Cleopatra was a BIG movie. It told the story of one of the most spectacular love affairs of all time — the tragic romance between Roman general Mark Antony and Egyptian queen Cleopatra — and the film production matched the grandeur of the tale. It had lavish sets. Elaborate costumes. Thousands of extras. It ran more than three hours long. At the time, it was the most expensive film ever made. It won four Oscars, earned more money at the box office than any other movie in 1963, and still managed to lose tens of millions of dollars.
But nothing about Cleopatra was bigger than its stars. Elizabeth Taylor, hailed as one of world’s most beautiful women, became the highest paid actress in Hollywood when she signed on to play the title role. Starring alongside her as Mark Antony was one of the most respected thespians of his time: Richard Burton.
To the joy of paparazzi everywhere, the two fell in love. They were gorgeous, tempestuous, alcoholic, and entertaining. Their director said working with them was “like being locked in a cage with two tigers.” Every twist and turn in their relationship became international news.
It was less fun for their spouses. At the time, Burton had been married for more than a decade; Taylor, at twenty-eight years old, was already on her fourth husband. Neither marriage would last much longer. When Burton’s wife saw the way he behaved with his co-star on the set of Cleopatra, she fled — not just the set, but the entire country. The couple was divorced by the end of 1963.
It wasn’t an easy divorce. More than a hundred years after Elizabeth Powell and John Stuart were granted the first divorce in Toronto history, divorces were still exceedingly difficult to get — both in Canada and the United States. Burton and his wife had been forced to go to Mexico for theirs. Taylor’s was taking even longer.
That was a problem. Burton needed to get to Toronto right away; he was set to star in a production of Hamlet directed by the respected Shakespearean actor John Gielgud. It would be playing at the O’Keefe Centre (later known as the Hummingbird Centre, the Sony Centre, and the Meridian Centre) before heading to Broadway. He’d been there for the red carpet grand opening of the flashy new theatre on Front Street just a few years earlier, starring with Julie Andrews in its first ever production: the world premiere of Camelot. Now, he was scheduled to make a grand return. There was absolutely no way he could possibly miss it.
But he also couldn’t bear to be without Elizabeth Taylor. Which meant they would be living in Toronto. Together. For eight weeks. In sin.
They arrived in January 1964 and took over a five-room suite on the eighth floor of the King Edward Hotel. It was big news. “SHE’S HERE!” screamed the front page of the Toronto Star upon their arrival, alongside a photo of a Mountie escorting the hand-holding stars into a waiting car at the airport. The couple’s Hollywood nickname, “Dickenliz,” was thrown around liberally. And the paper reported gleefully on the crowd of fans filling the lobby of the hotel, packed so tight that when Prime Minister John Diefenbaker finished giving a speech in a ballroom, he couldn’t find his way to the exit. They even printed a photo of Taylor’s dogs when they arrived on a later flight.
The couple’s marital status was big news, too. For many people, it was an outrageous scandal. There was no shortage of religious indignation in the early 1960s. The Vatican had already denounced Taylor’s “erotic vagrancy.” Judgmental teenagers showed up at the hotel to protest, brandishing signs with slogans like “Drink not the wine of adultery” and “She walks among your children.” And while some have since suggested that at least a few of the teenagers were being satirical, there was no shortage of righteous scorn directed the couple’s way. One congressman in the United States suggested that Burton’s U.S. visa should be revoked.
But the moralizers were fighting a losing battle. There were more fans than picketers. The Toronto Star ran an editorial defending the couple. Times were changing.
And then one day, when Taylor came down from their suite to meet Burton for lunch, there he was, sitting at their usual table in the Sovereign Ballroom. It was strangely deserted; he’d reserved the entire room. That’s when he proposed.
Nine days after Taylor’s own Mexican divorce was finalized, the couple were married — in Montreal, since conservative Ontario wouldn’t recognize their quickie, foreign divorces. A couple of days later, they were back in Toronto showing off their wedding rings. The minister who performed the ceremony would be getting angry phone calls for weeks.
A few days after they got back, Taylor and Burton were off to the United States; Hamlet was opening on Broadway. Over the course of the 1960s, they would make seven movies together and drink and fight and write passionate love letters declaring their undying devotion. He called her “a poem,” “unquestionably gorgeous,” “extraordinarily beautiful,” and also “famine, fire, destruction and plague.” They divorced in 1974. Remarried in 1975. Divorced again in 1976. That would be the last time; a few years later he was dead.
When she came home from the memorial service, there was one last love letter waiting for her in the mail. He’d written it three days before he died, asking her to give him one more chance. In one of the last interviews she gave before she passed away in 2011, she said it was still there, where she always kept it, in a drawer beside her bed.