THE COUPLE: Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor
THE STORY: Long before there was a “Ben and Jennifer,” or a “Brad and Angelina” or “K-Stew and Robert,” there was, simply, Liz and Dick. Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton were married to other spouses when they began production on Cleopatra. Their adulterous romance made front pages; a congressman wanted to ban their film in the U.S. and the Vatican issued a statement condemning their “erotic vagrancy.”
WHAT BECAME OF THEIR RELATIONSHIP: The couple wed in March of 1964 and divorced ten years later. Sixteen months after the divorce was finalized, they re-married, only to be divorced again in 1976.
RICHARD BURTON: (to a London newspaper shortly before their first divorce) “You can’t keep clapping a couple of sticks [of dynamite] together without expecting them to blow up.”
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOU-soA-vWU]