“Elizabeth doesn’t claim to be the most versatile actress, she’s not a Meryl Streep, but she invests her roles with passion. She makes them more exciting than they appear on paper or might be through another actress.”
—Robert Wagner, friend and costar (There Must Be a Pony)
“As a child star she was decorative and sometimes intense. As an adult star she cannot help dominating every scene and every performer. She is like the eye at the center of the storm—and she is also the storm.” —French actress Marion Cotillard
“When you look like Elizabeth Taylor you know movie stardom is in store. Not to mention her above-it-all demeanor. Others of us had to struggle to be taken seriously as movie actors and stars. Nature just slotted her into that category.”
—Sally Field
“In her movies she’s often breaking the rules. Taylor’s characters, like her, aren’t passive. They’re not content. They want something else. They want more.”
—fashion designer Isaac Mizrahi
“I titled my book about Elizabeth Taylor The Accidental Feminist because my thesis is that she and her screen characters raised our consciousness but we were too distracted by her beauty to notice.” —cultural historian M. G. Lord
“People today can just watch Liz Taylor’s films and be entertained or moved and judge her as an actor. During her heyday, much of the public didn’t or wouldn’t watch her films objectively . . . some were boycotting her films or watching and judging her as this scandalous, spoiled woman.”
—Betty White
“Her life and image interfered with the perception of what she delivered as a performer.”
—Maggie Gyllenhaal
“Cleopatra wanted to rule her world, an impossible dream. Martha [in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?] wanted a perfect marriage—there’s no such thing. Et cetera and so forth. It’s riveting to watch Elizabeth want. Most of her characters cannot make their dreams come true, but oh, how Elizabeth makes them try.”
—friend and costar Laurence Harvey (Butterfield 8 and Night Watch)
“Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is usually cited as the film most responsible for ending unrealistic Hollywood screen censorship. The words in it made it adults-only viewing in 1966 but that’s how people talked, and it’s totally tame by today’s foul-mouthed standards.” —Australian actor Hugh Jackman
“We had no nudity, just off-screen adultery. There was language, but nothing, uh, scorching. But what Elizabeth Taylor said and did on-screen, that just . . . it simply . . . it blew away the hypocrisy and censorship of the movie ratings system.”
—Woolf costar and Oscar-winner Sandy Dennis
“Elizabeth Taylor is not the most beautiful actress, which that would be an opinion and what does it matter? She is one of the most interesting actors or actresses. That matters.”
—French actress Isabelle Huppert
“She is one of very few stars who regardless of a given film’s quality, it’s worth watching for her. When she first comes on the screen, it’s what you’ve been waiting for. She holds your attention, quietly—until she breaks out emotionally. If it’s a lousy movie and Elizabeth is in it from the first scene, you only gradually notice that it’s a lousy movie.”
—Robert Vaughn (The Man from U.N.C.L.E.)
“Ironically, her first Oscar was for a film she abhorred [Butterfield 8], enacting a high-class call girl. She tried everything to avoid doing it, but she owed MGM one more project before she was contractually free of them. After completing it she publicly declared, ‘This picture stinks.’ Most of the critics agreed. Her peers handed her an Oscar for it. In reality it was for her [previously Oscar-nominated] work in Suddenly, Last Summer and because she nearly died after completing Butterfield 8. Nor did it hurt that her character in the film died.” —Richard Burton
“I lost to a goddamn tracheotomy!”
—simultaneously Oscar-nominated Shirley MacLaine
“Taylor took lots of time off when Mike Todd produced and promoted Around the World in Eighty Days. He wanted to make a great event of a movie. It was based on Jules Verne’s novel and had dozens of big stars in tiny roles. The leads were Britisher David Niven, Mexican Cantinflas, and Shirley MacLaine as a Hindu princess. It was a great hit and won the Oscar for Best Picture of 1956.” —writer Boyd McDonald
“In the 1950s Mike Todd planned a movie about the maestro Arturo Toscanini. It came to nothing, but Todd, a huckster and a vulgarian, was always chasing class and validation. Elizabeth Taylor met Toscanini in the ’50s . . . three decades later she had a role in Young Toscanini as a diva—a soprano. While dubbed, she ‘performed’ an aria from the opera Aida. When Elizabeth first heard the name, she asked, ‘Who’s Aida?’”
—actor Ron Vawter (Silence of the Lambs)
“Like Howard Hughes, Todd wanted to be an A-list moviemaker . . . neither had the prerequisites to direct, they were deal-makers. . . . Elizabeth was never considered to star [in Around the World in Eighty Days]. Todd wanted a just-camp-enough actress—pretty but not beautiful, fey but not comical. . . . When Shirley MacLaine auditioned I saw the campy quality and told Mike and he hired her.”
—Dick Hanley, Mike Todd’s executive secretary
“Mike inherited secretary Dick Hanley from Louis B. Mayer, who sacked him after more than ten years of faithful service. When Mike died, Elizabeth made him her personal secretary. Dick became her right arm. He was gay, so there was no funny business . . . because the moment the press saw a man next to Elizabeth they automatically assumed an affair or cheating.” —Eddie Fisher
“By age eighteen Elizabeth had embarked on the marital career that would seriously compete with her movie career. Each fed the other, both fed her self-engorging fame.”
