Colin Farrell has opened up on his unusual and touching friendship with Elizabeth Taylor, and said that he actually considers the late actress, who was 44 years his senior, as his "last kind-of-romantic relationship".
"I just adored her," Colin said of the iconic screen star, who passed away in 2011, in an interview with Ellen DeGeneres. "She was a spectacular, spectacular woman."
The Irish star first met Elizabeth following the birth of his second child Henry in 2009. While at the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center waiting for his son's arrival, Colin ran into her manager at the lifts, who told him that Elizabeth was there to have a stent put in her heart.
"I said, 'Will you tell her I said hello, she probably won't know who I am.' And they go, 'No, she knows who you are,' and I went, 'Wow, cool. Well, tell her I said hello and I wish her the best,' and they said, 'Will do,'" Colin happily recalled to Ellen.
"So I got home a few days later with Henry and I was thinking about Elizabeth and how she was doing, and I called my publicist and I said, 'I bumped into some people of Elizabeth Taylor's...could I send her some flowers?' And my publicist said...'That's funny because I'm looking at an orchid from Elizabeth Taylor for you."
"I'll say!" the actor exclaimed as the audience reacted excitedly. "I said, 'Wow, that's amazing.'"
"I said, 'Well, send that bad boy over to the house and can I still get the flowers?' And it came with a hand written note from her. I then cheekily about a week later said, 'Listen is there any chance I can go...and see her?'"
Colin said his publicist 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... it was kind of like the last — it feels like in my head, not her, I'm projecting, but the last kind of romantic relationship I had.
"Which was never consummated," he quickly said.
"I wanted to be number eight, but we ran out of road," added the 37-year-old star, who read a poem at Elizabeth's funeral in 2011, in reference to the men Elizabeth married.
Among the things the pair bonded over was their insomnia.
"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," Colin revealed.
"…I'd call her at two in the morning and the nurse would answer the phone I'd say, 'Is she awake?' The nurse was like 'hold on I'll just check' 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. Really cool."