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Actress Dame Elizabeth Taylor has made love letters written by her late ex-husband Richard Burton public for the first time.

The 78-year-old says she is keeping only one letter private, which the actor wrote days before he died, asking her for another chance.

In an interview with Vanity Fair, she said: "Richard was magnificent in every sense of the word."

In the letters Burton uses the pet names "Twit Twaddle" and "My Lumps".

The final letter only reached the Oscar-winning actress in California after she returned from his memorial service in 1984.

Denounced

"Attentive, loving - that was Richard - from those first moments in Rome we were always madly and powerfully in love. We had more time but not enough," she told Vanity Fair.

The letters will be published in a book called Furious Love: Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, and the Marriage of the Century.

In one Burton admits he thought acting was "sissified and faintly ridiculous", and wished he had become a writer instead.

And in another he wrote: "You are probably the best actress in the world, which, combined with your extraordinary beauty, makes you unique."

The couple, who divorced twice and were eventually married to different people, met on the set of the film Cleopatra in 1962.

At the time they were both denounced by the Vatican as both were still married to other partners.

Burton died at the age of 58 after suffering a brain haemorrhage.