The story behind Elizabeth Taylor’s 1966 TV meltdown

But Hollywood was calling, too. Concurrent with his theatrical career, in 1952 he received the first of his seven Academy Award nominations with a Best Supporting Actor nomination for My Cousin Rachel, and followed this up a year later by being shortlisted for Best Actor for The Robe. By the time he was invited in 1961 to appear in Cleopatra, he was already living as a tax exile in Switzerland and had left the London stage for good.

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Everything changed when he met Elizabeth Taylor on the set of the epic filming that nearly bankrupted the 20th Century Fox movie studio. Burton was still in his first marriage while Taylor was married to her fourth husband, singer Eddie Fisher. Their fiery affair while filming in Rome was such an international scandal that the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano reportedly denounced Taylor for her “erotic vagrancy”, calling her “a greedy vamp who destroys families and devours husbands.” When Burton was asked in 1974 by BBC film critic Barry Norman whether he agreed that his career was divided by the eras before and after Cleopatra, the actor suggested instead: “I think my life was changed by a woman called Elizabeth Taylor.”

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They married in 1964 and became a global source of glamor with their lavish world of ostentatious jewellery, private jets and personal yachts. Some wondered if this star lifestyle was a sign of wasted talent. Burton admitted to critic Kenneth Tynan in 1967 that his first period after the London stage was replaced by Hollywood “was not the most interesting period of my life from an artistic point of view.” However, bad or indifferent reviews never bothered him: “I firmly believe that if people pay money to see me in the theater or in movies, that’s their responsibility, not mine. If they stop seeing me, if my box office drops or something like that, I’ll be perfectly content to stop working. I do it because I’d rather be famous.”

However, Burton rejected any idea that film acting was somehow a lesser art. Instead of needing to deliver his voice to the rafters of the theater, Taylor, who had been a movie star since he was 12, taught him how film acting required “economy, a little sound, movement, gesture, agony.” He added: “When your face is, as you explained to me, 38 feet high, you have to be very careful about how big the emotion of laughter, goofiness, joy, tragedy, whatever it is. She is, of course, the best movie actress in the world.”