MOVIES - Oct. 18, 1988

Selections from Richard Burton’s diaries will be published next year in a biography of the late actor. Samples, courtesy of Life magazine’s November issue: Dick wrote he’d love Liz Taylor until he died; he once bought her a $1.1-million ring after telling Liz her hands were “large and ugly and red and masculine.” “I have been inordinately lucky all my life, but the greatest luck of all has been Elizabeth,” Burton wrote on Nov. 19, 1967. “She is a prospectus that can never be entirely catalogued, an almanac for Poor Richard. And I’ll love her till I die.” There were also worries about the couple’s fun-loving habits: “It would be frightful to live the rest of our lives in an alcoholic haze, seeing the world through fumes of spirits and smoke.”