Richard Burton & Elizabeth Taylor

The first time Burton saw Taylor, in 1953, he was a Welsh upstart actor attending a tony Hollywood party at the home of movie stars Jean Simmons and Stewart Granger. “A girl sitting on the other side of the pool lowered her book, took off her sunglasses and looked at me. She was so extraordinarily beautiful that I nearly laughed out loud,” he wrote in his diary.Taylor, already a seasoned movie star at 21, found Burton “swaggering and vulgar,” and chose to ignore him.

Nine years later, when she found out that Burton was to be her costar in the epic Cleopatra (1963), she was determined not to be another notch in the now legendary lothario’s belt.In their first deep kiss, in Cleopatra’s boudoir…Burton found himself caught up, almost drugged, in her presence. They repeated the scene several times, their kiss lasting longer with each take.

Taylor, then 32, and Burton, 38, married for the first time on 15 March 1964 in Montreal, Canada. They divorced a decade later in 1974, only to exchange vows a second time in Botswana a year later, then separate for the final time in 1975.

Some of movies they filmed together: Cleopatra (1963), The Sandpiper (1965), The Taming of Shrew (1967)