—actor George Sanders, once married to Zsa Zsa Gabor, who was once married to Conrad Hilton, whose son Nicholas was ET’s first husband
“Elizabeth Taylor’s mother had been thrilled to play Broadway but when she married in 1926 she retired. She and her husband Francis didn’t have a child until 1929, a son, and then a daughter in 1932. Sara’s greatest success was her daughter’s superstardom. . . . She left behind an unpublished manuscript titled Taylor-made Memories.”
—novelist Jackie Collins
“How talented is Elizabeth Taylor? The question is irrelevant. Movies are for audiences. They’re not talent shows.” —producer George Jessel
“Giant made Elizabeth a megastar and proved she could act. Every name actress in Hollywood had been campaigning for the role, which now seems so clearly tailor-made for her. . . . At one point, [director] George Stevens asked leading man Rock Hudson whom he preferred for his leading lady, Grace Kelly or Elizabeth Taylor? Having met Elizabeth through Monty Clift and knowing she was simpatico with gays, he replied, ‘Elizabeth Taylor,’ and Stevens said, ‘Fine, we’ll get Elizabeth.’”
—ET biographer Ellis Amburn
“Miss Taylor is a very good actress within her range. However, her range is not very wide.” —film critic Wyatt Cooper
“The voice limits her. It’s too high-pitched too often, with a tendency toward childish petulance or near-hysteria. . . . After Virginia Woolf she was increasingly cast as nagging wives and harpies. Her eyes went wider too often and her voice too often became a shrill demand or a challenge to the leading man. Repetition did her in.”
—ex–casting director Renée Valente
“After the ’60s star actresses weren’t big box office, with the possible exception of la Streisand. And you knew Liz wasn’t going to take supporting roles, not for some time. . . . She longed to do another Tennessee Williams character, to revive her old successes. Her mistake was doing it [Sweet Bird of Youth] as a TV movie—a real comedown—and doing it opposite not a Paul Newman, like in the motion picture, but one Mark Harmon. She recreated, not very well, a role brilliantly performed, to Oscar-nominated acclaim, by Geraldine Page in the movie. People still remembered her and the movie. Liz even tinted her hair red, a bad move because Page’s hair was red in the movie.”
—comedian and acting coach Charles Nelson Reilly
“The three phases of Liz, three stereotypes: the nice-girl child star, the voluptuous, strong-willed beauty, the shrew.”
—columnist James Bacon
“What ever possessed her to go on-screen in [Agatha Christie’s] The Mirror Crack’d looking, or weighing, as she did? The other female lead was Kim Novak—she looked svelte and fantastic. In one scene where they pose for photos Kim’s character tells her, ‘Chin up, sweetie. Both of them.’ That has to have hurt. Yet Liz had no one to blame but herself.” —Peg Bracken, author of The I Hate to Cook Cookbook
“Elizabeth and I reunited in The Mirror Crack’d. It was great fun. It was a joy to be working together again. Giant seemed like a lifetime ago. . . . What I did resent were movie critics’ barbs about her weight. It in no way detracted from the picture.”
—Rock Hudson
“Christie based her story on a real-life event. Movie star Gene Tierney, best known for Laura, was hugged and kissed at the Hollywood Canteen by a devoted female fan in the Armed Forces who should have remained in quarantine but instead passed on German measles to the pregnant actress. As a result, Tierney’s daughter was born mentally retarded . . . Tierney had subsequent mental problems and was temporarily institutionalized.” —columnist Radie Harris
“Sooner or later, most top female stars wind up playing themselves. Which is what’s happened in The Mirror Crack’d with Elizabeth Taylor, except that she turns out to be the murderess. Otherwise, she’s a faded, overfed American movie star playing a faded, overfed American movie star.”
—Christopher Price, BBC host and journalist
“Elizabeth is an instinctual actress. She hasn’t had lessons . . . she feels what is required in a scene. We discussed this on location in Russia, where the Method and all that nonsense originated. Elizabeth concurs that an actor is not supposed to try to be interesting, an actor is supposed to be convincing. Elizabeth is innately interesting and she is convincing. It’s the script that’s supposed to be interesting. A good script and good actors—a good movie. Bad script, good actors—a waste-of-time movie.”
—director George Cukor
“I think it in deplorable taste for Miss Taylor to portray a character clearly suggested by my former wife and a tragic, much-publicized situation in this film of a popular novel.”
—Gene Tierney’s ex-husband, designer Oleg Cassini
“In The Blue Bird, a 1976 remake of a Shirley Temple movie, Elizabeth played a mother, a witch, and some sort of good fairy. In smaller parts, Ava Gardner and Jane Fonda, but . . . such a mish-mash. It was the first Russian-American co-production and I believe the last. The sheer incompetence! The horrors of the Russian location . . . and it dragged on and on. Not for me, thank you—I had a distinctly minor role. Russian crews? The worst. Work ethic? No work ethic.” —Sir Robert Morley
“Dear old George Cukor pleased the Russians when he declared himself proud to be working in the same studio as Sergei Eisenstein—both directors were gay and Jewish. He had filmed Battleship Potemkin there in 1925. The interpreter beamed and said, ‘Yes, Mr. Cukor, and with much of the very same equipment we are using now.’”
