How award winning actress Liz Taylor forged an independent life
A new documentary reveals how Elizabeth Taylor faced the perils that come with fame.
With her dark- blue eyes rimmed by double eyelashes, Elizabeth Taylor was a beauty from an early age as evidenced by films such as National Velvet, released when she was 12, in 1944.
She experienced sudden fame, but she was untrained and struggled to be taken seriously as an actor for many years. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences finally acknowledged her instinctive natural talent by awarding her Best Actress Oscars for Butterfield 8 in 1961 and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in 1967.
Seventy hours of taped recordings of Taylor’s 1964 conversations with journalist Richard Meryman (who had already written a book about Marilyn Monroe and ultimately wrote a book about Taylor) were recently unearthed by his widow. Then, American film and television director Nanette Burstein decided to make a documentary focusing on them, as well as on other unseen visual material provided by Taylor’s estate and a 1985 set of interviews recorded by Dominick Dunne, among others.
In Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes, Burstein aims for the London-born Taylor to tell her own story as much as possible, in her unmistakeable British-inflected voice. The result is a riveting story of a trailblazer who opened up the possibilities for other women and who ultimately championed the victims of AIDS.
The film had its world premiere in Cannes Classics at the Cannes Film Festival in May, and is about to be available to stream in Australia.
“I think what’s special about this film is you have this woman who’s a lot of things for a lot of people,” Burstein said in Cannes.
“She’s able to share what she thinks about different pivotal moments of her life, mainly at the height of her career in the ’60s and then later in the ’80s, when she’s having a different chapter of her life.”
Asked whether Taylor was a woman ahead of her time, Burstein said: “She played strong-willed, edgy characters and did not shy away from controversial roles. She negotiated impressive salaries and was the first man or woman to get a million dollars for a movie, for 1963’s Cleopatra. Today, actresses always make less than men, though recently there’s been attention paid to that”.
“Back then she was like, ‘No, I want this’. I made a film about producer Robert Evans (Rosemary’s Baby, Love Story, The Godfather, Chinatown) called The Kid Stays in the Picture and he said something to me that Elizabeth did, and I’ve tried to do in my life. He said, ‘Never to negotiate a deal unless you’re willing to walk away from it’. Elizabeth didn’t really want to make Cleopatra and insisted they pay her a million dollars, and when they agreed she did it.”
The documentary is probably at its best during this period, when Taylor met Richard Burton and the pair were constantly followed by the media. Burton had been in the second Rome casting of Cleopatra, as was Taylor’s close friend and her first co-star in 1943’s Lassie Come Home, Roddy McDowall, who also figures in the recordings. Cleopatra had been shut down in London because of flooding – and then Taylor became gravely ill with pneumonia.
“I was 18 hours on the operating table and four times was called dead and stopped breathing,” she explains. She says her illness, which made huge headlines, won her the Oscar for Butterfield 8, a film she didn’t like: “Butterfield 8 was my fourth nomination in a row and I won the award for my tracheotomy”.
Perennially strong-willed, Burstein notes that “she not only had pneumonia, but she struggled with chronic back pain ever since she had a horseback riding accident when she was filming National Velvet”.
“That started her taking pills and then sleeping pills and later her alcohol consumption increased. You think that actors would not have social anxiety, but she [did], so she would drink to go out and then of course getting involved with Richard Burton, she drank. He was a raging alcoholic, so that really increased it tremendously,” Burstein says.
Her anxiety stemmed from feelings of insecurity, particularly in her early years.
“She was worried, rightfully so, given her public image,” Burstein says.
“She was considered more of a sex symbol/movie star rather than a gifted actress, but she was a gifted actress, and she was never fully appreciated for that, mainly because she was so hot and that got in the way in that time period. So she did roles like Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, when she literally made herself look much older and fatter. She wanted to embrace her acting abilities.
“She also was the beginning of modern celebrity and the level of paparazzi, which started with her in Rome, and was on par with Princess Diana or Taylor Swift today, where your life is so invaded. And not only that, but your reputation is tarnished. You know, she was slut shamed and considered a homewrecker.
“She was judged in a way that men would never be judged. And she then realised that all of this negativity about who she was, because of her fame, she could actually use to change what most mattered to her, which was the AIDS crisis.
“All of her best friends were closeted gay guys in Hollywood (McDowall, Rock Hudson, Montgomery Clift) but they were not closeted to her. And she was astonished that no one was speaking up for them. You know, Ronald Reagan wouldn’t even utter the word AIDS. And he was a friend of Taylor’s, by the way.”
Taylor, who died from heart failure in 2011 at 79, wasn’t healthy in her later years and had contracted pneumonia again in 1990 and 2000. But the film doesn’t dwell on that – and there’s no mention of her friendship with Michael Jackson. Instead it concentrates on her earlier life, which she talks about on the Meryman recordings.
“Our film is really about the encapsulation of the perils of fame versus how she then changed it,” Burstein says.
“She grew up having to be dependent on people … in this kind of nanny culture, because she grew up in the studio system. She didn’t go off to school on her own, she always had to have a nanny in tow or her mother. She was chaperoned her entire life until she got married at 18.”
To escape the strictures, Taylor married Hilton heir, Conrad Hilton Jr, and in the film says she was a virgin at the time. At the wedding reception she had her first champagne and became “more and more petrified because I didn’t know what was coming”. Initially she locked herself in the bathroom. It took three days for the marriage to be consummated. It barely lasted eight months.
“I made tremendous errors I think, trying to rush things, trying to force things. I mean, there’s nothing to be said about my first marriage. I don’t want to talk about Nick Hilton, about his kicking me in the stomach and causing a miscarriage,” she says.
Then she married Michael Wilding Jr, 20 years her senior, who she admits was a father figure who “represented tranquillity, maturity, all the things I needed”.
Next up was producer Mike Todd, 22 years older, who she says was the love of her life.
“With Mike, I learned to enjoy life,” she says. He also bought her a lot of expensive jewellery.
“It was the first time I was happy; I had never been that happy. He was too good to be true.”
Taylor was devastated when Todd was killed in a plane crash inn 1958 – she hadn’t accompanied him as she had a cold.
She then married singer Eddie Fisher, Todd’s best friend, breaking up his marriage to her good friend, Debbie Reynolds. She says she never loved Fisher but she “kept Mike alive” by being with him. Taylor famously married Burton twice, then came John Warner and Larry Fortensky. In all there were eight marriages.
“She just married, married, married, married, married, without any break,” Burstein notes.
“So suddenly, she realised after going through rehab and coming into her own that she could be single. She could be this independent person. So that was an important part of the story as well.”
Available from Sunday, August 4 on BINGE and Hubbl
Clinton in Burstein’s lens
Nanette Burstein’s other credits include a 2020 documentary series about Hillary Clinton, who ran for the US presidency in 2016 and is a former first lady.
“I was a young woman when she became the First Lady (1993). She was a new kind of First Lady that I dug and she was inspiring to me,” Burstein says.
“I wasn’t an acolyte, but I voted for her. I wanted a woman to be president of the United States and I thought she was highly qualified.
“I had creative control with the film and told her very honestly, ‘I am going to include your flaws. You’ve been in many controversies, and you are the most hated and the most beloved woman in equal measure. And I’m going to do something really fair. I’m not going to defame you’. I wouldn’t take on the project if I despised her.
“She’s so important for the arc of the women’s movement and the history of partisan politics.”
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