Richard Burton

"Cleopatra" (1963) When movie stars still understood extravagance, and had enough power to disrupt a film's production without being ruined forever, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton drove this production into the ground with insane demands -- perhaps the most insane of which ... morewas that the public pay money to see it. The result was the most famously embarrassing flop of all time (at the time), and history has not been kind to the film itself, either the four-hour (!) original cut, or the three-hours-and-change studio version. (20th Century Fox / Courtesy Everett Collection)