—ET biographer Sheridan Morley (Robert’s son)
“Elizabeth didn’t settle for being labeled just sexy or a movie star. She had acting ambitions. . . . After her first time working with Montgomery Clift [in A Place in the Sun] she sought out acting challenges. His work had majorly impressed her, but her mother feared if she went to the Actors Studio for lessons she’d become a laughingstock, which later happened to Marilyn Monroe.”
—Susan Strasberg, daughter of Actors Studio head Lee Strasberg
“Monty privately tutored Elizabeth. . . . For the most part she stuck to what she knew. Sometimes you don’t want to tamper with what makes you tick. Too much self-knowledge inhibits some actors. If you’re not Method-oriented, as I am, it’s probably best just to go with the flow.” —Shelley Winters, winner of two supporting Oscars
“People always talked about how Taylor ‘ruined’ Burton’s career, how he went from a talent to a golden hack. Yet it worked both ways. As a team they worked for the biggest bucks, and after they stopped teaming—by public demand!—Taylor opted for prestigious writers and directors regardless how static the screenplay or inappropriate her part. By then she just wanted to stay on top.”
—James Card, film preservationist
“Elizabeth knew someday she would want and have to do theatre. In those days Broadway was the acme of acting. Almost every movie actor had some stage background. She didn’t. . . . Elizabeth eventually acted in two plays and formed her own theatrical company. I admire the determination and effort. After her awards for movie acting she could have but didn’t sit on her laurels.” —talk show host Virginia Graham
“My wife Anne [Jackson] said Elizabeth always admired and envied businesswomen like Lucille Ball or Gloria Swanson, who made a fortune designing clothes and dress patterns. . . . Elizabeth was very sensual and loved beautiful scents. She jumped in head first when it came time to create and promote her signature fragrance, Passion. . . . Ultimately, Elizabeth Taylor made more money from her line of perfumes than her acting career.”
—costar Eli Wallach (Winter Kills)
“In 1987, in the midst of her AIDS work, she licensed her name to the perfumes division of Chesebrough-Pond and debuted her own personal fragrance, Elizabeth Taylor’s Passion. Later there would be White Diamonds, Passion for Men, Violet Eyes . . . also The House of Taylor, her own jewelry company. Chesebrough-Pond invested over $10 million in Elizabeth’s perfume, and she crossed the country promoting it. It became an enormous success.” —publicist Andrea Jaffe
“The print and TV ads for Elizabeth Taylor’s Passion were beautifully done, and by 1990 it was the country’s fourth-most-popular women’s perfume, grossing over $70 million a year. By then Elizabeth was worth $100 million, mostly thanks to her perfume business.”
—costume designer Arnold Scaasi (Isaacs, spelled backward)
“When she hit it big with scents, several people advised Elizabeth to backpedal on her battle against AIDS and settle into being a glamorous icon and businesswoman. She refused. She stepped up her activism and used her renewed public profile with the perfumes to raise more money for AIDS research.”
—Bette Midler
“In Giant, set in Texas, Elizabeth Taylor’s character is the movie’s conscience. Basically, the U.S. stole Texas from Mexico, and Taylor’s character confronts the Anglos who discriminate against Mexicans and Mexican-Americans. That film, from 1956, still holds up today.” —Edward James Olmos
“In Suddenly, Last Summer she’s pitted against Katharine Hepburn as an old prude who wants Liz lobotomized for admitting that Hepburn’s late son was gay. . . . In The Sandpiper she’s independent, a Pagan-spirited, freethinking artist local churchgoers want to run out of town. . . . During the first half or two-thirds of her movie career Elizabeth Taylor’s characters were usually more natural and free, more progressive, than the rest.”
—film historian Carlos Clarens
“One thing I like about her and her movies is Elizabeth Taylor basically always rebels in them. Against authority or restrictions. And she was a rebel—with a cause.”
—Lady Gaga
“I’ve been asked time and again . . . I still don’t know exactly what happened. When Miss Taylor came to me wanting to play Velvet I liked her spirit and her looks but she was too small, too short to be convincing as a rider. A few months later she came back, taller—either actually taller or seemingly taller—and was just right for the part.”
—National Velvet producer Pandro S. Berman
“For years I thought Velvet was the name of the horse . . . I must not have been paying attention. I was mesmerized by Elizabeth Taylor and how she looked, even as a little girl. Years later I found out she was playing someone named Velvet Brown [in National Velvet].” —Isabella Rossellini [Blue Velvet]
“She was really a child of nature. All those wonderful movies as a child star with animals and wide-open spaces. And then several Earth Mother roles. . . . Several of her movie titles refer to animals; I don’t think that’s a coincidence.”
—animal-activist Betty White
“Mickey Rooney was billed first in National Velvet. He’d been a major star. . . . Perhaps he saw this as a comeback, or perhaps another animal-oriented picture. He didn’t take Elizabeth seriously, she was so petite and had a chirrupy voice. What rather threw him was how serious and passionate she was when she acted, while he often focused on entertaining himself and the crew. Elizabeth’s role was the standout. Mickey thought his was, by virtue of his starring in it. He was more than surprised at the result.”
