Richard Burton Married Elizabeth Taylor Twice—Then Wrote Her One Last Letter

Richard Burton was born Richard Walter Jenkins Jr. on November 10, 1925, the twelfth of thirteen children in the Welsh mining village of Pontrhydyfen. He became one of the great stage voices of his generation and earned seven Academy Award nominations without ever winning. But the role the world remembers him for is the one he played off screen for more than twenty years, as the husband, ex-husband and husband again of Elizabeth Taylor.

They married twice, divorced twice and made eleven films together, and the newspapers followed every fight. What the headlines missed was how it really ended. Burton died in 1984, a quarter century before anyone could read his love letters, and the last thing he ever wrote to Taylor stayed a secret she kept for the rest of her life.

How Did It Start On The Set Of ‘Cleopatra’?

They met properly in Rome, on the troubled set of Cleopatra, where Taylor was playing the queen of Egypt and Burton was cast as Mark Antony. Both were married to other people. Burton later recalled that his first impression was that she was “so extraordinarily beautiful that I nearly laughed out loud.” Taylor’s memory was less starry. She remembered a man who was “rather full of himself” and who “never stopped talking.”

Within months the affair was front-page news on both sides of the Atlantic. When Cleopatra finally opened in 1963, audiences lined up as much to watch the two of them together as to see the film itself. The love letters Taylor released in 2010 show how fast it ran deep. “You must know, of course, how much I love you,” Burton wrote in one, excerpted by CBS News from Vanity Fair. He closed another with a line he would spend years trying to live up to: “I love you and I always will. Come back to me as soon as you can.”

Why Did They Marry Twice?

The first wedding came on March 15, 1964, at the Ritz-Carlton in Montreal, just days after Burton’s divorce from his first wife, Sybil, was final, according to Biography.com and Hello! magazine. The marriage that followed was huge and loud. They made The Sandpiper and The Taming of the Shrew, and in 1966 they tore each other apart in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, which won Taylor her second Oscar while Burton went home empty-handed again. He also gave her some of the most famous jewels of the century, including the 69-carat stone that became known as the Taylor-Burton Diamond.

The drinking and the fighting were just as famous, and in June 1974 they divorced. It did not take. Sixteen months later, on October 10, 1975, they married again in a small ceremony beside the Chobe River in Botswana, Lifetime and Hello! reported. That second marriage lasted less than a year, and they divorced again in July 1976. Burton married Suzy Hunt soon after, and later the much younger Sally Hay. Taylor married Senator John Warner. Yet in 1983 the two of them were back on stage together in Noël Coward’s Private Lives, a comedy about a divorced couple who can’t stay apart. Nobody in the audience missed the joke.

What Happened When Burton Died?

Burton died of a brain hemorrhage on August 5, 1984, in Céligny, Switzerland, at the age of 58. He was buried in the village a few days later, and Taylor did not go. His widow, Sally, wanted a small service, and only about 80 family members and close friends attended, UPI reported at the time. Burton’s brother Graham said Taylor stayed away to spare his widow any embarrassment and because of the crush of reporters waiting outside, according to The Washington Post.

She grieved in private instead. Taylor’s daughter Liza Todd, who had grown up with Burton as a stepfather, was among the mourners. Their adopted daughter, Maria Burton, later stood in for her father when he received a posthumous star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2013. Taylor, meanwhile, held on to something no one else had seen.

What Did His Last Letter Say?

Burton wrote Taylor one final letter just days before he died, and it reached her only after his funeral. When Taylor opened her private letters to authors Sam Kashner and Nancy Schoenberger for their 2010 book Furious Love, she shared nearly all of them. That one she kept back, CBS News reported, because she kept it at her bedside.

The authors never published its text, but they described what it said. According to Kashner and Schoenberger, Burton told her that “home was where Elizabeth was, and he wanted to come home,” and the letter wondered whether they might have one more chance together. Burton’s widow has publicly disputed that account, and the letter itself has never been seen by the public.

Taylor never let it go. When she died on March 23, 2011, at 79, she had kept that letter beside her bed for more than a quarter century, and she was reportedly buried with it at Forest Lawn in Glendale. Burton’s grave is in Céligny, more than 5,000 miles away. Whatever the letter said, it went with her. If you loved them on screen, you can read more about the four children Elizabeth Taylor raised, including the daughter she and Burton adopted together.