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Peter O’Toole taunted Richard Burton about sleeping with Liz Taylor

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Updated on July 6, 2023

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According to a new book, Peter O’Toole reportedly irritated Richard Burton by claiming the actor’s wife Elizabeth Taylor told him he was a better lover than her husband.

The Lawrence of Arabia star allegedly had an affair with Taylor while she was married to American crooner Eddie Fisher, her fourth husband, whom she later divorced after falling in love with Port Talbot-born Burton on the set of Cleopatra, according to American authors Darwin Porter and Danforth Prince in their biography of O’Toole, who was married for 20 years to elegant Welsh actress Sian Phillips.

O’Toole was raised in a tough neighborhood of Leeds after being born in poverty in rural Ireland. He was fascinated with his own sexual fulfillment and lost his virginity at the age of 13 to a prostitute. He often insisted that he belonged to the “criminal class,” not the working class.

He was a renowned drinker. O’Toole once appeared on stage to make a vital speech as Shylock in his mid-20s during an early RSC production of The Merchant of Venice, but he was so inebriated that he began quoting lines from King Lear.

The thespian was also a great drinking buddy with Burton but their friendship was soured and “severely tested” when O’Toole reportedly confided to Burton he’d slept with his then spouse before they got together and boasted “she tells me I’m much better in the sack, at least more reliable, than you are”.

The book’s authors say O’Toole and Taylor started an affair when she was married to the American singer Eddie Fisher and staying in a suite at the Dorchester in London.

The actress, it is claimed, had been impressed with O’Toole’s Shakespeare stage performances and wanted him to play Mark Antony alongside her Cleopatra in the 1963 epic of the same name. Of course, the part eventually went to Richard Burton and his affair with Taylor started there on the set.

Burton, Taylor and O’Toole starred together in the 1971 movie of Under Milk Wood.

While most of the film was shot in the Pembrokeshire village of Fishguard, Taylor’s refusal to travel meant her scenes had to be filmed at Pinewood Studios in Buckinghamshire.

Taylor and Burton were married on two separate occasions from 15 March 1964 to 26 June 1974 and from 10 October 1975 to 29 July 1976. They had an adopted daughter, Maria Burton, together and Burton also adopted Taylor’s daughter Liza Burton, who she had with producer Mike Todd.

In her life, Taylor was married eight times to seven husbands, with her final marriage to Larry Fortensky ending in October 1996.

After his spectacular success in David Lean’s four-hour epic, Lawrence of Arabia, O’Toole announced: ”I’ve arrived! Ignore me at your peril!”

Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier, another famous acting couple, were also friends of O’Toole. It’s claimed O’Toole long envied actor Peter Finch’s affair with the beautiful Leigh after she split up from Olivier.

He got his own chance near the end of her short life when he watched her perform in a Noel Coward play and took her to dinner. After agreeing actors should never marry, Leigh invited him back to share her ‘lonely bed’.

O’Toole later confided to a friend he had to make love in a room festooned with nine photographs of Olivier, but ‘still managed to rise to the occasion’.

The list of sexual conquests didn’t stop there. As well as his liaison with transsexual April Ashley, it is claimed that O’Toole ended up, after another Andalusian society party, n-k-d in bed with Sarah Churchill, the hard-drinking actress daughter of Sir Winston Churchill. The actor reportedly told friends he couldn’t remember if anything had happened between them.

O’Toole spent more than two years making Lawrence Of Arabia, the film that turned him into an international star. As his wife stayed at home bringing up their first child on her own, he recalled carousing in the ‘fleshpots’ of Beirut during filming, enjoying bathtubs filled with champagne and once gambling away nine months’ wages in one night. Again, his drinking was out of control.

According to Alec Guinness, a local dignitary invited the film’s stars to a party only for O’Toole to get in a row with their host and hurl a glass of champagne in his face. ‘O’Toole could have been killed — shot or strangled,’ Guinness told a friend. ‘And I’m beginning to think it’s a pity he wasn’t.’

The new book focuses on his penchant for womanising, and claims he had relationships with some of the most beautiful women of the 60s, 70s and 80s.

Some his alleged conquests – many of which occurred during his stormy 20-year marriage to Welsh actress Sian Phillips, whom he tied the knot with in 1959 – include Audrey Hepburn, Jayne Mansfield, Diana Dors and even royalty with Princess Margaret named as a notch on his bedpost.