(This article is my original, the first "Information Times") (Love: Elizabeth Taylor & Richard Burton's Century Marriage, by Sam Cashner and Nancy Schoenberg, translated by Tan Qiu, published by World Book Publishing)
Studios always want to remake classics to get the expected box office revenue that can be more reliably realized. In the 1960s, the American film giant Twentieth Century Fox remade the epic "Cleopatra" in the 1917 silent film era, which was supposed to be able to control the expenditure level of medium-budget films, and thought it could bring super high box office. But both expectations are shattered by a woman and a man.
The woman, Elizabeth Taylor, played the heroine Cleopatra, the "Queen of the Nile", in Cleopatra, who raised the film's salary from her personal salary of $125,000 at the time to a basic salary of $1 million, a living allowance of $3,000 per week, an additional $50,000 per week for compensation beyond the filming plan, and a dividend of 10% of the film's total profits. As the most popular Hollywood actress at the time, Elizabeth Taylor also obtained the right to direct the film through lobbying. The remuneration plan reached by Fox and Taylor and the director's decision arrangement proved to be an important reason for the serious delay in the filming and the surge in costs.
Elizabeth taylor
However, the reason why the blockbuster "Cleopatra" became a box office poison and almost caused Fox to go bankrupt due to huge losses was also related to other incidents caused by Elizabeth Taylor. In Cleopatra, Cleopatra becomes a couple with her husband's nephew Mark Anthony, Julius Caesar, and eventually marries. Worse, the two protagonists, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, also really came together, and she and he turned their backs on their respective families, from stealing on the set to publicly entering and leaving, so that entertainment industry reporters who followed the blockbuster "Cleopatra" immediately turned to the tracking of this stealing scandal.
Richard Burton
Taylor has always been the darling of Hollywood, Burton is arguably Britain's most successful Shakespeare drama actor and film actor, so the more a pair of golden children try to evade media tracking, the more journalists begin to use the interview techniques and reporting methods that were originally only used to chase politicians in order to meet the needs of public gossip and voyeurism. Unexpectedly, this secret affair scandal directly created the celebrity news model of the entertainment industry that has continued to this day, that is, in order to "find out" the truth, reporters have constantly tried to adopt means and methods that can more directly capture the dynamics of celebrities - it can be said that this is the source of the accident that Princess Diana rode in decades later to avoid the paparazzi continuous candid filming, and the source of thousands of celebrity scandals or personal privacy.
The Taylor and Burton affair scandal had "moved away from entertainment news and into serious journalism" at the time, and was put on the front page of newspapers, alongside news from Kennedy, Khrushchev and the Cuban Missile. The Holy See (Vatican) issued a statement condemning Taylor, and the US Congress also set off a fierce debate on the matter, with some members arguing that the moral decline in the United States should be blamed on the fornication of "Taylor Burton".
Make great sacrifices for love
The protagonists of the affair end their respective marriages in a surprising way (Burton divorced earlier, and Taylor ended the original marriage at the cost of giving up part of his property two years after becoming partners with Burton), and then walked together, which is actually surprisingly in line with the plot of Cleopatra: the male and female protagonists "irrepressible desire sublimated into love". In Love: Elizabeth Taylor & Richard Burton's Century Marriage, it is specifically mentioned that in Cleopatra, Burton's Anthony abandons his shame when he abandons his soldiers to follow Cleopatra; then he and Cleopatra are defeated by Octavian, and the remnants of the army abandon him, And anthony can't find anyone to kill him so that he can die with dignity, crying: "Is this the final abandonment?" It was my own making! "Whether artistically or in life, Burton often feels that he caused the final abandonment, 'This is of my own making.'" This sense of helplessness and self-abandonment runs through the whole process of Burton and Taylor's love and marriage.
Taylor made great sacrifices for Burton. She hopes that her husband can become a great actor, so she can not take new films for several years in a row - this choice is decisive for the damage to her own acting career, long-term non-acceptance of new films, so that Taylor's old audience's memory of the idol has always stayed in the super invincible pure love jade woman impression, so a few years later, when Taylor, who was slightly blessed and tried to challenge the new role, came up with a new work, the old audience first disagreed, and also put this account on Burton. Worse still, coinciding with the turbulent 1960s, when social trends and fashion perceptions were undergoing a drastic shift, Taylor's reduced exposure led young people to directly equate her with a passing figure, mocking her plump body type and old-fashioned pearlescent.
On Burton's side, although he received Taylor's support and guidance, his fame was much inferior to his wife, which made the Son of a Welsh miner feel inferior. Burton was able to grow into one of the top actors in Hollywood, Europe, and around the world, mainly thanks to the help of Taylor, who pushed him to face his fears bravely, including fear of heights, hemophilia, and numbness on his cheeks, etc., but these efforts also further exacerbated Burton's inferiority and eventually accumulated into a source of impulse to betray women several times after many years.
