Elizabeth Taylor's career and biography

She has been called the most beautiful woman in history. But it's not the beauty that made her famous. For nearly 70 years, from the late 40's of the 20th century until her death, the press all over the world continuously chronicled every aspect of Taylor’s very public private life, which was filled with melodrama, romantic intrigue, success and scandal, great achievements and great tragedies. Her eight marriages, medical crises, and the universal headline news, all but eclipsed the fact that Elizabeth Taylor was one of the most awarded and popular actresses in film history. She twice won the Best Actress Academy Award, for “Butterfield 8” (1960) and “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” (1966), respectively. The American Film Institute ranked the five-time Oscar nominee as the seventh on its list of the “25 greatest women screen legends” in 1999. The world remembers her big blockbuster “Cleopatra” (1963) and all her indelible performances in such classics as “National Velvet” (1944), “A Place in the Sun” (1951), “Giant” (1956), “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” (1958), Suddenly, Last Summer (1959) or "The Taming Of The Shrew (1967). 

Ironically, the raven-haired, violet-eyed screen siren elicited more pity than awe when she entered the world on Feb. 27, 1932. The second child of Francis and Sara Taylor, Americans living in London, the infant Elizabeth Rosemond Taylor suffered from hypertrichosis, which left her tiny body completely covered in soft black hair. Her parents' worries vanished after a few weeks, when the unsightly hair fell away, revealing their newborn daughter’s exquisite beauty. While Francis Taylor managed his uncle’s art gallery, Sara lavished attention on Elizabeth, whom she simultaneously indulged and controlled. Both Elizabeth and her older brother Howard, three years her senior, were raised in privilege. Every whim was indulged, but at the same time, Sara carefully groomed Elizabeth to carry herself with poise, particularly after the four-year-old girl captivated the audience with her solo performance during a dance recital. A former actress with a handful of 1920s-era stage roles to her credit, Sara immediately recognized her daughter’s nascent star quality.

In 1941, two years after the Taylors left London to settle in Los Angeles, Sara Taylor got a six-month contract for nine year-old Elizabeth at Universal Pictures and Elizabeth, a shy and sheltered little girl, made her screen debut in a short film, “There’s One Born Every Minute” (1942) co-starring Carl “Alfalfa” Switzer. Taylor’s performance as a bratty little girl failed to impress Universal’s casting director Dan Kelly, who complained that Taylor’s “eyes are too old. She doesn’t have the face of a kid.”

Dismissed by Universal, Taylor soon rebounded with an MGM contract, thanks to her father’s friendship with producer Sam Marx. In the midst of shooting “Lassie Come Home” (1943), starring Roddy McDowall and Donald Crisp, Marx was desperately looking for a young girl to play the small but pivotal role of Priscilla, the granddaughter of the rich Duke of Yorkshire. Despite her inexperience – she had no formal training, just her mother’s coaching – Taylor nevertheless beat out four other actresses for the part. Still, the resulting film did little to boost her profile on the MGM lot; in fact, the studio promptly loaned her out to 20th Century Fox for a brief role in “Jane Eyre” (1944), in which she stole the show.

Determined to play the coveted role of Velvet Brown, the horseback riding heroine of “National Velvet”, the 11 year old Taylor launched a major charm offensive against Lucille Ryman Carroll, the head of MGM’s talent department. She won the demanding role, which required her to play an English country girl masquerading as a boy to ride her beloved horse in the Grand National Steeplechase. Under Clarence Brown’s sensitive direction, Taylor gave a spirited performance in this heartwarming adaptation of Enid Bagnold’s novel, co-starring Mickey Rooney, Anne Revere, and another fresh-faced newcomer, Angela Lansbury.

Thanks to “National Velvet” (1944), Taylor finally became a bona-fide movie star. Unlike many of her classmates at the studio’s "little red schoolhouse", she never went through a career-ending “awkward stage”. The ethereally lovely adolescent blossomed into a drop-dead gorgeous ingénue, equally believable playing teenagers and older women alike. In 1949 she played Amy March in MGM’s glossy remake of “Little Women”. The same year the studio cast the 17-year-old Elizabeth Taylor as Robert Taylor’s wife in the espionage thriller, “Conspirator”. She acquitted herself nicely in both roles, but MGM was still out as to whether Taylor was an actress of depth, rather than simply a glamorous leading lady...

