Suzy Miller: The Woman They Traded for a Million Dollars and a Clean Divorce

She was sold. That’s the word the biographers used. Not metaphorically — Richard Burton literally wrote James Hunt a check for a million dollars to dissolve their mutual mess and take Suzy off his hands. Hunt allegedly pocketed it and stated, “Relax, you’ve done me a wonderful turn by taking on the most alarming expense account in the country.” and that was that. The exchange of a human being across the ski slopes of Gstaad, two rich men shaking hands, one walking away with the trophy and one walking away laughing. That’s the story of Suzy Miller in miniature. Beautiful, complicated, almost completely erased from her own life.

Table of Contents

Quick Bio

Detail	Info
Full Name	Susan Miller
Born	c. 19 May 1949
Birthplace	Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe)
Nationality	British
Professions	Model, dancer, actress, choreographer
Known For	Marriages to James Hunt (1974–76) and Richard Burton (1976–82)
Third Marriage	Jack Cawood (American millionaire, 1985)
Portrayed by	Olivia Wilde in Rush (2013)
Last Known Location	Ibiza, Spain (per 2013 reports)

She Came From Somewhere Nobody Thinks About

Southern Rhodesia. That’s where she started. Born into a colonial world that was already crumbling around the edges, raised there with a twin sister and a brother in a country that would eventually become Zimbabwe and erase itself from the map that wealthy white families in England kept on their drawing room walls. She moved to England. Of course she did — because that was what you did, if you were young and tall and blonde and ambitious and growing up in a place that felt like it was slowly running out of time.

By 24 she was modeling in London. Fashion magazines, agency shoots, the whole gilded circuit. The 1970s London fashion scene was exactly as chaotic and exhilarating as every memoir about it claims — miniskirts and cocaine and photographers treating you like furniture and calling it art. She fit perfectly. Not just because of the obvious physical stuff, though she was by all accounts extraordinary-looking. The biographies all say some version of “she could stop a stampede” — which, for the record, is Richard Burton’s own quote, so take it with the grain of salt you’d apply to a man who had just left Elizabeth Taylor for a woman twenty-two years younger than him.

She wasn’t just a face. She danced. She choreographed. She had acting credits — Twenty Nine in 1969, before she was even a public name, and later The Wild Geese in 1978 while still married to Burton, which is a kind of audacity you have to respect. The woman got work. But the work wasn’t what anyone was ever going to write about.

James Hunt and the Society Wedding That Was Already Over

Here’s what I keep thinking about. She met Hunt in Spain in 1974. He proposed within weeks. They got married in October at the Brompton Oratory in Knightsbridge — the “society wedding of the year,” per the tabloids who were already treating their relationship like a shared property. And then they spent their honeymoon in Antigua and settled in Spain for tax reasons, which is maybe the most 1970s detail in this entire story.

They were described by the media as one of the happiest married couples in the sports world.James Hunt was sleeping with everyone. Not quietly, either. The man had what his biographer Tom Rubython diplomatically described as “a gigantic appetite” — and he satisfied it with roughly the discretion of a Golden Retriever let loose at a party. Suzy later said that she always felt like the second priority. Like everything — every race, every podium, every after-party with every new person — came before the marriage.

She was right. And she knew it, probably faster than she admitted to anyone.

That marriage lasted fourteen months. In the ground.

The Slope at Gstaad and the Transaction That Changed Everything

December 1975. Switzerland. The Alps doing their whole performance. And in a ski resort at Gstaad, two couples crossed paths. Suzy and James Hunt. Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. Taylor and Burton were on their second marriage by then — that whole catastrophic reunion everyone said wouldn’t last. It didn’t.

Burton spotted Suzy. Reportedly turned around and said she was “nine feet tall” and could “stop a stampede.” He was fifty years old. She was twenty-six. He was already one of the most famous actors alive, seven Oscar nominations, a voice like thunder wrapped in Welsh coal dust, and a liver that was slowly losing a very long war. She was a model in a failing marriage looking for leverage — her own words, essentially, when she later admitted she initially got involved with Burton partly to make Hunt jealous.

She was traded. That’s Olivia Wilde’s phrase from a 2013 interview about playing her in Ron Howard’s Rush. The Hunt biography Shunt lays it out without ceremony: Burton paid a million dollars as part of the divorce settlement. Hunt took the money, called it a “wonderful turn,” and the whole thing was processed in Haiti — where, in a detail so absurd it feels like a screenwriter invented it, both couples had their divorce hearings on the same island on the same day in June 1976. Because you could get divorced there in twenty-four hours. The wealthy invented the concept of convenient jurisdiction. Two marriages ending simultaneously in the Caribbean sun.

Burton and Suzy married in August 1976. Arlington, Virginia. Just like that.

The Taylor Problem

Here’s where it gets genuinely interesting and also genuinely sad. Suzy had beaten Elizabeth Taylor. Had she, though?

Burton — and this is documented in his published diaries, in the biographies, in basically every account of his inner life — never stopped loving Taylor. Even when they divorced. Even when he married Suzy. He said in 1982, at Taylor’s fiftieth birthday, that they would “always be drawn back to each other.” I bred her in my bones, he said. Great. You’re saying this to reporters while your current wife stands somewhere nearby.

Suzy reportedly had programs edited during Burton’s stage performances to remove references to Elizabeth Taylor. Think about that for a second. Not just that Burton’s presence was so saturated with his former wife that programs at his plays mentioned her — but that Suzy apparently had to ask for the name to be removed. Because seeing it hurts. Because she was married to a man whose bones were haunted by someone else.

Six years of that. She tried to help him with the drinking. Burton was a committed alcoholic in the way that only genuinely brilliant people manage — with total awareness of the destruction and zero real intention of stopping. She apparently tried. It didn’t work. It usually doesn’t. By 1982, they were done.

