Author(s): Roger Lewis

Entertainment

Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor were a Sixties supercharged couple in an era of supercharged couples.

As a pairing they were fantasy figures, impossibly desirable.

Liz supple and soft, in perfumes and furs - yet with something demonic and lethal about her.

Dick, in turn, with his ravaged, handsome face, looked as though lit by silver moonlight - poised to turn into a wolf.

Roger Lewis uses this glamorous and damaged pair as the starting point to tell the story of an age of excess: the freaks and groupies, the private jets and jewels and the yachts sailing in an azure sea; the magnificent bad taste and greed.

It is about the clash of worlds: the filth and decay of South Wales and the grandeur and elegance of Old Hollywood; the fantasies we have about film stars and the fantasies the Burtons had about each other.