If not for director George Stevens, Taylor might have continued providing little more than eye candy in MGM films, like the “Father of the Bride” (1950), starring Spencer Tracy. Stevens, however, saw in Taylor the vulnerability, passionate abandon, and inner strength to play Angela Vickers, the ravishing socialite heroine of “A Place in the Sun” (1951), his adaptation of Theodore Dreiser’s classic novel, "An American Tragedy". Not since “National Velvet,” had she tackled such a demanding role – or given such a multi-dimensional performance as Taylor did here, as the rich girlfriend of a poor but ambitious factory worker, so desperate to get ahead that he commits murder. Challenged by Stevens and co-stars Montgomery Clift and Shelley Winters, Taylor erased any lingering doubts that she had the dramatic chops to tackle difficult roles. 

A critical and commercial smash, nominated for nine Academy Awards, including Best Picture, “A Place in the Sun” should have brought Taylor in the position to get dramatic parts from MGM. However, the films she made over the next five years were box office hits, but mediocre at best. During this time, Taylor was generating more ink for her marriages than for her performances in such middling star vehicles as “The Girl Who Had Everything” (1953). She married hotel magnate Nicky Hilton (who she later claimed physically abused her), followed closely by British actor Michael Wilding (who would father two of her three children). Still, one film from that era survived and passed the test of time:“The Last Time I Saw Paris” (1954), directed by Richard Brooks.

Once again, George Stevens effectively came to Taylor’s professional rescue with another great role: the female lead in his big-budget adaptation of Edna Ferber’s Texas family saga, “Giant” (1956), co-starring Rock Hudson and James Dean. To play Leslie Benedict, a headstrong yet compassionate Virginia belle married to wealthy Texas cattle rancher Jordan “Bick” Benedict (Hudson), Taylor had to age 30 years convincingly. She gave an excellent performance that held up beautifully. Yet while her male co-stars both received Academy Award nominations for Best Actor – Dean posthumously – Taylor’s finely modulated performance in “Giant” was overlooked by the Motion Picture Academy. But Taylor received something more – a chance to form on location a close friendship with James Dean (who died while shooting "Giant") and Rock Hudson (one of several gay best friends, the others being Monty Clift and fellow child star, Roddy McDowall).

A year later, she would finally receive the first of her five Academy Award nominations as Best Actress, for “Raintree County” (1957). MGM’s expensive adaptation cast Taylor as Susanna Drake, a mentally unstable New Orleans beauty married to an idealistic Midwesterner (Montgomery Clift) fighting for the Union. Taylor’s histrionic performance was the only spark in this overblown film, directed by Edward Dmytryk. A near-fatal car accident during the film’s production – which occurred after leaving Taylor’s home in the Hollywood Hills – had left Montgomery Clift's formerly handsome face disfigured, so there was no consistency as to how he photographed throughout “Raintree County”. Since the accident occurred not far from the Taylor home, not only did she race to Clift's side and keep him from choking to death by removing two of his teeth which had become lodged in his throat, she would nurse him back to health and provide as much nurturing as the tortured actor would allow.

Taylor’s next movie featured one of her very best performances. Unfortunately, as was becoming the norm in her life – career highlights came in tandem with personal tragedies. Having divorced Wilding in 1957 and that same year married husband #3 – film producer Mike Todd – Taylor was, for the first time in her married life, blissfully happy with a man completely in love with her. She had recently given birth to their daughter, Elizabeth “Liza” Todd and she had a flu when Todd took a flight trip she had intended to accompany him on. Unfortunately the showman’s private plane, “the Lucky Liz” crashed on March 22, 1958. Taylor was so grief stricken, she had to be sedated upon hearing the news. Still grieving the loss of her larger-than-life showman husband, she nonetheless plunged into the role of Maggie in Richard Brooks’ powerful adaptation of Tennessee Williams’ Broadway smash, “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” (1958). The role fit Taylor’s screen persona as tightly as the slip she wears in many scenes: Maggie is tempestuous yet tender; a vulnerable woman who refuses to be an emotional doormat. The scenes between Taylor and co-star Paul Newman crackled with sexual electricity. The film would bring Taylor her second Academy Award nomination. But at the same time she experienced this accolade, she found herself again making news for other...reasons.

