Brief Encounter is a 1974 British-Italian television film starring Richard Burton and Sophia Loren, adapted from the play Still Life by Noël Coward. The plot of the film is about two strangers, each married to another, who meet in a railway station and find themselves in a brief but intense affair. The material was previously the basis for the David Lean film Brief Encounter (1945). Burton was cast at the last moment, after Robert Shaw dropped out.