The Reason Why Elizabeth Taylor's 'True Love' Might Not Have Been Richard Burton

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Elizabeth Taylor married eight times, but it is always Richard Burton, who many people believe was her soulmate. They married twice — the first time in 1964, and the second time in 1975. However, Nanette Burstein, director of the upcoming HBO original documentary, Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes, believes that another man was the one who always had her heart. 

Bursting shared with Closer that she’s confident in her belief that her third marriage to Mike Todd was her “happiest” union of them all. Describing the film producer as her “true love,” Todd had a special quality about him that let Taylor thrive both personally and professionally. “I think that he made her confident. I think he made her feel special,” she said. “I think she felt like she could do anything in the world, and I think he would’ve been and continued to be – he was and would have continued to be – the great love of her life, but then he died in a plane crash.”

Taylor and Todd were only a year into their marriage when his private plane, the Liz, suffered from engine failure after being overloaded in icy conditions. The plane crashed near Grants, New Mexico, and Taylor’s life was never the same. “God, I loved him. My self-esteem, my image, everything soared under his exuberant, loving care,” Taylor wrote of her grief in her 1988 memoir, Elizabeth Takes Off. “I honestly didn’t think I would survive and didn’t much care if I did not.” Taylor was able to carry on, but her relationships looked much different from her Todd marriage.

Roger Lewis’ book, Erotic Vagrancy: Everything about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, called her romance with Burton “supercharged” when it came to their life together. They traveled with an entourage of “secretaries, makeup artists, housekeepers, a house photographer, tutors, bodyguards, nurses, business managers, chauffeurs, butlers, and even suitcase-packers.” In 1969 along, the couple spent $800,000 on their household staff, per Lewis, which would be the equivalent of over $6 million in today’s dollars. 

If Todd had lived, Taylor might not have walked down the aisle another five times because her marriage to the producer was that solid. He treated her like the queen she was, but they only got a brief moment in time together — and Taylor might have been chasing that same love in her other marriages to less success.

Before you go, click here to see every man Elizabeth Taylor dated or married below: