She to the singer Eddie Fisher, who had left Debbie Reynolds and he to the actress Sybill Williams, with whom he had two daughters, Kate (68) and Jessica (66).
The passion of the lovers, who eventually married twice, led Burton to unapologetically leave his wife. This Monday, June 10, marked the centenary of the actor's birth, considered one of the greatest performers in the history of cinema, although he never won an Oscar.
On this anniversary, LOC remembers the actor's eldest daughter, Kate, a popular television actress with a long theatrical career of which much of her life remains unknown. She grew up in New York under the care of her mother and stepfather, Jordan Christopher, where she stayed away from the media circus that her father and Elizabeth Taylor were involved in with paparazzi worldwide.
In an interview with People magazine several years ago, the actress revealed that from the start Elizabeth Taylor made her feel "at home" and that when her father married the actress for the first time in 1964, the star of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof brought three children from two previous marriages, Michael, Christopher, and Liza, "who remain my siblings, we are still very, very close," explains the 64-year-old actress from Inventing Anna.
Later, the Taylor-Burton marriage adopted a girl named Maria. And with the names of their three daughters, they created the acronym Kalizma, with which they named their impressive yacht.
At the age of 12, Kate appeared in Anne of the Thousand Days (1969), her first film uncredited alongside Taylor and Burton, but as Kate has stated in numerous interviews, acting was not a priority for her. She chose to continue her education and became the first in her family to earn a degree from one of the Ivy League's top universities, Brown University, where she graduated in European History and Russian Studies in 1979. Her ambition was to pursue a career in diplomacy.
However, one of her professors who was a Russian history advisor told her she had a special gift for communication and asked if she had considered acting. After considering it, she graduated in 1982 with a degree in Drama from Yale. The first play she performed was Present Laughter by Noel Coward, one of her father's favorite authors.
During rehearsals, she met Michael Ritchie (68), who was a stage director and later became her husband. Kate later gained popularity with the series Ellis Island, which Richard Burton starred in shortly before his death.
Unlike her father, who had a tumultuous love life, Kate's has been extremely stable since she married Ritchie in 1985, with whom she has two children, actors and writers Morgan Ritchie (37) -a spitting image of his grandfather, who has acted alongside his mother in the film August (1996) and the play The Seagull (2014)- and Charlotte Ritchie (27).