The same year Taylor’s sixth marriage ended too, by the way. Both women, same year, watching the man between them finally disappear into his final chapter. Burton died in 1984.

After the Circus: The Quiet Third Act Nobody Talks About

Suzy married again. Third time. An American millionaire and real estate developer named Jack Cawood. They married in Virginia on July 20. She moved to the United States. And that was essentially it for her public life.

No scandal. No memoir. No desperate celebrity comeback. She had a daughter — details carefully kept private — and disappeared into a kind of chosen invisibility that seems, honestly, like the sanest possible response to what she’d been through. One report from 2013 placed her in Ibiza, which tracks. If you’d survived being the subject of tabloid bidding wars in the 1970s, you’d probably end up somewhere with good weather and no interest in talking about Formula One.

She never wrote the book. She should’ve written the book.

The Olivia Wilde Interpretation

Rush came out in 2013. Ron Howard directing, Chris Hemsworth as Hunt, Daniel Brühl as Lauda. It’s a good film. Olivia Wilde plays Suzy, and she does what actors do — she makes the role warm and humanizing and slightly softer than the chaotic truth probably was. Reviewers noted the resemblance. Wilde herself called Suzy someone who was “traded,” which is the most honest thing anyone associated with that film said publicly.

The movie compresses timelines and smooths edges the way biopics always do. Hunt proposes faster on screen than he did in life. The texture of Suzy’s daily existence — the racing wives waiting around, the infidelities she wasn’t supposed to acknowledge, the loneliness dressed up in glamour — that’s gestured at but not excavated.

It made people Google her again, briefly, in 2013. Then they forgot.

What Actually Got Erased

The thing that gets me, going through all of this, is how completely Suzy Miller’s interiority vanished. Every account of her life is really an account of James Hunt’s marriage or Richard Burton’s marriage. She’s the supporting character in her own biography. The biographers of her husbands wrote about her as an element of their stories — the beautiful model who pushed Burton over the edge, the “expense account” that Hunt was relieved to offload.

She danced. She choreographed. She had opinions and ambitions. She said that she had played games with Burton in order to exact revenge on Hunt; here is a woman with complete emotional agency acting in a way that is common in unhappy marriages, attempting to get the control she never actually had. That’s human. The fact that we only know it as a footnote in a book about James Hunt is the problem.

She came from Zimbabwe before it was Zimbabwe. She built a modeling career in one of the most competitive cities on earth. She survived two marriages to genuinely spectacular disasters of men and then quietly built a third life out of frame. She has a daughter somewhere who probably knows stories we’ll never read.

That’s life. A whole, jagged, real one. Not an ornament.

Final Words

Suzy Miller is now somewhere in her mid-seventies. She’s been off the grid, more or less, for four decades. Her daughter grows up not-famous, which seems like the gift Suzy chose very deliberately to give. No memoir. No documentary. No cash-in interview about what Richard Burton was really like at 3am in Gstaad.

Maybe she doesn’t owe us any of that. Maybe being sold for a million dollars and written about as an “expense account” and then reduced to a supporting role in a Ron Howard film is exactly the right amount of public attention she was ever interested in having.

Or maybe the real story is still sitting somewhere, unwritten, in whatever house she’s living in — in Ibiza, or Virginia, or wherever the quiet years have taken her.

Either way, it’s hers.

FAQs

1. Who is Suzy Miller?

A British model, dancer, and actress born around 1949 in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), best known for her marriages to Formula One champion James Hunt and actor Richard Burton.

2. Did Richard Burton actually pay James Hunt a million dollars for Suzy Miller?

According to multiple biographies including Shunt by Tom Rubython, yes — Burton reportedly paid approximately $1 million as part of the divorce settlement between Hunt and Miller, facilitating the split and their subsequent marriage.

3. Why did Suzy Miller really get involved with Richard Burton?

She later admitted that part of her initial motivation was to make James Hunt jealous. It’s unclear if that remained the case as the friendship grew.

4. Did Suzy Miller and Richard Burton have children?

No verified children from either the Hunt or Burton marriages. She reportedly has one daughter from later in life, details kept private.

5. Why was she jealous of Elizabeth Taylor during her marriage to Burton?

Burton never emotionally moved on from Taylor. There are accounts of Suzy having Taylor’s name removed from theater programs at Burton’s stage productions to avoid the discomfort of seeing it.

6. What happened after she and Burton divorced?

She married American millionaire Jack Cawood in 1985 and relocated to the United States, largely disappearing from public view.

7. Who played Suzy Miller in the movie Rush?

Olivia Wilde, in Ron Howard’s 2013 biographical sports film. Wilde described Suzy as having been “traded” in the whole Hunt-Burton arrangement.

8. Did Suzy Miller have an acting career?

Small but real — she appeared in Twenty Nine (1969) and The Wild Geese (1978), the latter alongside Richard Burton while still married to him.

9. Why isn’t Suzy Miller more famous on her own terms?

Because the history of the era consistently treated women adjacent to famous men as accessories rather than subjects. Her own dance and choreography work, her life before and after the marriages — nearly undocumented.

10. Where is Suzy Miller now?

The last credible report from 2013 placed her in Ibiza. She has maintained essentially no public profile since the mid-1980s.

11. What does the “Haiti divorce” mean?

In June 1976, both Suzy & James Hunt and Richard Burton & Elizabeth Taylor had their divorce hearings in Port-au-Prince, Haiti — where foreign nationals could obtain a divorce in a single day. Both couples processed their divorces simultaneously, on the same island.

12. Was Suzy Miller happy?

Not a question the sources ever bothered to ask. Which is part of the problem.

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