Elizabeth Taylor was so obsessed with Richard Burton that she set up a 50,000 pound-a-week role in a bid to wed him for third time, it has been revealed. Her plot to rekindle the tempestuous affair with the part in a play for her life’s leading man is portrayed in the BBC4 bio-drama ‘Burton and Taylor’, the Mirror reported. But Taylor’s hopes for fresh romance following the comeback were smashed when he went off and married his younger lover during the run. And the ill-fated tour ended with a scorned Taylor venting her fury on Burton for real each night on stage in Noel Coward’s Private Lives, about a divorced couple. She invented new lines and attacked him with real force during fight scenes. She even tried to sabotage him by unexpectedly walking on stage with her pet parrot, Alvin. Set in New York in the summer of 1983, starring Helena Bonham-Carter and Dominic West, Burton and Taylor tells of their sell-out but critically-slated seven-month run of Coward’s comedy.
