Richard Burton: Elizabeth Taylor's true love?

By Christina Frasca

(CBS) Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton had one of the most dazzling relationships to ever hit global stardom. After falling in love on the set of "Cleopatra," they embarked on a tumultuous  journey  through two marriages and subsequent divorces.

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For starters, both Taylor and Burton were married to other people when they began their affair in 1961. Taylor was 29 and already on husband number four, Eddie Fisher, and Burton was married to Sybil Burton.

Both divorced their partners over the course of the two-and-a-half-year film shoot, and the couple married on March 15, 1964 - nine days after Taylor's divorce from Fisher.

From the beginning, Taylor and Burton were a fiery couple. Burton was quoted about Taylor saying, "I cannot see life without Elizabeth. She is my everything -- my breath, my blood, my mind, and my imagination."

Burton and Taylor were known to act out their tempestuous romance on-screen in such films as, "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" (1966) and "The Taming of the Shrew" (1967). These were among their most celebrated of their 10 big-screen collaborations.

Before ending their second marriage with a divorce in 1974, the couple filmed a made-for-TV movie called "Divorce His, Divorce Hers."

Seven years after their second divorce, Burton and Taylor co-starred in a 1983 Broadway revival of "Private Lives."

Before Burton died at age 58 from a stroke in August 1984, he wrote a final letter to Taylor, then 52, which she claimed was the most cherished memory she had of him.

Taylor was said to have worn the 33.19-carat Krupp diamond given to her by Burton until her final days..

Vanity Fair published an excerpt from one of Burton's many letters to Taylor during their marriage. "My blind eyes are desperately waiting for the sight of you. You don't realize of course E. B. how fantastically beautiful you have always been, and how strangely you have acquired an added and special and dangerous loveliness. Your breasts jutting out from that half-asleep languid lingering body, the remote eyes, the parted lips."

Even Graham Jenkins, Burton's youngest brother, says, "His surrender to Elizabeth was total."