Richard Burton had secret flings with Marilyn Monroe and Lana Turner

London, Jan 12 : Actor Richard Burton had a secret fling with Hollywood legends Marilyn Monroe and Lana Turner while he was still married to his first wife, reveals a new biography.

The book, by former film publicist Michael Munn, has come out with the sensational revelation that one of the greatest actors enjoyed an extra-marital fling with the most loved starlet of the age.

Munn claims that Burton's liaisons with Monroe and Turner took place in the 1950s and early 1960s, before he met Elizabeth Taylor, who went on to become his second wife, on the set of 'Cleopatra'.

At the time, Burton was married to his first wife, Sybil Williams, whom he met in 1947 on the set of his first film, 'The Last Days of Dolwyn'.

The tome, to be out next month, also details how the libidinous Welshman was once caught in a brothel with fellow womaniser Errol Flynn and had a fistfight with Frank Sinatra.

Munn, who was Burton's publicist and the author of a biography of Laurence Olivier, also describes how he looked after Burton through a severe epileptic fit and witnessed a petrifying encounter he had with East End gangsters.

"The affairs with Monroe [right] and Turner took place in the Fifties and early Sixties when Burton's Hollywood career was taking off, before he met Elizabeth Taylor on Cleopatra," the Daily Express quoted a literary source, as saying.

"He was married to his first wife Sybil Burton at the time but was notoriously unfaithful to her," the source added.

Burton died aged 58 in 1984 having been married five times, twice to Taylor.

ANI