MUMBAI: Helena Bonham Carter, who is better known for her role in Les Miserables, will be essaying Elizabeth Taylor in a new BBC drama that will explore her torrid romance with Richard Burton.

"Elizabeth was 51, still every inch a star, still beautiful and they still needed each other, but this was professional. They were doing Noel Coward‘s Private Lives on stage, playing a couple who used to be married. People wondered if they were still in love and whether they‘d be playing themselves or their characters," Carter observed.

The 43-year-old will play Taylor in Burton & Taylor that will tell the story of their appearance in a 1983 revival of Noel Coward‘s play Private Lives, reported Daily Express.

The pair gripped filmgoers in the sixties and seventies with their stormy marriages, the first of which lasted from 1964 to 1974. But just 16 months after divorcing they remarried, only to split up again in 1976.

A BBC spokesman said Burton & Taylor would offer viewers an insight into one of the most fascinating, glamorous and tempestuous relationships of the 20th century.