Furious Love

Elizabeth Taylor has released her love letters from Richard Burton to Vanity Fair magazine in its July edition. The letters apparently give new insight into "a passionate, playful but turbulent romance" that spanned 20 years and two marriages.

Apparently one letter is kept private however: the final letter written by Burton - only a few days before his death in Switzerland of a brain hemorrhage - and which reached Elizabeth after she returned from his memorial service. How spooky...

Taylor, 78, decided to share the bulk of the letters with Kashner and Schoenberger for a book Furious Love: Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, and the Marriage of the Century which is due for release later this month.

Burton calls Taylor "Twit Twaddle" (what...?), addresses her as "My Lumps" (what would Fergie say about that?) and sometimes signed his letters "Husbs."

Here are some extracts to tantalise you... And make you question the quality of those dirty text messages/flirty emails we receive these days which apparently now equate to love letters:

* "If you leave me, I shall have to kill myself. There is no life without you."

* "You are probably the best actress in the world, which, combined with your extraordinary beauty, makes you unique."

* "The fundamental and most vicious, swinish, murderous, and unchangeable fact is that we totally misunderstand each other ... we operate on alien wave­lengths. You are as distant as Venus - planet, I mean - and I am tone-deaf to the music of the spheres." (If he'd put this thought in a book, he'd have made millions! Talk about being ahead of his time)

In other letters, the Welsh-born actor confesses that he believes acting, for a man, is "sissified and faintly ridiculous" and talks of how he wished he had chosen the life of a writer.

"Richard was magnificent in every sense of the word," Taylor, the eight-times married actress, told Kashner and Schoenberger.

"And in everything he ever did.... He was the kindest, funniest, and most gentle father. All my kids worshiped him. Attentive, loving - that was Richard - from those first moments in Rome we were always madly and powerfully in love. We had more time but not enough," she said.

Taylor and Burton started a torrid affair in 1962 on the Rome set of the movie Cleopatra that shocked the media and was denounced by the Vatican as both were still married to other partners.

Their first marriage lasted from 1964-74 and they wed again in October 1975 before breaking up in July 1976.