Elizabeth Taylor

• 1. Introduction

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  Elizabeth Taylor was born on the 27th of February 1932 in Hampstead Garden Suburb, northwest London, in a family home called Heathwood. She died on the 23rd of March 2011 at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. Between those two dates, she was married eight times to seven men, won two Academy Awards, became the first movie star to be paid $1 million for a single role, raised more than $270 million for HIV/AIDS research, and accumulated a jewelry collection that sold at auction after her death for over $156 million. Yet one of the most incisive observations ever made about her came not from a film critic but from a cultural writer at The Washington Post, who argued that she "became famous for being famous, setting a media template for later generations of entertainers, models, and all variety of semi-somebodies."

  How does someone who began as a child actress under the thumb of a studio system become something closer to a force of nature? What made Taylor so different from the stars who came before her, and why did her private life eclipse, in the public imagination, a film career of genuine distinction? And what drove a woman who by the 1980s had every reason to retreat into comfort to instead become one of the first celebrities to publicly fight the AIDS crisis? These are the questions this documentary sets out to answer.

• 2. Made in London, Remade in Hollywood

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  Francis Lenn Taylor and Sara Sothern were American citizens from Arkansas City, Kansas, who had moved to London in 1929 and opened an art gallery on Bond Street. Their daughter arrived into a social world that included artists Augustus John and Laura Knight, and politicians such as Colonel Victor Cazalet, who became Taylor's unofficial godfather. Cazalet was a Christian Scientist and a Zionist, and both commitments would leave lasting marks on his goddaughter.

  In early 1939, with war looming over Europe, US ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy personally urged Francis Taylor to take his family home. Sara and the children sailed first in April 1939 aboard the ocean liner SS Manhattan, staying initially with Taylor's maternal grandfather in Pasadena, California. The family eventually settled in Beverly Hills, where Taylor enrolled at Hawthorne School.

  It was her eyes that opened the door to Hollywood. They were blue to the point of appearing violet, rimmed by dark double eyelashes caused by a genetic mutation. People who saw her told Sara she ought to audition the child for films. Sara resisted at first; the outbreak of war made the idea feel more reasonable, as it closed off any return to England and raised the question of how an English family assimilates in Los Angeles. Francis Taylor's Beverly Hills gallery had already gained clients from the film industry, partly through the endorsement of gossip columnist Hedda Hopper. Through a client and a school friend's father, Taylor auditioned for both Universal Pictures and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in early 1941.

  Universal signed her first. The arrangement lasted barely a year before the studio's casting director dismissed her with a line that would haunt Taylor's early press clippings: "the kid has nothing... her eyes are too old, she doesn't have the face of a child." Biographer Alexander Walker noted that Taylor simply looked different from the child stars of the era, a category that then included Shirley Temple and Judy Garland. Taylor herself later said that she "used to frighten grown ups, because I was totally direct."

  The MGM opportunity came through an acquaintance of her father, producer Samuel Marx, who needed a child actress with an English accent for a small role in Lassie Come Home. After a three-month trial, she was given a standard seven-year contract in January 1943. The contract that would define, and confine, the next decade of her life had begun.

• 3. National Velvet and the Cost of Stardom

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  Taylor was cast in her first starring role at the age of 12, playing a girl who wants to ride in the all-male Grand National steeplechase in National Velvet. Since 1937, MGM had been looking for exactly the right actress, one with a British accent and genuine equestrian ability. Gene Tierney, twelve years older than Taylor, had been the leading candidate. White Cliffs of Dover director Clarence Brown pushed for Taylor after watching her work, confident she could handle a horse. There was one problem: at the time of casting, she was considered too short for the role. Filming was delayed several months so she could grow an inch or two, and during that interval she spent her time riding.

  National Velvet opened on Christmas 1944 and became a box-office success. Bosley Crowther of The New York Times wrote that "her whole manner in this picture is one of refreshing grace." James Agee of The Nation called her "rapturously beautiful... I hardly know or care whether she can act or not."

  But stardom extracted something in return. Taylor later said that her childhood ended the day she became a star. MGM began controlling every aspect of her life, scheduling her days between schoolwork and filming, and her evenings between dancing classes, singing classes, and rehearsals for the following day. The studio required her to wear braces to straighten her teeth, had two of her baby teeth pulled out, and proposed dyeing her hair, altering her eyebrows, and even changing her name to "Virginia." Taylor and her parents refused that last demand. They kept her eyebrows and her name. Everything else was negotiated on MGM's terms.