—Clarence Brown, the film’s director
“I’ve teased Elizabeth that she first made a hit as a girl pretending to be a boy. In National Velvet she breaks the rule against female jockeys by impersonating a boy, and she wins the race over the real ones. Of course she’s disqualified, but she’s made her point. It was a movie ahead of its time.” —costar Jackie “Butch” Jenkins
“I was the star of Lassie, Come Home, Elizabeth’s second picture. Almost everyone in it was British, it was like a family. I’ve been asked whether I felt competitive with Elizabeth or thought she might steal our scenes together. No. None of that. We were instantly friends. She was charming and sincere. Sincerity has never been a Hollywood hallmark.”
—Roddy McDowall
“MGM was surprised by Elizabeth’s success in National Velvet. But then they kept her off the screen for some time, unsure what to do with her. Finally they starred her in Courage of Lassie. She hadn’t yet blossomed, you see. The next picture, she got her initiation into kissing, and since then her kissing scenes have been legion. Millions of girls learned how to kiss well from watching Elizabeth Taylor do it.”
—costume designer and friend Edith Head
“When Vivien Leigh played Cleopatra in the film of Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra, she came across as a bubbleheaded nymphet. Leigh displayed none of the moxie she did as Scarlett O’Hara. . . . Elizabeth Taylor’s was a modern, politically astute Cleopatra who used two powerful Roman leaders to try and rule or co-rule the Mediterranean world.”
—historian Barbara Tuchman
“That scene in which Cleopatra makes her triumphal entry into Rome is beyond . . . well, just spectacular. I doubt there’s one scene in any other movie that matches it for sheer impressive splendor. It’s more than spectacular.”
—Tina Louise (Gilligan’s Island)
“Caesar and Cleopatra became the most expensive British film, then Cleopatra became the most expensive Hollywood film. The latter was so costly that it was almost a year after completion until its release. Meanwhile, a small army of contending executives tried to shape all that pricy celluloid into a not-too-long, not-too-short, commercial-enough version. If nobody had shown up to see Cleopatra, if its total cost had gone unrecouped, that could have spelled the end of the Fox studio.” —film distributor Harry Walders
“I have nothing against Italians but they supported Mussolini and lost the war [WWII]. So in the 1960s poverty was still widespread. Cleopatra brought lots of employment to the Rome area. . . . One of the myriad ways the film’s budget went up was locals ripping costumes to shreds so they had to be remade, which could take weeks. . . . The extras often didn’t appear when required—they did show up on pay days. . . . More sabotage . . . you name it. It wasn’t all about Elizabeth Taylor’s poor health.”
—producer Walter Wanger
“The press had gone in for such excessive and constant coverage during the making of Cleopatra that when it actually reached the cinemas, critics and anyone who wished to seem sophisticated had to pan it. You’d be Pollyanna if you didn’t say oh-no or at least hohum. . . . The public didn’t care what the critics said, they wanted to see Liz and Dick and what all the hubbub was about with this movie.” —San Mateo Times writer Barbara Bladen
“Some moral watchdog groups warned their followers that Cleopatra contained ‘casual’ nudity. In one all-female scene Elizabeth Taylor is lying facedown on a massage table, her back covered but her side, from face to feet, nude. If you want to call that nude. At the time, many people wanted to. That’s the most ‘nudity’ Elizabeth Taylor ever showed on screen. She didn’t need to peel to be sexy or seductive. It came from her eyes and her attitude, not to mention being so naturally voluptuous.” —Cleopatra costar Hume Cronyn
“I remember when she played the prostitute in Butterfield 8 there was a lot of fuss. In previous movies, when a character was a prostitute, it was camouflaged. . . . Several movie critics were indignant that her character would only have sex with men she herself chose. Apparently they’d have preferred a character who had no choice.” —Natalie Wood
“It didn’t occur to me then that A Place in the Sun was about anything but class differences. Monty Clift’s character aspired to the upper class through Elizabeth’s character. After he got involved with my working-class character. Today some people say the movie espoused reproductive freedom, since my character’s not being able to get a legal abortion leads to her death and then to Monty’s. You should know that the original novel by Theodore Dreiser had a different, more descriptive title: An American Tragedy.”
—Shelley Winters
“After the film of my novel became such a hit, it was suggested I do a distaff version. A differing plot, different situations, but with a Godmother. Who, I asked, would play this singular role? The backers said Elizabeth Taylor. I declined. Miss Taylor might have looked the part . . . [but] she was not capable of playing Italian and her voice was wrong for the part. Ideal casting would have been Anna Magnani, who was too old by Hollywood standards and not box office in the U.S. Later on, Taylor somewhat resembled Magnani.”
—The Godfather author Mario Puzo
“It’s been printed numerous times that I resemble Elizabeth Taylor. I know it’s meant as a compliment . . . I do not have the same abiding interest in men that she does. Our voices are also quite distinct. I scare off a lot of men whose voices aren’t deeper than mine.”
—actress Suzanne Pleshette
“One misses the opportunity of working with Miss Taylor. . . . We do share the same mole, and very few men have one there. Mine is real, as is hers. If mine weren’t real, I wouldn’t have had one put on.” —Robert Vaughn (Hustle)
“Everyone always says what beautiful eyes I have, then half the time they’ll say I have ‘Elizabeth Taylor eyes.’ Or comment that I look like her, with the eyes and black hair . . . and when it comes to gaining a bit of extra weight, even more comparisons. I’ll tell you something: no actress very much relishes comparisons with another actress.”
