Vintage Photos of the Most Iconic ’70s Couples

They collided on the set of Cleopatra in the early ’60s, but the affair burned hottest in the ’70s—lavish gifts, volcanic fights, private jets, diamonds, and nonstop headlines. Hollywood watched as two titans drank, loved, and performed together in films like Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, blurring life and art.

By the mid-’70s, excess took its toll. They divorced, remarried in 1975, then divorced again a year later. Despite the chaos, neither ever fully let go. Burton famously said of Elizabeth, “You can’t live with her, but you can’t live without her”—a perfect epitaph for their saga.