Colin Farrell & Liz Taylor Had a Thing

Well here's a pairing that's a little weird, kind of perfect, and something that never occurred to us: Colin Farrell and Elizabeth Taylor. Best of friends, and, to Farrell, almost romantic? According to Farrell's recent appearance on Ellen, Farrell and Taylor became very close in the screen legend's last few years. Though their relationship was never consummated, Farrell said of Taylor that "she was a spectacular, spectacular woman. I wanted to be [husband] number eight, but we ran out of road."

Everything he says about this is actually quite beautiful and tragic, and would probably make a pretty good romantic movie in and of itself.

The two met when they were both at Cedars Sinai Hospital — Farrell for the birth of Farrell's son, Henry, Taylor to get a stint put in her heart. It's how he tells the story that's really striking:

I asked [my publicist] Danica, and she made some calls, and I got to have an audience with her. And that was the beginning of a year and a half or two years of what was a really cool [relationship]. It was kind of like the last -- it feels like in my head, not hers, I'm projecting -- but the last kind of romantic relationship I had. Which was never consummated.

The two grew very close, and their friendship flourished:

It was really cool, and she wasn't much of a sleeper at night, like I'm not, so at two o'clock in the morning, I'd call her," he said. "I'd call her at two in the morning, and the nurse would answer the phone, and I'd say, 'Is she awake?'...And then I'd be on the phone and I'd hear, 'Hello?' And I'd go, 'How's it going?' And we'd talk for a half an hour, an hour, into the wee hours.

"I just adored her," he told DeGeneres.

Obviously, the end of this story is well-known: Taylor died in 2011 at the age of 79. Still, it's the kind of unexpected love story that seems fitting for the last hurrah of a woman as legendary in love and in her career as Elizabeth Taylor.