Richard Burton nearly laughed when he first set eyes on Elizabeth Taylor in 1953 poolside at Stewart Granger and Jean Simmons's Hollywood home. Her beauty was that astounding. But it wasn't until nine years later, that the famous British stage actor and the former Hollywood child star officially met for the first time on the Rome set of Cleopatra (1963). While working on Joseph Mankiewicz's black hole blockbuster, Burton (married and with two young daughters) and Taylor (married to fourth husband Eddie Fisher at the time) embarked on one of the most tempestuous, jet-setting, notorious relationships in the annals of celebrity culture. Over the course of their lives together, the couple weathered suicide attempts, health disasters, divorce, infidelity and roller-coaster professional lives. Their lives were touched by countless tragedies that might have ruined lesser folk, and also a kind of metaphysical good luck typified by the foreboding Taylor experienced as Burton climbed aboard a helicopter to take him to the Yugoslav mountain film set of the historical drama about Yugoslavian Communist leader Josef Tito, The Battle of Sutjeska (1973). Burton was spooked enough by her premonition of death to take a later flight and the copter he had first boarded crashed, killing everyone on board.

It is the assertion of Sam Kashner and Nancy Schoenberger, authors of Furious Love: Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton and the Marriage of the Century (HarperCollins), that "Dickenliz" were the first celebrity couple long before Brangelina or Katie and Tom were making the scene. "Theirs was the first reality show," Furious Love asserts, "a marriage with an audience." They were the couple who ignited the worldwide, contemporary trend for celebrity-stalking paparazzi and also made iconic the notion of high-flying, no-expense-spared celeb excess, coining a popular Sixties phrase "spending money like the Burtons." To put matters into perspective, Schoenberger and Kashner, for instance, note that during the making of Cleopatra, Taylor's $700 a week liquor bill would be equivalent to $4,900 a week today. Taylor was also the first actress to command a million-dollar plus payment for her services and something akin to American royalty for her ability to extract jewels from not only her lovers and husbands, but the studio heads, producers and directors who were expected to pay tribute to Taylor when each film production wrapped.

But that level of adoration and scrutiny paid more troubling dividends as well, including mob scenes wherever Burton and Taylor traveled and a feeling that their lives, faces and bodies were public property. Or as Joseph Mankiewicz said during the making of Suddenly, Last Summer (1959), feeling perfectly entitled to comment on what he saw as Taylor's weight gain, "It looks like you've got bags of dead mice under your arms."

The product of an impoverished Welsh mining town, Pontrhydyfen, a drunkard father and limited prospects beyond the coal mines, Richard (née Jenkins) managed, under the tutelage of a loving sister Cecilia (who also became Burton's model of female charm) and several well-connected benefactors to rise to prominence as a respected stage actor with a lifelong love of the English language that ranked him among the class of upper-crust stage vets such as John Gielgud and Laurence Olivier. Elizabeth Taylor had a pedigree of a very different sort, an upper middle class English upbringing in Hampstead among fine art and horses and precocious show business chops that left her preternaturally aware of the gaze of the camera, her fans, and always performing for an expectant public in both her movie and private life. Married multiple times to unsuitable men like the abusive hotel heir Conrad Hilton and tragically to Michael Todd, who died in a plane crash, Taylor's marriage to Burton in 1964 (her fifth) proved a match of two startlingly similar, but also combustive people. It was a match made in heaven and in hell, defined by two cosmically aligned forces of will and personality and two flawed people with bad habits who were often each others' worst enemies. Drink was most often the agent of bad blood between the famous couple, with Taylor once presciently warning Burton, after some cruel remarks directed her way, "you should be more careful love. One day you might harm more than yourself." But the couple was also burdened, the authors note, by the stress and surreality of living perpetually in hotel rooms (they traveled constantly to avoid taxes) with a cast of chauffeurs, tutors, make-up artists, nurses, governesses, bodyguards, children and animals making for an exceptionally chaotic menagerie and some famously trashed hotel rooms.

Kashner and Schoenberger's biography is, on every front, a deepening of the people behind the obfuscating mask of celebrity, largely due to the inclusion of intimate letters and notes sent from Burton to Taylor that lend a small-scale human element to their outsize image. The authors also include speculation about the complex motives behind seemingly boorish behavior, such as their notion that Burton's flagrant womanizing was perhaps driven by a few early homosexual experiences and his continued drunkenness the result of gnawing feelings of insecurity and inadequacy rooted in his humble Welsh background. With the ideal of his miner father always haunting him, Burton's insecurities were further fueled by his fear that acting, even in prestigious productions such as Beckett (1964), Hamlet (1964) or The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965) was an "unmanly" profession, "sissified and faintly ridiculous" he wrote in a letter to Taylor. Though she propelled him in front of the film camera, to his great financial advantage, Taylor's star status also further fueled Burton's inadequacies. As the bigger, better paid star, Taylor's power challenged this man's man. Ironically, it was often Taylor's most fervent wish to raise her children and be a wife to Burton rather than perpetually occupy the limelight in her own roster of high-profile films from her turn as iconic child Velvet Brown in National Velvet (1944) and iconic bride in Father of the Bride (1950) to her performances as heartbreaking beauties in the film adaptation of Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy, A Place in the Sun (1951) and Tennessee Williams' sordid Suddenly, Last Summer (1959), both alongside lifelong friend Montgomery Clift. But onscreen fame was less important to a woman who had grown up with it, than real-life love. "I think it's more important for a woman to be a mother than an actress," she insisted.

Far from an expose, Furious Love is an enlargement of two flesh and blood people, painting a portrait of Burton as an intensely romantic man full of strong emotions for not just Taylor, but for literature, poetry and the stage. Taylor is equally celebrated as a compassionate advocate for the disenfranchised and marginalized from her gay friends (Montgomery Clift, Rock Hudson) to her employees and the frail, disabled German girl, Maria, she adopted and transformed into a healthy, happy swan. The authors show two extraordinary people who weathered the vagaries of public adoration and professional success. Their movies together, such as Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966)--for which Taylor won an Oscar and Burton did not--and The Taming of the ShrewBoom! (1968) and the television drama Divorce His-Divorce Hers (1973) they veered into campy send-ups of their super-sized celebrity, too vulgar and self-conscious to compete with the new vogue for understated stars like Dustin Hoffman and Julie Christie and more modest films like Bonnie and Clyde (1967), The Graduate (1967), Midnight Cowboy (1969), Easy Rider (1969).

The final marital split in 1974 and public waning of DickenLiz could be attributed to any number of factors: this generational shift in film tastes, Burton's incessant drinking and philandering--begun after 8 years of married fidelity, when Burton took up with his Bluebeard, (1972) co-star Nathalie Delon--and Burton's final professional humiliation (after being nominated seven times for Academy Awards and never winning) and inability to achieve professional parity in his relationship with his wife when the seven-time Academy Award nominee was passed over for an Oscar co-starring turn as King Henry VIII with Geneviève Bujold as Anne Boleyn in Anne of the Thousand Days (1969) and for Sidney Lumet's psychological thriller Equus (1977). Though the couple eventually remarried in 1975 on a game reserve in Botswana, their relationship never recovered from infidelity and the alcoholism that finally laid Burton low in 1984, a sad coda to a remarkable love story.

by Felicia Feaster