Fifty years on from Liz Taylor's troubled turn as Cleopatra, Geoffrey Macnab reflects on the Egyptian queen's poisonous history with Hollywood film-makers

Dominic West and Helena Bonham Carter are to appear as one of Hollywood's most tempestuous couples - Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor.

Sybil Christopher became the wife of Richard Burton at the age of just 20 and was married to him for fourteen years. During that time she experienced the entire gamut of emotions, from pleasure to pain and back again, that being married to the great and complex actor could bring. 

How has the co-star of Cleopatra got into the news?

Technology has finally caught up with Doctor Who, which is to be screened in 3D for its 50th anniversary later this year.

The actress's acting comeback hasn't worked out all that well if the critics' responses are anything to go by

Life magazine photographer and Hollywood portraitist Bob Willoughby is widely believed to have invented the photojournalistic motion picture still.

I'm never entirely sure what the difference is between a movie actor and a movie star, but I think the ability to render the phrase, "Broadsword calling Danny Boy", the most explosive words in the English language, even for just a couple of hours, might define it. Richard Burton was a movie star in every sense: from the weak strongman, Mark Antony, right through to the screen-munching menace he brought to O'Brien in 1984.

Notebook

Who knew that at the end, after that film-star life, after all the Oscars, the drama, the husbands and the jewellery, Elizabeth Taylor's final public communication, a month before she died, was a tweet to Kim Kardashian?

In 1969 the American photographer Diane Arbus took some rare photos of the British Royal Family. Or rather not of the real thing, but of waxwork versions of them. The pictures, taken when Arbus visited Madame Tussauds after hours, will go on show in London for the first time next week.

It's a strange day when you find yourself grateful to Mickey Rooney for providing moral compass but, after 90 long minutes of Elizabeth Taylor: Auction of a Lifetime, that was where I found myself uttering an enfeebled cheer that someone, at last, had offered a tiny counterpoint to the programme's dazzled infatuation with glamour. Mickey, who was in at the start of Taylor's career on National Velvet, said that he thought her obsession with expensive trinkets was a bit "sad". A truly beautiful woman, he observed, doesn't really need precious stones. A truism, I guess, and not what I really hankered for, which was some Old Testament howl of rage at the shallowness of the rich (preferably backed up with a flame-thrower). But in the absence of anything better it had to do.

The headpiece

The hair