The greatest love story of the 20th century

The coverage of Liz Taylor's death this week inevitably brought to mind Richard Burton as well.
I adored the way Richard Burton spoke (listen to him reading the wonderful writing of Dylan Thomas' Under Milk Wood and tell me your spine doesn't tingle - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uuPO2Kvqlms).

But he wrote like a dream too. How about this on his meeting the future Mrs Burton aka Liz Taylor at a pool party. At first stunned by her "apocalyptic breasts" he goes on "She was unquestionably gorgeous. I can think of no other word to describe a combination of plentitude, frugality, abundance, tightness. She was lavish. She was a dark unyielding largesse. She was, in short, too bloody much."
"... so extraordinarily beautiful that I nearly laughed out loud."
"... the most astonishingly self-contained, pulchritudinous, remote, removed, inaccessible woman I had ever seen."
"... her body was a true miracle of construction and the work of an engineer of genius. It needed nothing, except itself. It was true art, I thought, executed in terms of itself. It was smitten by its own passion. I used to think things like that."

I can just hear his wonderful, dark chocolate voice now speaking these words and it melts my heart.

Richard and Liz - the first true celebrity couple, they fell passionately in love on the set of Anthony and Cleopatra (you can see it in every scene) and went on to marry, divorce and marry again. But they were so much more than a vacuous celebrity couple - they truly had talent with screen and stage presence in spades. Watch Liz Taylor in 'Cat on a hot tin roof' made in 1958 with Paul Newman and you'll see what I mean - she simply steams.

Richard Burton died too young - one of that set of hell-raising, rip-roaring actors of the period along with Oliver Reed, Peter O'Toole, Richard Harris - too much booze, too many fags, too much everything.

What a couple, what lives. To quote Richard Burton himself "just too bloody much."