor made her screen debut at 10 and a year later stole hearts as the courageous collie's adopted owner in Lassie Come Home (1943). Richard Burton was the son of a Welsh miner, the youngest of 12 children. He escaped his lot in life by winning a scholarship to Oxford University. He took to the stage where his confident demeanor helped him make his mark in British theater. By 1953, Burton answered the call to appear as Marcellus, a Roman sentry in The Robe, Hollywood's first CinemaScope extravaganza. Elizabeth Taylor had already appeared in her own historical epic, the medieval Ivanhoe (1952). She had endeared herself to audiences in The Father of the Bride (1950) and demonstrated that she was an unattainable goal in A Place in the Sun (1951). Taylor was one of the hottest leading ladies in Hollywood; Burton was an actor who seemed typecast in costume dramas.
Following The Robe, Burton briefly appeared in Demetrius and the Gladiators (1954) and was put to work in more costume dramas, The Prince of Players (1955) and Alexander the Great (1956). By 1960, Elizabeth Taylor had begun work on what would be the lavish romance of Cleopatra (1963). She was offered the unprecedented salary of $1 million for the picture. The locations and sets were already costly obstacles but when Stephen Boyd walked out, producers were strapped for a suitable Mark Antony. When Burton stepped on the set, Antony and Cleopatra had found each other.
The production spiraled out of control; the budget overrun was complicated by a disastrous screening. But Liz and Dick were bigger than even Cleopatra. The press ate up stories of their romance that had begun on the set and after the film wrapped, Liz left Eddie Fisher and married Burton amid the paparazzi's flash bulbs. Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton entered a stormy relationship that played out in the tabloids and onscreen.
The Taylor-Burton chemistry was quickly put to work. In The VIPs (1963) they play a wealthy, dissatisfied couple, Frances and Paul Andros, trapped in a London airport. In The Sandpiper (1965), Elizabeth played a beatnik single mother who confronts a minister (Burton) about how to raise her son. This was a power couple: she was beautiful, with stunning violet eyes, a voluptuous figure and a spirited attitude. He was a dignified, educated stage actor with regal airs. But jealousy had already begun to leech into their lives. When Burton left to work on The Night of the Iguana (1964), Taylor followed to keep an eye on her man and notoriously easy Ava Gardner. On the set the distrust was so great that director John Huston gave each member of the cast and Taylor a gun with six bullets--each with a different cast member's name.
In 1966, Taylor and Burton took a creative risk. They appeared in Edward Albee's surrealist nightmare Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Liz, for the first time, dared to appear defiantly unglamorous, overweight and disheveled. Burton allowed cinematographer Haskell Wexler to shoot the film in a starkly realistic style that exposed the actor's acne scars which had always been neatly covered up in his Hollywood films. The two stars play the alcoholic, argumentative George and Martha: a college professor frustrated with his academic position and his shrewish wife. The love has drained from their marriage. All they are left with are barbed jabs which they thrust at each other for the fun of watching the other cringe with emotional pain.
The play takes place after a departmental cocktail party. George and Martha have invited a new professor and his wife to their house for a late night highball. By the time the couple arrives, George and Martha are clawing at each other in a sadistic and perverse display. Nick and Honey unwittingly walk into their cage to become not only spectators but also participants in the madness. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is a startling display of conjugal lunacy which went farther than any previous big-studio film in its use of profanity and sexual implication. Shocking yes...but hilarious and so very human.
It's easy to conflate these characters for the life they lived, passionate, drunken and theatrical, but Taylor and Burton were actors and Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf? was an act. Or was it? They appeared together again in The Comedians (1967) and four more films before they divorced, bringing the total of their big-screen co-starring vehicles to nine. A year after their divorce they were back together and remarried. The second union only lasted a year.
Relationships, marriages and divorces are the fodder that drives the tabloids today - but when Liz and Dick did it, the events still shocked audiences. In love and in life these stars had enormous appetites; together they were like nitroglycerin--capable of a magnificent explosion.
18 TUESDAY
8:00 PM The V.I.P.’s (1963) Wealthy passengers fogged in at London’s Heathrow Airport fight to survive a variety of personal trials. Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Margaret Rutherford. D: Anthony Asquith. C 119m. LBX CC
10:15 PM The Sandpiper (1965) An Episcopal priest falls for a free-living artist. Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Charles Bronson. D: Vincente Minnelli. C 118m. LBX
12:30 AM Who'S Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? ()
3:00 AM The Comedians (1967) American and British tourists get caught up in political unrest in Haiti. Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Alec Guinness. D: Peter Glenville. C 152m. LBX
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