  Following the film's success, MGM rewarded her with a new seven-year contract paying $750 per week. It also published a book of her writings about a pet chipmunk, had paper dolls made in her image, and cast her in a minor role in the third Lassie film. By the time Taylor turned 15 in 1947, the studio was organizing photo shoots to construct a public image of a "normal" teenager. Life magazine called her "Hollywood's most accomplished junior actress." Time put her on its cover in 1949 and described her as "a jewel of great price, a true sapphire."

• 4. Sun and Shrew

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  A Place in the Sun, released in 1951 and directed by George Stevens, changed what critics expected from Taylor. Based on Theodore Dreiser's 1925 novel An American Tragedy, it cast her as a spoiled socialite caught between a poor factory worker played by Montgomery Clift and his pregnant girlfriend played by Shelley Winters. Stevens said he chose Taylor because she was "the only one... who could create this illusion" of being "not so much a real girl as the girl on the candy-box cover." Taylor later said it was the first film in which she had been asked to act, rather than simply be herself. The film grossed $3 million and Herb Golden of Variety wrote that her "histrionics are of a quality so far beyond anything she has done previously, that Stevens' skilled hands on the reins must be credited with a minor miracle."

  She kept trying to leave MGM. She resented the studio's control and many of its casting choices, including the historical epic Ivanhoe in 1952, in which she found her role as Rebecca too small and the story too superficial. She did not want to be cast in Beau Brummell in 1954 either, later saying it produced one of the worst performances of her career. When the studio cast her in Love Is Better Than Ever in 1952, biographer Alexander Walker suggested it was punishment for her divorce from Conrad Hilton, which had caused a public scandal.

  The decisive creative turning point came with Giant in 1956, which Taylor actively lobbied director George Stevens to win. The film, an epic about a Texas ranching dynasty, co-starred Rock Hudson and James Dean. Filming in Marfa, Texas was difficult; Stevens deliberately tried to break Taylor's will to make her easier to direct, and she was frequently ill. Dean died in a car accident only days after completing his scenes, and Taylor still had to film reaction shots to their joint scenes while grieving. When Giant was released, Variety called her performance "surprisingly clever" and The Manchester Guardian described it as "an astonishing revelation of unsuspected gifts."

  By 1966, working for the first time with theatre director Mike Nichols on Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Taylor gave what critics across the board judged the finest performance of her career. To play the 50-year-old Martha, she gained weight, wore a wig, and used makeup to make herself look older and tired. Nichols, who had no previous film experience, insisted on thoroughly rehearsing the play before filming began. Stanley Kauffmann of The New York Times stated she "does the best work of her career, sustained and urgent." Variety wrote that her characterization was "at once sensual, spiteful, cynical, pitiable, loathsome, lustful, and tender." The film won her a second Academy Award, along with BAFTA and National Board of Review honors.

• 5. Cleopatra and the Birth of Celebrity

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  The production of Cleopatra, which finally reached cinemas in 1963, was so troubled that it became a story in its own right. Filming began in England in 1960 and had to be halted repeatedly because of bad weather and Taylor's illness. In March 1961, she developed near-fatal pneumonia that required a tracheotomy; one news agency incorrectly reported that she had died. Once she recovered, Fox discarded all the filmed material, relocated the production to Rome, replaced the director with Joseph Mankiewicz, and replaced the actor playing Mark Antony with Richard Burton. Filming was finally completed in July 1962. The final cost came to $62 million, making it the most expensive film produced up to that point.

  Taylor had negotiated a landmark deal: $1 million for the role, plus 10% of the film's gross profits, plus the right to shoot in Todd-AO, a widescreen format whose rights she had inherited from her third husband, Mike Todd. She was the first movie star paid $1 million for a single role.

  Cleopatra was the biggest box-office success in the United States in 1963, grossing $15.7 million at the domestic box office. But its production costs were so vast that it nearly drove Fox to bankruptcy anyway, and the studio publicly blamed Taylor for its troubles. The reviews were mixed to negative, with critics finding her overweight and her voice too thin. Taylor herself later called it a "low point" in her career.

  What the film actually produced was something more consequential than any review: a new kind of celebrity. Taylor's affair with Burton while both were married to other people was captured by a paparazzi photograph on a yacht near Ischia. Sociologist Ellis Cashmore has argued that the publication of that photograph was a "turning point" in celebrity culture, beginning an era in which it became nearly impossible for famous people to keep their private lives separate from their public images. The Vatican condemned Taylor and Burton for "erotic vagrancy." Members of the US Congress called for barring them from re-entering the country. Life magazine called Cleopatra "the Most Talked About Movie Ever Made." None of that was about the film.

• 6. Liz and Dick

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  Taylor and Burton were married for the first time on the 15th of March 1964 in a private ceremony at the Ritz-Carlton Montreal, ten days after her divorce from Eddie Fisher was finalized in Puerto Vallarta. They starred together in eleven films and lived, as Burton once described it, in a way that "generated more business activity than one of the smaller African nations." Together they earned a combined $88 million over the following decade.