While grieving the loss of Todd throughout 1958, Taylor had grown extremely close to his best friend, crooner Eddie Fisher - who had a wife... The wife in question, just happened to be musical screen star, Debbie Reynolds. Together with Fisher, the couple had been “America’s Sweethearts” for several years – even double-dating with Todd and Taylor on occasion. Unfortunately, Taylor and Fisher fell in love; more likely a shared grief instead – breaking up the “perfect marriage” of Fisher and Reynolds. It did not bode well for either Fisher and Taylor that Reynolds was often photographed alone, with her two children, Carrie and Todd – securing the sympathy vote as the wronged woman. For the first time in her life, Taylor experienced a radical shift in public opinion: from sympathy at the loss of Todd, to outright rancor and disgust for stealing another woman’s husband. Indeed, the "Liz - Eddie - Debbie" dust-up ended up being the biggest Hollywood scandal of the 1950s. Taylor’s career would eventually recover, but Fisher’s fans would prove less forgiving – leading to a lifelong addiction to pills and booze for the aging singer.

Despite the tabloid buzz of real life “jezebel”, Elizabeth Taylor would return to the Southern Gothic milieu of Tennessee Williams for her next film, “Suddenly, Last Summer” (1959), co-starring Katharine Hepburn and Montgomery Clift. A lurid psychodrama based on Williams’ one-act play Garden District, “Suddenly, Last Summer” was the third and final film starring Taylor and Clift, as he was then spiraling downward into alcoholism and drug addiction. Given the well-documented tensions on the set, where Taylor and Hepburn frequently quarreled with director Joseph L. Mankiewicz and producer Sam Spiegel, it was a wonder that “Suddenly, Last Summer” ever got completed, much less turned out to be such a compelling film. As for Taylor, her intense performance as Catherine Holly, an emotionally traumatized young woman scheduled to be lobotomized, earned her a third Academy Award nomination.

Now married to Fisher, Taylor’s part in the love triangle three years prior would be forgiven after she nearly died from pneumonia in 1961. Her fight to survive not only made for great copy, it also earned Taylor the Motion Picture Academy’s “sympathy vote” for her role as a Manhattan call girl in “BUtterfield 8” (1960). Even Debbie Reynolds said: "Hell, even I voted for her!". Taylor herself had no illusions about why she won the 1960 Best Actress Academy Award for her solid remarkable performance in a film she loathed. Everyone else seemed to know the same: fellow nominee Shirley MacLaine (for “The Apartment”) reportedly exclaimed, “I lost to a tracheotomy!”

Oscar in hand, Taylor returned to work with a lucrative vengeance: for playing the title role in Fox’s mega-budgeted “Cleopatra” (1963), she became the first actor to receive a million dollar fee. Initially greenlit as a $2 million epic, shot in London by veteran Rouben Mamoulian, “Cleopatra” was dogged by costly delays from the start. Mamoulian exited the film, as did Taylor’s original co-stars Peter Finch and Stephen Boyd; they were replaced by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Rex Harrison, and Richard Burton, respectively. Playing Marc Antony to Taylor’s Queen of the Nile, the Welsh coal miner’s son with the sonorous voice and handsomely ravaged face embarked on a steamy affair with Taylor – often blatantly in front of photographers on vacation. Meanwhile, the budget for “Cleopatra” kept soaring as the production dragged on in Rome. When Mankiewicz finally screened his reported six-hour cut of the film for Fox executives, the budget for “Cleopatra” had topped $44 million (more than $300 million, adjusted for inflation). As for Taylor, she ultimately pocketed a cool $7 million paycheck for “Cleopatra” (approximately $48 million, adjusted for inflation)– and husband #5, once she and Burton divorced their respective spouses.

