Furious Love: Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, and the Marriage of the Century

Furious Love: Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, and the Marriage of the Century, by Sam Kashner and Nancy Schoenberger
 
In light of Elizabeth Taylor's recent passing, there has been renewed interest in her life and career. Furious Love: Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, and the Marriage of the Century chronicles the celebrity marriage between these two larger-than-life movie stars that inspired media madness around the world. Sam Kashner and Nancy Schoenberger were granted access by Elizabeth Taylor to private letters written by Richard Burton to her and this adds a human dimension, very warm and charming at times, to their story. Their professional and personal lives before they began their torrid romance while filming Cleopatra are covered. Once they became a couple, Taylor and Burton became modern gypsies as they traveled from one movie location to another with a band of family members, personal assistants, tutors and assorted others in tow. Furious Love is very well written and, quite surprisingly, a wonderfully interesting insight into the world of movie making. Taylor and Burton, perhaps Burton more so, were often lauded for their professional and endearingly wonderful acting techniques and the authors show why this praise is deserved. In the end, however, their personal demons of alcohol abuse and wildly dramatic swings in emotional behavior caused so much damage to their lives. This is a great read for anyone interested in these two powerhouse personalities as well as the era of movie making in the latter years of the twentieth century.
-Roy