  Biographer Alexander Walker compared their films to "illustrated gossip columns," as their screen roles often mirrored their public personae. The Sandpiper in 1965, about an illicit love affair in Big Sur, grossed $14 million despite largely negative reviews. The Taming of the Shrew in 1967, which they co-produced with Franco Zeffirelli directing, grossed $12 million. Zeffirelli later observed that Taylor's lack of any previous Shakespeare experience made her performance interesting, since she "invented the part from scratch."

  Their joint project in Oxford in 1966, Doctor Faustus, saw Taylor play Helen of Troy in her first stage role. The part required no speaking, which the critical response to the subsequent film version suggested may have been prudent, as it grossed only $600,000.

  They divorced in June 1974, reconciled, and remarried in Kasane, Botswana, on the 10th of October 1975. The second marriage lasted less than a year. Taylor later said of Burton: "After Richard, the men in my life were just there to hold the coat, to open the door. All the men after Richard were really just company."

• 7. White Diamonds and AIDS

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  Taylor began her HIV/AIDS philanthropy in 1984, hosting the first AIDS fundraiser to benefit the AIDS Project Los Angeles. In August 1985, she and Michael Gottlieb founded the National AIDS Research Foundation after her friend and former co-star Rock Hudson announced he was dying of the disease. The following month, that foundation merged with Mathilde Krim's organization to form the American Foundation for AIDS Research, known as amfAR.

  She testified before the Senate and House for the Ryan White Care Act in 1986, 1990, and 1992. In 1987, she persuaded President Ronald Reagan to acknowledge AIDS publicly for the first time in a speech. She publicly criticized both President George H. W. Bush and President Bill Clinton for insufficient action. She founded the Elizabeth Taylor Medical Center to provide free HIV/AIDS testing and care at the Whitman-Walker Clinic in Washington, DC, and established the Elizabeth Taylor Endowment Fund at the UCLA Clinical AIDS Research and Education Center. In 1991, she founded the Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation, paying its overhead costs herself.

  She explained her motivation in an interview with Vanity Fair: "I decided that with my name, I could open certain doors, that I was a commodity in myself... I could take the fame I'd resented and tried to get away from for so many years... and use it to do some good. I wanted to retire, but the tabloids wouldn't let me. So, I thought: If you're going to screw me over, I'll use you."

  The money she raised for the cause over her lifetime exceeded $270 million. The awards she received for the work included the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award in 1993, the Screen Actors Guild Lifetime Achievement Award for Humanitarian Service in 1997, the GLAAD Vanguard Award in 2000, and the Presidential Citizens Medal in 2001.

  Her final public performance took place in 2007, when she performed the play Love Letters at an AIDS benefit at Paramount Studios alongside James Earl Jones. Her estate has continued funding the Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation after her death, donating 25% of royalties from the use of her image and likeness to the foundation.

• 8. The Shape of a Legacy

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  Five of Taylor's films have been preserved in the National Film Registry: Lassie Come Home, National Velvet, A Place in the Sun, Giant, and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? The American Film Institute ranked her seventh on its list of the greatest female screen legends in 1999.

  Yet the reputation has always been contested. Film historian Jeanine Basinger argued that "No actress ever had a more difficult job in getting critics to accept her onscreen as someone other than Elizabeth Taylor... Her persona ate her alive." The counter-case was made by Mel Gussow of The New York Times, who stated that "the range of Taylor's acting was surprisingly wide", and by film critic Peter Bradshaw, who called her "a shrewd, intelligent, intuitive acting presence in her later years." David Thomson put it most bluntly: "she had the range, nerve, and instinct that only Bette Davis had had before."

  Scholars have debated what her career signified for women. Camille Paglia described her as a "pre-feminist woman" who "wields the sexual power that feminism cannot explain." Cultural critic M.G. Lord called her an "accidental feminist" whose films "introduced a broad audience to feminist ideas" even as she never identified as one.

  After her death, her jewelry collection alone sold at Christie's for a record-breaking $156.8 million, with her clothes and accessories fetching a further $5.5 million. The proceeds went to the Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation. Her estate's management was established before her death, with three trustees she selected herself overseeing the Elizabeth Taylor Archive and maintaining her philanthropic commitments. In 2022, House of Taylor released a ten-part podcast series narrated by Katy Perry. That same December, the first biography authorized by the estate was published. A BBC docuseries, given the working title Elizabeth Taylor: Rebel Superstar, was announced in 2024. The machinery of her fame, which she spent a lifetime resenting and then weaponizing, shows no sign of stopping.