Inside Richard Burton's Marriages: From Elizabeth Taylor's Passion to Sally Hay's Devotion

Richard Burton, the legendary Welsh actor with a voice like velvet, loved as fiercely as he performed. His five marriages—from a teenage sweetheart to the most famous woman in the world—read like a Shakespearean drama filled with passion, scandal, and enduring devotion. As documented in Screenshot (550).png, here is the complete story of the women who captured Burton's heart.

Sybil Williams: The First Love

Burton married his fellow Welsh native, Sybil Williams, in 1949 when he was just 23 years old and she was 19. They met on the set of the British film The Last Days of Dolwyn—his film debut and her only screen appearance as an extra.

Sybil gave up her acting career to support Burton's meteoric rise, moving from Switzerland to America after welcoming daughters Kate and Jessica in the mid-1950s. She told The New York Times in 1994 that she never saw it as a sacrifice: "I loved theater, but I certainly wanted to go as a wife to America when Richard was offered a job there. I knew it would be fun, two Welsh kids on the Queen Mary, traveling first-class."

Their marriage crumbled when Burton met Elizabeth Taylor on the set of Cleopatra in 1963. The divorce that year reportedly granted Sybil a $1 million settlement and custody of their daughters. She later remarried musician Jordan Christopher and went on to become a nightclub founder and theater director. Sybil Williams died in 2013 at age 83.

Elizabeth Taylor: Twice the Passion, Twice the Heartbreak

No Hollywood romance has ever matched the intensity of Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. They met on Cleopatra in 1963—he as Mark Antony, she as the Queen of the Nile—while both were still married to other people. In a voiceover from the documentary Elizabeth Taylor: Rebel Superstar, Taylor recalled the moment: "The first day on the set, he was hungover and very vulnerable and his hands were shaking. He asked me to hold a coffee cup up to his lips, and I was gone."

Burton agreed wholeheartedly, telling columnist Roderick Mann: "I was genuinely in love. I felt I didn't know the meaning of the word before." They married on March 15, 1964, in Montreal, becoming the world's most glamorous couple, known for their lavish lifestyle and explosive arguments.

After a decade, they separated in 1974. "You can't keep clapping a couple of dynamite sticks together without expecting them to blow up," Burton told reporters. Yet they remarried the following year in October 1975, only to divorce again in 1976. Still, they remained intertwined. At Taylor's 50th birthday party in 1982, Burton said: "I bred her in my bones, and I love her passionately. She may marry someone else, and so may I, but we will always be drawn back to each other."

Their daughter, Maria McKeown, was adopted by Taylor and later adopted by Burton. Taylor told Vanity Fair in 2010: "Attentive, loving—that was Richard, from those first moments in Rome. We were always madly and powerfully in love. We had more time but not enough."

Suzy Hunt: The Brief, Glamorous Encounter

After his second divorce from Taylor, Burton found himself entangled with British model Suzy Hunt. Their first meeting was straight out of a movie: they locked eyes while going in opposite directions on a ski lift at the Gstaad resort in Switzerland. Burton later described her as "this gorgeous creature, about nine feet tall. She could stop a stampede."

At the time, the 50-year-old Burton was still married to Taylor, and 26-year-old Hunt was married to Formula 1 driver John Hunt. After divorcing their respective spouses, Burton and Hunt married in a quiet civil ceremony in Arlington, Virginia, on August 21, 1976. The marriage lasted only five years; they separated in August 1981 and divorced in February 1982.

Sally Hay: The Final Chapter

Burton met his last wife, Sally Hay, in 1982 on the set of the TV miniseries Wager in Vienna. She worked behind the scenes while Burton played the starring role. They married on July 3, 1983, in a Las Vegas hotel suite—during a one-week break from Burton's stage tour of Private Lives, which, in a bizarre twist, starred his ex-wife Elizabeth Taylor.

Hay handled the unusual situation with grace, telling The Telegraph in 2012: "I did his makeup, we would run the lines together before rehearsal. I watched from the wings, later I sat in the dressing room and read a book while listening to the performance on a speaker. Then we would go home together and I would cook supper."

Their marriage lasted only a year before Burton died at age 58 from a cerebral hemorrhage on August 5, 1984. Since his death, Hay has never remarried. Instead, she devoted herself to preserving his legacy, setting up scholarships and donating his diaries to Swansea University. "My love for him has never diminished," she said in 2011.

Burton's love life remains one of the most captivating stories in Hollywood history—a testament to a man who lived, loved, and burned with passion until the very end.

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