Bowler and Lohan try to recreate the magic. (
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Lohan and Bowler (
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Taylor and Burton (Everett Collection / Everett Col)
When Richard Burton first saw Elizabeth Taylor, he observed, “Her breasts were apocalyptic, they would topple empires.”
What was the initial reaction of actor Grant Bowler, who’s playing Richard Burton in the Lifetime movie “Liz & Dick,” when he first saw Lindsay Lohan?
The Aussie actor bursts out laughing. “Well, you know, similar,” he says sheepishly. “Lindsay’s extremely striking, particularly in a similar vein to Elizabeth Taylor.”
Bowler, 44, is being supremely diplomatic, a good boy mincing around the fact that he’s playing opposite one of Hollywood’s biggest train wrecks, the 26-year-old paparazzi-magnet. Bowler lives in Venice, Calif., and would have to be living under a rock not to know the Lohan legend for unprofessionalism and reckless behavior.
“It was a concern, I’ll be honest,” he says. Was she on time? “Not particularly.”
But still he was intrigued by the idea of Lohan playing Hollywood’s last true star whose life was a cloud of publicity, headlines, husbands and jewelry. “There are a lot of innate, unactable similarities there. But you hear all the stuff and I was concerned about that.”
Even though he was apprehensive about working with the diva, Bowler was more concerned with getting Burton down, in particular the voice that made him one of the finest actors of his generation before the booze and the bad movies — hello, “Bluebeard” — took over. “I knew [the chance] wouldn’t come around again. They’re not making many movies about Richard Burton.”
In the lounge at the Trump Soho hotel, Bowler is tall and strappingly built (Burton was slight and 5-feet-6). He wears jeans, a black blazer and a blue T-shirt that says “Denzel saves.” To play Burton, who died in 1984 at age 58, Bowler wore four wigs to cover the film’s 30-year span. “I was an hour-and-a-half in hair every day,” he says.
Lohan had 66 costume changes on the film, which was shot in 21 days and gets right down to business, on the set of “Cleopatra,” where the stars’ affair began and continued onto “The V.I.P.s,” a movie Burton was supposed to make with Sophia Loren — until Taylor muscled her off the project, telling the film’s producer (Charles Shaughnessy) to fire his entire p.r. team to afford her salary because she and Burton will guarantee the film free publicity. The stars make time to actually shoot the picture between fights and sessions in bed (Lohan’s Liz is frequently heard to say, “I want more”). To make up after one embarrassing argument on set, Taylor buys Burton an original Van Gogh, and hangs it on the wall of their hotel suite.
These scenes of their overheated life together are juxtaposed with clips of an on-camera interview they do years later discussing their history with an air of bemusement and little regard to the marriages they wrecked along the way.
Burton was Taylor’s fifth husband (out of seven). Bowler maintains that Taylor “had no regard for tomorrow or the real value of things. He probably failed to give her any sense of restraint. The two of them were ridiculous together.”
Still, with her global fame and arresting beauty, she was an immediate object of fascination for Burton, the product of a Welsh coal-mining town who didn’t speak English until he was a teenager.
“Part of what freed Burton in being with her is that he felt a terrible obligation and responsibility around money,” Bowler says. “He had exceeded where he had come from by such an extraordinary degree that it was uncomfortable. He got all of his family out of the coal mines. And he still couldn’t be happy with what he had. But she gave him permission. And he pushed it.”
Burton and Taylor married and divorced twice. The first marriage lasted 10 years, from 1964 to 1974. They remarried a year later, for one year. Bowler thinks the second marriage was a mistake. “They were that great love that we all seek. And they blew it,” he says.
Executive Producer Larry A. Thompson had the opportunity to meet Taylor, who died last year at age 79, in person at her Bel Air home. He was with Cicely Tyson and they were to discuss a possible Broadway project.
“We were brought into her blue living room. We were asked to sit in two chairs,” he says. “Elizabeth made an entrance. She sat in the center of a couch behind a coffee table. In the center of the coffee table was a bouquet of violet flowers that matched her eyes.”
Obviously, Lohan can’t hold a candle to the real Taylor — and Thompson tested four pair of violet contact lenses to get the right one — but the producer took a gamble on her exactly because of her notoriety.
“I needed an actress who understood being a child star and being hunted by the press, someone who lived in excess,” he says. “No one could understand that better than Lindsay. If could harness her talent, I would get the movie made. I was certainly aware of her history.”
He relied on Bowler, however, to ground the film. “Elizabeth Taylor and Lindsay Lohan are the storm and he’s the anchor,” Thompson says, praising the “gravitas” he brings to the film. “Grant Bowler is the cherry on the sundae.”
LIZ & DICK
Today, 9 p.m., Lifetimex