—Delta Burke (Designing Women)
“If you want to devote the best part of four hours to looking at Elizabeth Taylor in all her draped and undraped physical splendor, then this is your movie. In royal regalia, en negligee, or au naturel, she gives the impression that she is at one of Miami Beach’s more exotic resorts.” —from the New York Herald Tribune’s review of Cleopatra
“It’s reached the point where any actress applying a beauty spot to the lower half of her face is accused of copying Elizabeth Taylor! For all I know, Miss Taylor has been copying someone else, and I certainly had a famous mole some time before Miss Taylor did.”
—British star Margaret Lockwood (The Wicked Lady)
“To act opposite Elizabeth Taylor is rather mesmerizing when you’re playing face to face, looking into those eyes. They are beautiful but intimidating eyes . . . no other actor or actress ever kept me on my toes as much as when I had to act opposite those blazing eyes.” —costar Peter Ustinov (The Comedians)
“I’d like to know where to place the blame. Whether it’s she or he who says, Let’s do this movie, luv. Burton-Taylor are currently foisting themselves on an incredulous and dwindling public in Boom!, a big bust by way of a trivial Tennessee Williams play. That, we can guess is her fault—love that Tennessee! A year or so past, the brazen couple did the non-comedy The Comedians, via one of Graham Greene’s most convoluted and irrelevant tales. One of the two must have said, Ooh, Graham Greene, luv! Mustn’t miss a chance to do a Graham Greene, he’s veddy, veddy esteemed. Taylor’s German accent in The Comedians had to be heard to be disbelieved.” —British critic Gil Monsen
“I was surprised to hear what impelled Elizabeth Taylor to take the wife/mistress role in The Comedians was a rumor that Sophia Loren was going to do it. She didn’t want Sophia near Richard, so she snatched the role. . . . How did Miss Taylor think Sophia Loren could possibly enact a German?” —German supermodel Veruschka
“After seeing them so often and so ostentatiously together in real life and in reel life, it’s clear that Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton have become legends in their own time and in their own minds.”
—singer-actor Robert Goulet, who supported Richard Burton on stage in Camelot
“It’s still on TV, in reruns, that episode of Here’s Lucy where she meets Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton and she tries on that famous ring [with the Burton-Cartier diamond] and it gets stuck on Lucy’s finger. That’s an awesome episode.”
—Keanu Reeves (“Lucy Meets the Burtons” was the series’ highest-rated episode)
“For most of [the Here’s Lucy episode] Burton impersonated a plumber. . . . In movies he can be charming . . . with us he seemed resentful. He certainly resented Lucille. . . . Liz didn’t appear till after the middle—the eagerly awaited ‘star turn,’ as Burton put it. But she wasn’t soured like him . . . not even embarrassed to let everyone know that as soon as our taping was over she was heading for the hospital for another operation for ‘piles’—hemorrhoids, in American. Good grief.”
—Jerry Paris, TV director and former actor (neighbor Jerry on The Dick Van Dyke Show)
“I was in Los Angeles with them during the 1970 Lucy opening-season episode. Rich was glad, originally, to get on a successful teleseries for a single episode. Nor was he drinking that week. But he and Elizabeth felt rather exploited, as if they were being showcased on Miss Ball’s show as an event, to win her ratings. Which was true . . . I think they looked down on television and, furthermore, preferred to control exploitative situations. By another token, they did agree to be on the Here’s Lucy show.”
—Richard Burton’s friend and assistant Brook Williams (son of Welsh actor-playwright Emlyn)
“Richard Burton could be quite the male chauvinist. He came from a redneck background—twelve kids. . . . Lucy is the queen of comedy, she knows the business inside-out and always goes through scenes with her actors and offers suggestions. Precisely how many comedies has Richard Burton ever done? But he only wanted directions from the director, who was Lucy’s employee. Directors may call the shots in movies but not in television. Elizabeth was nowhere as tense, she could smile and laugh. . . . . He sometimes had murder in his eyes. Odious man.”
—Cleo Smith, Lucille Ball’s cousin and a Here’s Lucy producer
“I never understood why Burton did it. Being married to any actress can be distressing. Don’t I know. But marriage to a lady or woman richer and more famous than yourself . . . that, I could never subject myself to.”
—Sean Connery, whose first wife was actress Diane Cilento
“Elizabeth was more jealous of Richard’s leading ladies than he was of her leading men. Not so much because she was afraid he’d pounce on them as that some aggressive, ambitious actress would pounce on him and try and take her place in the Dick-and-Liz media saga.”
—Rod Steiger, who eventually dated ET
“Elizabeth Taylor did not want to be displaced. She was aware, and so was Burton, that she’d elevated him from a foreign star to an international superstar. But now he was in a position, if he ever left Taylor, to boost a little-known actress to a star or a star actress to a superstar.” —writer Marvin Jones
“One factor in Elizabeth’s doing an uncredited cameo in Richard’s Anne of the Thousand Days [about Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn] was she liked to play dress-up. The Tudor outfit and headdress looked smashing on her. Another factor was to be on-set, keeping an eye on Richard. More specifically, on Genevieve Bujold, the young leading lady. The French-Canadian actress hadn’t made it big in Hollywood yet.”
