Elizabeth Taylor’s life was more dramatic than any star-crossed Hollywood romance. The legendary beauty was married eight times to seven husbands. The first was at age 18, to Nicky Hilton, the hotel heir, more a rebellious act against her overbearing mother than a marriage of love. The second was to Michael Wilding, a British actor. The marriage lasted five years – considerably longer than the nine months spent with Hilton, but their differences still brought them apart. Michael Todd, her third husband, tragically died just over a year into their marriage; his best friend Eddie Fisher, who comforted the grieving Taylor became her fourth. Then came the tumultuous Richard Burton.

On this day, October 10, in 1975, Elizabeth Taylor married Richard Burton for the second time. Just sixteen months after their divorce, the couple reconciled – Burton famously said “You can’t keep clapping a couple of sticks [of dynamite] together without expecting them to blow up” – and married again, in a secret ceremony in Botswana.

Their second marriage lasted just a short year, but for the 10 years of their first marriage, their intense passion made them the biggest Hollywood couple of the age. The passion was evident in the Van Gogh work she gave him as a wedding present and the 33-karat Krupp diamond he bought for her – a mere trifle compared to the $1.1-million, 69-carat diamond he got for her from Cartier. But their overindulgence did not stop at expensive art and jewelry: in every sphere their appetites exceeded their common sense. They loved – everything, each other, life – perhaps, a little too much.