Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton: Is This the Next ‘Love Story’ Coming to FX?
After the tragic JFK Jr. finale, creator Connor Hines eyes Hollywood’s most intense duo next
Key Takeaways
- Love Story creator Connor Hines wants to tackle Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton next.
- The Season 1 finale of the FX hit featuring JFK Jr. & Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy drops March 26.
- The show has broken streaming records on Hulu and Disney+ by focusing on historical research.
The FX series Love Story has not yet been officially renewed for a second season, but its creator, Connor Hines, is already considering which real-life romance might next deserve the kind of careful, dramatic treatment that defined the show’s first outing—a retelling of the relationship between John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette.
His answer may resonate with anyone who lived through one of the most storied love affairs of the twentieth century.
“Maybe Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton,” Hines said of whose story he’d like to highlight in an interview with Vanity Fair published on Monday, March 23. “They have the right intensity.”
A romance that defined an era
For those who remember the headlines—and many readers will—the Taylor-Burton saga unfolded across two decades and captivated the public in ways few celebrity relationships ever have.
Taylor and Burton met in 1961 while working together on Cleopatra. At the time of filming, Taylor was married to Eddie Fisher, while Burton was married to Sybil Williams. Burton and Taylor ended up having a publicized affair and they subsequently divorced their respective spouses. Taylor and Burton tied the knot in 1964.
During their marriage, Burton and Taylor starred in several films together. After a decade, the pair divorced. However, Taylor and Burton reconciled and wed for a second time in 1975. The following year, they called it quits for good and divorced again.
Despite ending their relationship, Taylor and Burton remained close friends. When Burton died in 1984 at age 58, Taylor declared he was the love of her life. Taylor passed away in 2011. She was 79.
It is a story of remarkable emotional gravity—two marriages, two divorces, an enduring bond, and a devotion that outlasted the legal ties between them. Whether Hines and his team could do justice to the weight of that history remains to be seen.
The Kennedy story at the heart of Season 1
Before any potential Taylor-Burton season can take shape, the show’s first chapter is drawing to a close. Love Story follows the tragic romance of John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette. JFK Jr. and Bessette met in the early 1990s and got married in 1996. They died three years later in 1999 in a plane crash off the coast of Hyannis Port, Massachusetts.
On the show, Sarah Pidgeon plays Bessette, while Paul Kelly portrays JFK Jr.
The Love Story finale drops on Thursday, March 26. It is expected to include the plane crash incident — a moment that, for millions of Americans, remains vividly and painfully lodged in memory. Dramatizing such a tragedy carries an inherent responsibility, one that the show’s creative team appears to have taken seriously.
The question of historical accuracy
For viewers who care about how faithfully a dramatization represents the people it depicts, the sourcing behind Love Story is worth examining closely. The show is based on Elizabeth Beller’s book Once Upon a Time: The Captivating Life of Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy. But executive producer Brad Simpson made clear that Beller’s work was far from the only reference point.
Simpson exclusively shared with Us Weekly how the writing team was able to use several elements to tell the story.
“You reach out to one person, and then it becomes, ‘Why are you not reaching out to every person?’ We love these characters. We did deep, deep research. It’s based on not just the Elizabeth Beller book but many other artifacts from that time and many other histories,” he explained to Us. “We came from a place of love, but if you foreground one person’s personal story and their version of the truth, then you have to foreground everybody’s, and often they’re in conflict. On all our shows we tried to be true to what we think the characters were and show you what it was like to walk in their footsteps.”
Simpson’s remarks illuminate one of the central tensions in any biographical dramatization: competing accounts of the same events, told by people with different relationships to the figures at the center. The acknowledgment that these versions “are often in conflict” suggests a production team aware that telling the truth about real people is never simple.
A show that has found its audience
While the couple didn’t have a happy ending in real life, Hines was pleased with how he was able to tell their story.
“It’s exactly as I pictured it in my mind when I was writing it,” Hines told VF.
The audience response has been substantial. The show, which premiered in February, has broken streaming records for Hulu and Disney+. The FX series’ inaugural season was highly successful — a fact that lends real plausibility to the idea that a second season could move forward.
What a Taylor-Burton season would mean
Should Love Story proceed with Taylor and Burton as its next subjects, the creative team would be taking on a story that many viewers remember firsthand. The two marriages, the public fascination, the films they made together, Burton’s death at 58, and Taylor’s abiding declaration that he was the love of her life—these are not distant historical curiosities for a generation that watched them unfold in real time.
The same ethical questions that surrounded the Kennedy portrayal would apply. How do you honor people whose lives were both extraordinarily public and deeply private? How do you balance conflicting accounts? And how do you dramatize loss—especially the loss of someone a viewer may have genuinely mourned—with the gravity it deserves?
These are questions the Love Story team has already grappled with once. Whether they’ll have the opportunity to do so again remains, for now, an open question.
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