Art imitating life imitating art imitating life

Dominic West and Helena Bonham Carter are to play Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in a one-off 90-minute BBC4 drama (to be shown "later this year" - no broadcast date has yet been confirmed).

From an article by Anna Pukas in The Express:

In 1983 the hottest ticket in town was Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton on stage together for the first time. The play was Noel Coward’s Private Lives but the billboards might as well have read The Liz and Dick Show.

After all Private Lives is about a couple, divorced after a stormy marriage, who meet up again while honeymooning with their new spouses and realise they are still in love with each other. Remind you of anyone? If ever there were a case of art imitating life, this was it. The second wife was even called Sybil, like the first wife Burton had left for Taylor.

Taylor and Burton had divorced for the second time six years earlier. They had both made ill-advised new marriages – she to Virginia senator John Warner, he to model Suzy Hunt, ex-wife of racing driver James Hunt – which had also ended in divorce. It was no wonder that audiences thought Private Lives was about their lives.

But rather than a triumph the next year was to be a watershed. For the first time Taylor – a consummate film actress but with virtually no theatre experience – seemed out of her depth and for the first time in the tempestuous 20 years he had known her, Burton found her irritating and boring. Most poignantly they were to be the last months they ever spent together for Burton died the following year.

Now the story of that last turbulent year has been made into a TV film starring Dominic West and Helena Bonham Carter in a BBC project that might be described as art imitating life imitating art imitating life.

Unfortunately, according to The Guardian, this will be the last of the brilliant real-life documentaries that have made BBC4 such a compelling and watchable channel since it was launched in 2002...

The drama, written by William Ivory and directed by Richard Laxton, is something of a swansong for BBC4, the last in a successful series of biopics about public figures including Margaret Thatcher, Enid Blyton, Beatrix Potter, Kenneth Williams, Frankie Howerd and Barbara Cartland.

BBC4's budget was cut last year as part of the corporation's "Delivering Quality First" cost-saving initiative. As a result, the channel is commissioning less original drama.

Such a shame.

BBC4