The 1960s would be defined by Cleopatra,
Newport cheap, the infamous 1962 epic that was the most expensive film ever made at the time (even then it cost approximately US$40 million) and also the meeting place of Taylor and Richard Burton, who she subsequently married and divorced twice. The ancient melodrama, for which Taylor earned a million dollar salary (and a million more in overtime because of legendary production overruns), made most of its budget back, but as a couple Taylor and the classically trained Burton were more famous than productive. Aside from a young Mike Nichols’ vituperative domestic drama, 1966’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,
Noise Headphones, their joint offerings tended more towards 1968’s disastrous Boom.
After 1967’s underrated Reflections in a Golden Eye,
newports cigarettes, overseen by John Huston, in which Taylor and no less than Marlon Brando play a military couple silently at war in their marriage, her work fell away. As if sensing that the decade couldn’t accommodate her, Taylor spent a good part of the 1970s as a Washington-based political wife to U.S. Senator John Warner. It was this period that required treatment for depression and addiction at the Betty Ford Clinic,
women Jeans, and the Taylor that emerged a grand dame, essentially playing herself in cameos or in soap opera stints.