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Revealing love letters show why Liz and Dick will always remain "The Ultimate Celebrity Couple."
By claire daniel — Written on Apr 13, 2020
Gracing the cover of the latest Vanity Fair is Elizabeth Taylor, one half of "The Ultimate Celebrity Couple" known as Liz & Dick, whose love letters from two-times-her-husband Richard Burton have recently been made public in the book Furious Love: Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, and the Marriage of the Century.
And my oh my are they scintillating, at least what little we get in the excerpt.
We've read the book, which was co-authored by her favorite professor and advisor at The College of William & Mary in Virginia, Nancy Schoenberger, and it's juicy.
On his need for Taylor: "If you leave me I shall have to kill myself. There is no life without you."
On her gifts as an actress: "You are probably the best actress in the world, which, com bined with your extraordinary beauty, makes you unique. … When, as an actress, you want to be funny, you are funnier than W.C. Fields; when, as an actress, you are meant to be tragic, you are tragic."
On their misunderstandings: "You must know, of course, how much I love you. 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."
On the idiocy of love: "I find it very difficult to allow my whole life to rest on the existence of another creature. I find it equally difficult, because of my innate arrogance, to believe in the idea of love. There is no such thing, I say to myself. There is lust, of course, and usage, and jealousy, and desire and spent powers, but no such thing as the idiocy of love. Who invented that concept? I have wracked my shabby brains and can find no answer."
On his own acting: "I have never quite got over the fact that I thought and I'm afraid I still do think, that 'acting' for a man – a really proper man – is sissified and faintly ridiculous. … My heart, unlike yours, is not in it."
The one letter that Taylor declines to share publicly — though she read it aloud to a Vanity Fair reporter was the last one he wrote to her, just days before his unexpected death from a brain hemorrhage.
In that letter, which Taylor keeps in a bedside drawer, he says he was happiest in life when he was with her, and wonders if they might have another shot together.
Claire Daniel is a love and entertainment writer.
Editor's Note: This article was originally posted on June 2, 2010 and was updated with the latest information.
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