—Sian Phillips, actress and wife of Peter O’Toole
“When Elizabeth was making The Only Game in Town opposite Warren Beatty, Richard would harp on Warren’s good looks. She insisted they were like sister and kid brother. Richard kept insisting Warren was a temptation . . . I doubt she and Warren did anything but chat. Both of them love to hold forth . . . maybe it was all competing monologues.”
—writer Sheridan Morley
“We had no idea [What Ever Happened to] Baby Jane would become a big success, though the story was dynamite . . . I felt Bette [Davis] should have won a third Oscar . . . what she did with the role was unique. Had there been a big-screen remake, I feel the sole actress capable of stepping into Davis’s strap shoes would be Elizabeth Taylor. She’s now the right age for it.” —Henry Farrell, author of the novel on which the film was based
“I had a project Liz Taylor would have suited, and vice versa. But she’d been so exploited by her studio that once she was free to make fewer movies, she did. And after the very time-consuming Cleopatra she signed for fewer projects, particularly without her hubby, who was busy shuttling from picture to picture.”
—Baby Jane director-producer Robert Aldrich
“She was known to turn down good scripts because she didn’t want to leave Richard’s side and to choose, when she did choose, second-rate projects, like the one [The Driver’s Seat, aka Identikit] from Muriel Spark, who’d written The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Elizabeth placed too much importance on past authorship and prestigious reputation, and not enough on the script in hand.” —magazine editor Ingrid Sischy
“Taming of the Shrew had been a big hit, so decades later she agreed to work again with [director] Franco Zeffirelli in Young Toscanini . . . to try and re-capture some of the old box-office magic. But the biopic was a boring flop, all superfice and no substance. One critic said it was likelier to please those familiar with a chocolate box than an opera box. It bombed in Europe and would have in the USA except it hardly played even New York or L.A.” —Richard Gully, former assistant to Jack L. Warner
“Her fulfilling marriages were to Mike Todd and Richard Burton. During those times she was usually content to let movies go hang. Elizabeth kept busy traveling with and usually sticking like glue to those two men. She always had to have something going on. If it wasn’t a movie or a man, it was . . . campaigning for one husband or raising funds to fight AIDS, the perfume business . . . but always something. Because when Elizabeth is bored or down she eats too much.” —fellow MGM contractee June Allyson
“At about seven, Elizabeth’s parents moved her and her older brother to Los Angeles, and by age ten Sara Taylor had gotten her into pictures. Mama’s job was carting Elizabeth to one audition after another. . . . Before long, Elizabeth’s income was supporting the family. That only inspired Sara to aim even higher.”
—friend, costar, and MGM colleague Peter Lawford
“One of Elizabeth’s heroines, growing up, was Bette Davis during her golden age as the ‘fifth Warner Brother.’ Bette was attractive then, but not so much so that her looks boxed her into decorative roles. . . . Bette got the best scripts and alternated between likeable and popular characters and unlikable ones in popular films. Elizabeth, like most actresses, admired and aspired to that.” —costar Louis Jourdan (The V.I.P.s)
“Elizabeth took after her mother. . . . Sara was the mover and shaker in the family, the restless and dissatisfied one—the pushy one. Elizabeth’s father Francis loved art. He was quiet and polite. Nobody had an unkind word to say about him. Which couldn’t quite be said about mother and daughter.” —MGM composer Hugh Martin
“It’s no secret now that Francis Taylor was the longtime boyfriend of [MGM costume designer] Adrian. Both men had wives for cover—Adrian’s was Janet Gaynor, who was bi or lesbian and the first actress to win an Academy Award. And both men reproduced—Adrian and Janet had a son, the Taylors had two children. But that didn’t change their nature . . . both preferred sex with men.”
—actor and Goldwyn contractee Farley Granger
“We’ve lived the same life: the great tragedy of childhood stars. . . . My father took the money.”
—Michael Jackson (ET’s father did not take her money)
“Was Elizabeth hypnotized or what? Going on Barbara Walters, defending Michael Jackson’s relationships with boys under fourteen, and then, because Walters mentions that Jackson’s father used to beat him and wonders if Elizabeth’s also beat her, Elizabeth nods yes! Her brother denies it, so does anyone who knew the family. Why does Elizabeth choose to identify so completely with that guy? And why on earth besmirch and betray the memory of her father?”—publicist Ronni Chasen
“Elizabeth’s more recent operations, since about age sixty, including ‘upstairs,’ have . . . taken something away—they’ve had a marked effect. Sometimes she slurs her words or doesn’t make sense . . . she’s not the same, physically or mentally, as she was before.”
—ET friend and photographer Herb Ritts
“It’s not so much growing older as the cumulative effect of operation after operation, as well as the volume of medications. In her early sixties Elizabeth started experiencing awful headaches . . . and suddenly, memory loss. A brand-new affliction. She would ask friends, ‘What fresh hell is this?’”
—writer-producer Marvin Jones
“A star actress ultimately works less if she only accepts leads. Else, she retires from acting to find a new field of endeavor. Or retires, period. Or—what the true actor does—takes smaller roles and does the best of what’s on offer, including television so long as it’s not too infra dig. Elizabeth has been working less, not by choice. The only thing that curbs her energy is ill health, which often does interrupt.”