Taylor tries to use his previous affair scandal with Burton in reverse, and a "Spring Of Infinite Hate" has achieved great commercial success, and the book "Love" comments that "the audience cannot stop watching the film to relive the excitement of the couple's original adultery that shocked the world." Then, this is just a few pieces of good news, and since then, almost all of the films that the Burtons have co-starred in have become "box office poison", and in turn, some of the films in which the two people have participated separately can achieve commercial and public opinion reputation success.
If you love too fiercely, you will burn each other
Burton and Taylor have been hurting each other while they are in love. Taylor worries about Burton's continued style of hooking up with the actress she worked with before marriage, and Burton is more worried that his heavenly wife will be targeted by other men. When two people participate in the film separately, one party returns to the other party's set to visit the class, and even unequivocally "monitors" his wife (husband) and the opposite sex starring in the supporting role. Two people often raise bars and quarrel with each other in public, as an inherent way to deepen their feelings, but forget the accumulation of quarrels, after all, it will cause the escalation of contradictions.
The celebrity couple both like to buy gifts for each other with huge sums of money. On more than one occasion, Burton spent a fortune on bidding jewelry for his wife, and the bidders who lost to him included greek ship kings, Middle Eastern royals and American financiers. Taylor, on the other hand, was more inclined to make financial sacrifices to support Burton's writing and continue to participate in Shakespeare's plays, etc., to satisfy her husband's dreams of being a poet and drama actor. The mutual support of two people has had disastrous consequences:
Because he failed to focus all his attention on the films he participated in, the box office became worse and worse, Burton gradually passed, and the remuneration and film selection space were greatly reduced, so that he was nominated for the Oscar many times and finally missed the award, which greatly stimulated his inferiority complex, so that he often destroyed the love relationship in a deliberately provocative way when getting along with his wife.
Taylor's penchant for collecting rare jewelry and displaying them was a great rebellion in the United States at the time of the "declaration of war on poverty", and even the New York Times commented on the vanity and obsolescence of the old woman.
The book "Love" also reveals that Burton and Taylor, two passionate lovers, still maintain amazing passion after many years of marriage, and this passion is reflected in the way that both people retain the habit of drinking a lot of alcohol and relying on drugs, which makes him and her love every day seem to be full of love, but after all, it greatly affects each other's health, and ultimately ruins the two people's star path.
What worried Taylor the most finally happened. At the age of 40, her career was constantly slipping, and she couldn't stop wanting to stop, and she couldn't help but devote her energy to preventing her frivolous husband from cheating. She saw in the newspapers the news that she had been afraid to see, Burton, had hooked up with Alain Delon's ex-wife Natalie Delon. Although Taylor forgave her husband, Burton's indulgence in drunkenness and out-of-control drunkenness have become increasingly intolerable.
Continue the love
The relationship between the two people then became somewhat inexplicable. He and she went through the entanglement of breakup- brief reunion - sudden divorce - remarriage - re-divorce, and during the breakup and the two divorces, the two could have a more calm and patient conversation, when Taylor was hospitalized for surgery, Burton took a leave of absence from the set to fly from Italy to Los Angeles; but once the outside world thought that the neurotic two stars had hope of reuniting, the two invariably found a new boyfriend (girlfriend) and even a new husband (wife). In such a complex and disorderly state of love, marriage, and life, Burton gradually moved to the final stage of his life, and on August 3, 1984, he and his friends went to a bar to watch a football game broadcast, quarreled with others, was pushed down, and hit his head on the ground. The next day, Burton died of ineffective rescue at the age of 58.
Before his death, Burton wrote Shakespearean verses in red ink by his bedside:
"We should dye the vast sea water a red... Tomorrow, tomorrow, another tomorrow... Our revelry is over..."
Taylor fainted when he learned of Burton's death. Later, she said, "Knowing the day he died, I was still madly in love with him." I think he loves me too. I think he'll always be there, on the other end of the phone, and even though we're not together, I know he's still in this world." Burton's last wife, Sally, asks Tyler not to attend Burton's funeral, and she agrees, losing her last chance to see her beloved him in person (so as not to hurt Sally). A few days later, she quietly came to Burton's grave.
In honor of Burton and to continue his love for him, Taylor, who had attracted much criticism from the media and many people, stood up for AIDS research, demanded that the U.S. government and the public change their attitudes toward AIDS and homosexuality, and personally raised millions of dollars to find solutions and cures for the disease. Taylor did this because Burton had homosexual experiences as a young man and suffered from hemophilia (both of which were strong social discrimination at the time). She had in her hand a letter from Burton sent on August 2, 1984 (delivered a few days after Burton's death, in which Burton expressed a desire to reunite with her), and from then on until March 23, 2011 (Taylor's death), she kept the letter.