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Colin Farrell has revealed on the Ellen DeGeneres talkshow that he had a "romantic relationship" with Elizabeth Taylor in the final years of her life.

Farrell met Taylor when his son was being born, when she was being treated in the same hospital. After bumping into her manager, he asked for his regards to be passed on, and later asked his publicist to send her some flowers – only to find that Taylor had just sent him some orchids.

This courtship led to the pair meeting and "a year and a half or two years of what was a really cool... it feels like in my head - not her, I'm projecting - the last romantic relationship I had, which was never consummated," Farrell told DeGeneres. "I just adored her... She was a spectacular, spectacular woman."

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He added that the pair would talk late into the night over the phone when each was unable to sleep. Taylor meanwhile was a vocal admirer of Farrell, telling Kim Kardashian in a 2011 interview that "I love Johnny Depp, and I love Colin Farrell – both brilliant, nuanced actors with great range." She passed away that year.

Farrell read the Gerard Manley Hopkins poem The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo at Taylor's funeral, and spoke later in 2011 about how much he missed her.

While it seems like a warm friendship rather than an fully-fledged fling, Farrell has had his eye drawn to older women before. Dame Eileen Atkins was propositioned by the actor when he was 28 and she was 69, as the pair worked on the film Ask The Dust. Although she declined his advances, she later said "the offer did me the world of good".

• Elizabeth Taylor remembered

• Elizabeth Taylor dies aged 79

• Colin Farrell interviewed in 2012