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Titanic may have cost $235m but the biggest film budget is still for "Liz And Dick's" Cleopatra which cost $44m - or $300m in today's money.

Until 1963 no one had paid $44m to make a film, but then no one planned to. The budget grew through a series of disasters, all part of movie lore today.

Taylor says she threw up when she saw it on its release 35 years ago. But the two-and-a-half year shoot had at least brought Richard Burton into Taylor's life...

Cleopatra had two directors and two separate casts. For one scene alone 6,000 Italian extras were hired to greet Liz Taylor who was borne on a giant sphinx.

The Alexandria set covered 20 acres, featured palm trees flown in from Los Angeles, four 52ft-high sphinxes, and cost $600,000.

Cleopatra's first director Rouben Mamoulian managed to produce just 10 minutes of footage for $7m.

When Joseph Mankiewicz took over, Liz Taylor got double pneumonia. "I was pronounced dead four times," she says. "Once I didn't breathe for five minutes."

Richard Burton was signed up as Mark Antony for $250,000; Rex Harrison as Julius Caesar for $300,000. Taylor was on $1m against 10% of the gross.

Production was moved to Rome because 20th Century Fox thought the climate would suit Liz Taylor.

Director Mankiewicz arranged shooting schedules around Taylor's menstrual cycle. Taylor argued, "Look, I'm playing the most beautiful woman in the world. I want to look my best."

The fake Roman forum, costing $1.5m, used up so much steel tubing that the Italian construction industry suffered a national shortage.

Elizabeth Taylor believes that a large amount of Cleopatra's budget was lost through theft.

She tells Vanity Fair: "I got to see the studio's breakdown on the money waste. They had $3m for 'miscellaneous' and $100,000 for paper cups. They said I ate 12 chickens and 40 pounds of bacon every day for breakfast. What?"

Actors were kept idle for weeks due to rain and rewrites. Each rained-out day cost between $40,000 and $75,000.

The greatest event of Cleopatra was the affair of Liz Taylor and Richard Burton - prompting a papal denunciation and a very modern paparazzi-feeding frenzy

He was married to Sybil, she to Eddie Fisher. Off-screen there were violent rows. On one occasion Taylor needed to take 22 days off to recover from a beating Burton gave her.

The film nearly destroyed 20th Century Fox - yet the result was a goodish film with an excellent Rex Harrison.

Despite Cleopatra's troubled shoot the film made a small profit, and still holds the biggest budget record. And Burton and Taylor became global superstars.