What are the chances that we would get🍃 to see within 18 months not one but two TV-movies about the drunken, brawling, theatrical love affair between Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton?
Call it dumb luck.
Last summer, there was the atrocious “Liz & Dick,” whose subject was really the decline of its star, Lindsay Lohan, miscast as Liz. Her presence made headlines, but ot꧃herwise made for uncomfortable viewing as the actress was no match for the legend.
This time, the filmmakers made wiser choices. They hired quality actors, Dominic West (“The Hour”) and Helena Bonham Carter (“The King’s Speech”),🉐 as Hollywood’s most famous couple. And rather than try to encompass the entirety of their relationship — as did “Liz & Dick,” from their first encounter on the set of “Cleopatra” to Burton’s last days — the film selects one of the more embarrassing periods in💜 the Burton-Taylor timeline: a revival of Noel Coward’s play “Private Lives,” which debuted at the Lunt-Fontanne theater in 1983, played to a sold-out run, and then went on tour.
The stars, paid $70,000 a week, made a fortune. But the joke was on the audience who paid to se🌃e a play and got a freak show. Reviews were scathing, and Taylor angered Burton by mugging and blowing kisses from the stage. They were stars at half-mast, Hollywood anachronisms whose zenith — Mike Nichols’ 1966 film of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” — was ღlong behind them.
“Private Lives” is a comedy about an ex-husband and wife who meet again on their respective second honeymoons. Taylor and Burton had been divorced seven years when they met again in a rehearsal
hall with director Milton Katselas and the play’s two other cast members. Taylor, inܫ full makeup, was high and didn’t know her lines. In fact, she hadn’t even read the play. Burton was livid. “I like to come to it fre-e-esh,” Taylor purrs in her annoying sing-song voice. Katselas wisely breaks for lunch.
“She did exist on another planet,” says Carter. “Tꦐhat’s why shꦓe was so late a lot of the time. From the age of 11, everyone waited on her.”
Carter says Taylor did “Private Lives” for the money, knowing that she could sell Liz Taylor as a commodity and not feel demoralized. Burton was a different story. Struggling with sobriety, he’s a thin-skinned man who realizes that, in his 50s, he has one last chance to realize his promise as a Shakespearean actor — an opportunity he squandered for globa♋l fame as Taylor’s fifth and sixth husbands — by agreeing to star in a production of “King Lear🌳.”
💖What Taylor really wants — and what Burton fears — is one last shot at reeling him in again, even though he has a new girlfri꧂end, Sally Hay.
“I think she always wanted him back,” says West, who calls from Montauk, where he is shooting a pilot (“The෴ Affair”) for Showtime. “She, like him, knew that there was no one that she acted better with or had such a sparky relationship with as B🍸urton.”
Sparky is not the word for it. Mercurial on a good day, Taylor could be positively volcanic on a bad one. When Burton very diplomatically gives her a performance note she becomes so enrage🦹d that she stops coming to the theater; so many customers demand their money back that producers decide to leave the house dark until Taylor feels “well enough” to return. Reminded of who is the bigger star on the marquee, an enraged Burton, with one card up his sleeve, manages to upstage the biggest diva of them all— he runs off to Las Vegas and marries Hay, who was wife until he died in 1984.
“It was the final blow,” says West. “Burton and Taylor” was shot in just 18 days. Carter and West had to be quick studies. She consumed a small shelf of books about the sub🌱jects, including the biography “Furious Love.” He took a trip to the Welsh village where Burton grew up, the 12th of 13 children. the contrast between Pontrhydyfen and Hollywood could not be more stark.
“His is such a romantic story: the miner’s son who became the most famous actor of his generation. It really hits home when you see whe🐈re he came from,” West s🍬ays. “It is a romantic and dramatic and simple place, not a sophisticated community.”
When West and Carter came to the set, the budget w🍌as so low that the producers couldn’t afford to have the dogs playing Taylor’s pets work more than one afternoo🉐n.
“The only thing I complained about was that they didn’t have real diamonds,” Carter says, somewhat disingenuously. “So I brought myꦜ own. They give you your own radiance when you’re lacking it.”