Available Formats
Paperback
Published: 26th October 2023
Hardback
Published: 30th January 2024
Paperback
Published: 27th August 2024
Erotic Vagrancy: Everything about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor
By (Author) Roger Lewis
Quercus Publishing
riverrun
30th January 2024
26th October 2023
United Kingdom
General
Non Fiction
Individual actors and performers
Films, cinema
791.430280922
Hardback
656
Width 164mm, Height 236mm, Spine 56mm
1080g
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.Roger Lewis has achieved considerable word-of-mouth success with Seasonal Suicide Notes. He has also written a biography of Anthony Burgess, and Sunday Times best-selling books on Laurence Olivier, Peter Sellers and the Carry On actor Charles Hawtrey.