After keeping them private for 50 years, Elizabeth Taylor has released passionate love letters Richard Burton sent her over the years of their tumultuous relationship. INSIDE EDITION has the story.
It may be the greatest romance in Hollywood history.
For the first time we're hearing the passionate love letters between Elizabeth Taylor and the late Richard Burton - correspondence she kept secret for almost 50 years.
"I love you, lovely woman," Burton wrote to Taylor. "You don't realize...how fantastically beautiful you have always been."
Burton and Taylor were the Brad and Angelina of their day. They fell in love on the set of the 1963 movie Cleopatra.
Their relationship was so stormy they married and divorced twice.
Burton wrote to Taylor, "If you leave me I shall have to kill myself. There is no life without you."
The love letters are revealed for the first time in the new issue of Vanity Fair in an excerpt from a new book, Furious Love. Taylor gave the letters to the authors.
On the subject of love, Burton wrote, "Who invented that concept? I have wracked my shabby brains and can find no answer."
The couple appeared in 11 movies together, including the classic Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
The letters provide an insight into the couple's notoriously turbulent relationship.
"The fundamental and most vicious, swinish, murderous and unchangeable fact is that we totally misunderstand each other," Burton wrote. "We operate on alien wavelengths."
After their first marriage fell apart, Burton wrote, "I shall miss you with passion and wild regret."
Taylor says her last letter from Burton was written shortly before he died of a brain hemorrhage in 1984 at age 58. She didn't receive it until after he had passed away.
She's keeping that letter private.