—UK director Guy Hamilton (The Mirror Crack’d)
“Eleven years between her two final marriages, and during that time Elizabeth was eager to work. . . . Many fans were disappointed to see her in minor roles, for instance a brothel madam in a TV offering titled North and South. . . . Elizabeth can keep herself in the headlines but not up on the screen. That’s out of her hands.”
—columnist Radie Harris (ET earned $100,000 for one day’s work in the miniseries)
“Depending on the source, Elizabeth Taylor earned half a million bucks or one million for her three weeks in Malice in Wonderland, a TV movie about [gossip columnists] Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons. . . . Liz had a field day playing her old enemy Louella and using Louella’s whiny baby voice.” —Malice costar Joyce Van Patten (Dick’s sister)
“What’s caught up with Elizabeth Taylor is her tardiness. A yen for attention is one thing, gifts and bribes another . . . but consistently holding up production, whether from bad health or feelings or a mood, is inexcusable. This is first and foremost a business.”
—George C. Scott
“By the time I worked with her [in 1950] Miss Taylor had matured or erupted from a determined but proper English-type girl into young leads as a raven-haired, lavender-eyed beauty whose screen presence was phenomenal. . . . The amount of attention she was getting on and off screen turned her head. How could it fail to do so?”
—ET’s director Vincente Minnelli (Father of the Bride and Father’s Little Dividend)
“You know, her eyes are not really violet. That is publicity. As Elizabeth herself says, her eyes change color according to what she wears.”
—costar Fernando Lamas (The Girl Who Had Everything)
“She’s changed markedly from when she played my naïve young bride in our picture [Conspirator, 1949]. I would not have thought her capable of the behavior she’s displayed since her third or fourth marriage. I do not condone her behavior.”
—Robert Taylor in 1963
“Before final casting of Conspirator, a McCarthy-era witch hunt type of MGM picture, there was real concern in the head office. Robert Taylor and Elizabeth Taylor—same last name, both black-haired . . . might the public think incest? . . . I heard some polls were taken to reassure Louis B. Mayer that it was okay to cast both Taylors in the same picture.” —director Stanley Donen
“Soon after [WWII] Elizabeth was one of the players ordered to travel to Washington, D.C., to help launch the March of Dimes campaign. She got to meet the president but told her mom she didn’t like Truman because he looked like Louis B. Mayer. He didn’t, though, not by about thirty pounds.” —Don Taylor, ET’s groom in Father of the Bride
“I didn’t see Father of the Bride or its sequel until Elizabeth half-jokingly encouraged me. Too bad that both centered not on her but the hokey, cheapskate father enacted—indifferently, maybe because of his alcoholism—by Spencer Tracy. . . . Those pictures were sizeable hits, so Elizabeth’s big fear at the time was that they might become a series. Being associated with a film series was death for an ambitious star.”
—Halston, designer and ET pal
“I could have wished Elizabeth Taylor had protested the post-war backlash against democracy in our country. But older and bigger names didn’t, or felt they didn’t dare. In or out of Hollywood, people were terrorized. McCarthyites used intimidation tactics, including guilt by association. And we had a president [Truman] who kept silent about what was going on.”
—blacklisted Anne Revere, a descendant of Paul Revere, who played ET’s mother in National Velvet and Monty Clift’s mother in A Place in the Sun
“Elizabeth is or was, for the longest time, politically ingenuous. She evinced no interest in politics and would rub shoulders with political reactionaries—including the enemies of her gay friends—if it was a gala occasion or the funeral of a rich friend. Her worldview isn’t very broad . . . poverty, over-population, and government manipulation aren’t much in her purview.” —actor and Screen Actors Guild president William Schallert
“She admits to a minimal education. The little schoolhouse at MGM was little more than a joke, a minimal compliance with the law. Elizabeth is, however, very worldly wise about feelings and people and making her way in the world. We can all learn a thing or two from her.”
—Richard Burton
“I met her a few times in her teens . . . she did seem aloof and more or less impatient to be elsewhere. Years later when we were in Raintree County she was more pleasant and paid attention when you conversed. I assume that marriage, motherhood, and intermittent unhappiness had given her depth and compassion.”
—Tom Drake, best known for Meet Me in St. Louis
“Like most of us educated at Metro, Elizabeth wishes she had a more literate background. . . . Even after you become famous there’s still a part of you that feels left out or a little embarrassed when you’re in the company of people who went to college. Fame and fortune makes up for a lot . . . not everything.”
—Ann Miller, dancer-actress and MGM contractee
“Elizabeth Taylor does read books now and again. Richard Burton is very book-oriented and would rather be a famous author than a famous actor. He’s introduced her to better books, to non-fiction. But they often read mystery novels together. She does prefer fiction. Especially things with strong female roles.”
—ET’s director Joseph Losey (Secret Ceremony)
“Elizabeth has a good instinct for material. When she was reading The Godfather I asked what was it like, it was such a big bestseller. She said it was poorly written but almost impossible to put down. . . . One script she was reading, I asked what it was about. Elizabeth threw it down in disgust. ‘It’s about all I can take!’ That script was later filmed, with a top actress, and flopped badly.”
—Brook Williams, sometime actor and companion to Richard Burton
“As an actress, a businesswoman, and as a woman, one of Elizabeth Taylor’s best bargaining tricks is playing hard to get. She does it very well. It’s not really a trick because she never cares that much if you get her or not. If you do, it will be on her own terms.”