The blockbuster “Cleopatra” was the first of nine feature films starring the couple, soon known around the world as “Liz and Dick”. Many of their films were mediocre, like the romantic drama “The Sandpiper” (1965) or cult like “Boom!” (1968), an adaptation of Tennessee Williams’ "The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore". It seemed that Taylor and Burton were too busy living a life of glittery, drunken excess to focus on their film careers. They would marry not once, but twice – first in 1964; then in 1975. All told, only two of their films together withstood critical scrutiny: Franco Zefferelli’s opulent adaptation of Shakespeare’s “The Taming of the Shrew” (1967) and “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” (1966).

It was veteran screenwriter Ernest Lehman’s brainstorm to cast Taylor and Burton as Martha and George, the embattled couple playing alcohol-fueled head games with a young professor and his mousy wife, in Mike Nichols’ film version of Edward Albee’s Pulitzer Prize winning drama. Rumor had it that would not be much of a stretch for Burton and Taylor, a volatile couple whose boozy, top-volume arguments were already the stuff of tabloid legend. It was difficult to envision the beautiful, 34-year-old Taylor as the blowsy, foul-mouthed, and frankly middle-aged Martha, a part character actress Uta Hagen had played to unanimous acclaim on Broadway. Studio boss Jack Warner had reportedly wanted to cast either Bette Davis or Patricia Neal in the role, rather than Taylor. Whatever reservations critics had about Taylor’s casting evaporated, once she appeared onscreen, 25 pounds heavier and wearing a salt-and-pepper wig. Taylor gave a shattering performance in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” She deservedly won her second Best Actress Academy Award for Nichols’ film, which received 13 nominations, including Best Picture, Director, and Actor for Burton, who lost to Paul Scofield for “A Man for All Seasons” (1966).

“Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” marked the artistic peak of Taylor’s film career. She continued making films, most notably “The Taming of the Shrew” and John Huston’s haunting “Reflections of a Golden Eye” (1967), opposite Marlon Brando. Her big screen vehicles continued: "Secret Ceremony" (1968), “The Only Game in Town” (1970), “The Blue Bird” (1976), “The Mirror Crack’d” (1980). In 1994, she made her last feature film: Universal’s live-action, big-screen version of “The Flintstones”. Like many actresses of a certain age, Taylor found better roles on the small screen. She startled soap opera fans by making an appearance as the evil Helena Cassadine at Luke and Laura's much publicized 1981 wedding on the daytime drama, "General Hospital" (ABC, 1981). She and Carol Burnett redeemed the soapy, HBO made-for-television film, “Between Friends” (1983). And she returned to the works of Tennessee Williams for Nicholas Roeg’s NBC remake of “Sweet Bird of Youth” (1989), bravely playing an over-the-hill actress involved with a much younger gigolo (Mark Harmon). In 2001, she and Debbie Reynolds put the Eddie Fisher scandal behind them to join Shirley MacLaine and Joan Collins in the made-for-television comedy “These Old Broads” (ABC, 2001), written by Reynolds’ daughter, Carrie Fisher.

She has been nominated for a Tony Award for her performance in Austin Pendleton’s 1981 Broadway revival of Lillian Hellman’s “The Little Foxes”. She and Burton would work together one last time – in a Broadway revival of Noel Coward’s “Private Lives” in 1983, a year before his death – but acting had long since taken a back seat to Taylor’s AIDS activism (in the wake of best friend Rock Hudson’s 1985 death from the disease) and thriving perfume business – to say nothing of a continued succession of post-Burton husbands including Senator John Warner in 1976, and later – a construction worker she met in rehab, husband #7, Larry Fortensky, in 1991. All would end in divorce. Although frequently plagued by serious illness (and during the 1970s – a very public battle with her weight), Elizabeth Taylor never retreated from the public eye, despite its occasional cruel judgments. It was home to her; a place she had lived comfortably roughly since birth. As she herself once explained, filming "The Blue Bird" in Saint Petersburg: “I’ve been through it all, baby. I’m Mother Courage.”

Sadly, Elizabeth Taylor died on March, 23rd, 2011 at the age of 79. The media frenzy over her death was huge all over the world. True to her style, she was late to her own funeral ! It was the end of an era...