Video: Helena Bonham Carter as Elizabeth Taylor in BBC movie about her reunion with Richard Burton

This is not to be confused with that disaster of a Lifetime flick starring Lindsay Lohan.

The BBC movie about Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton has begun airing and I have a scene below that takes place at Miss Taylor’s 50th birthday party in London.

It stars Helena Bonham Carter as the two-time Oscar winner and AIDS activist and Dominic West as Burton, her fifth and sixth husband and co-star in such films as Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Cleopatra.

The film is set against the backdrop of their appearance in the 1983 revival of the play Private Lives. But at the time of Taylor’s 50th birthday a year earlier, she had just split from hubby #7 Sen. John Warner and Burton had split from wife #4 Suzy Hunt.

There was a splashy People magazine cover of the two of them at that party and worldwide speculation that the famous lovers might get back together yet again.

But this clip is a window into maybe why that didn’t happen: Taylor was drinking and taking pills (she would enter the Betty Ford Center in 1984) while Burton had grown increasingly frail after years of hard living and seemed to be looking for someone to take care of him.

But it was clear that they were the loves of each others’ lives.