—singer Julio Iglesias
“We wooed Elizabeth with favorable conditions and gifts. And more gifts. Virtually every day of shooting, she was gifted—more accurately, she was a gifted actress who didn’t need to work and could buy most anything her heart desired, but Elizabeth was accustomed to and even expected that we give her a gift—some expensive bauble, an antique, or a piece of jewelry—to thank her for completing a day’s filming and to show our appreciation. Elizabeth very much likes to be appreciated.” —Renée Valente, producer of ET’s western telefilm Poker Alice
“My goodness! I don’t begrudge her, I only wish I was treated the same way as Elizabeth Taylor any time I make a television movie. You’d have thought she was starring in a big-budget motion picture . . . I guess they think she deserves it, and who am I to say she doesn’t?”
—Patty Duke
“What’s happening is that most big-name male actors won’t go near Liz Taylor on big or little screen. They don’t care to be overshadowed. She relegates most of her leading men to near-supporting status. So even in TV projects she doesn’t get the top TV actors, she gets middle-level actors or has-been movie actors. They know who’ll get the juicy role with the big build-up and all the publicity.” —columnist Lee Graham
“I have directed [Brigitte] Bardot, [Catherine] Deneuve, [Jane] Fonda . . . I would like to make a romantic fantasy with Elizabeth Taylor, preferably in Europe. But I know even there she will finish by directing me, and that must not be.”
—French director Roger Vadim
“Suddenly, Last Summer showed that Taylor could act. But three other movies saw to it that she would never play anything but a sexpot—Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Butterfield 8, and Cleopatra. She’d have had a more varied career if she’d not chosen roles that made so much of her figure and characters that live and breathe for love. She didn’t do any of that in Suddenly, Last Summer.” —Gore Vidal
“Taylor’s career was in danger of being eclipsed by her private life and public scandals until the humongous budget of Cleopatra and its sheer optical splendor reminded everyone that this was a truly major movie star. . . . Her alliance with Burton and their movies together gave her career a new lease on life. Until it dragged them both down, pretty much for keeps.” —film historian Carlos Clarens
“Everyone hated A Little Night Music [the film version]. I liked it better than the Broadway musical that everyone loved. I think it was great they hired Liz Taylor, who can’t sing. It’s a big movie tradition, like when they hired Lucy Ball for Mame. . . . Liz is brave. She sang ‘Send in the Clowns’ by herself, no dubbing. You could right away tell it was really her.” —Andy Warhol, who appeared in ET’s The Driver’s Seat, aka Identikit
“Due to her box-office stature Elizabeth Taylor was seriously considered for the movie of Hello, Dolly! Never mind her non-singing status. Yes, Barbra Streisand was too young for the part, but thank goodness they chose her instead. My musical score has never been sung more beautifully.”
—composer-lyricist Jerry Herman
“Liz Taylor practically died laughing when she heard she was up for the motion picture of my Myra Breckinridge. ‘Me play an ex-man?’ she gasped. She couldn’t decide whether it was hilarious or insulting. Liz was a little too ripe for the role. Raquel Welch was just right in age, looks, and synthetic appeal. Rex Reed, the bitchy movie critic, played the man, as it were, that she used to be.” —novelist Gore Vidal
“She had to sing ‘Send in the Clowns,’ which terrified her. ‘Every great singer has done it,’ she said, ‘and now here comes Chunko.’ She gained fifteen pounds during this production.”
—ET biographer J. Randy Taraborrelli
“Elizabeth Taylor is five years older than Warren Beatty. However, in The Only Game in Town she appears a decade or more his senior. Her image and physical self have grown increasingly blowsy. As a Las Vegas chorine she is baldly unbelievable. She must have assumed this picture would amount to something due to the guiding presence of her Giant director George Stevens. But he too must be past it. By any objective standard, the result is a neon-colored catastrophe.” —British columnist Gillian Dawes
“I was sorry The Only Game in Town didn’t work out. The ingredients sounded promising . . . just that the most crucial one wasn’t included—a good, solid story. Giant could have been made with unknown actors and it would still be a good story.”
—Rock Hudson
“Appearing in Cleopatra was an unmatchable experience. Just seeing what Elizabeth would look like each day—the costumes and makeup were more than extravagant. . . . Elizabeth had little to do with the script but I wish my character had been less wimpy, regardless of his historical sexuality [bisexual]. For that matter, Caesar was bisexual, but either he was scripted differently or Rex [Harrison] had him, shall we say, beefed up.”
—Roddy McDowall
“Has ever a film star been more indulged than Elizabeth Taylor? Of late she insisted that Reflections in a Golden Eye, a story set in the American South, be shot in Rome at tremendous extra cost. Then she signed for The Only Game in Town, set in Las Vegas but filmed in Paris at her royal command, with specially-built sets representing American casinos, streets, apartments, and a supermarket, adding tremendously to the picture’s budget. Almost needless to say, both were flops. Do Hollywood studios never learn from past experiences with Liz? Did Cleopatra count for nothing? Are they besotted or mesmerized by Liz Taylor and the chance to star her in yet another overblown money-loser? Or is it really about tax write-offs? What gives?” —director Lewis Allen
“What other movie queen would have, or does now, take such un-Hollywood-like chances with her glamour? She probably knows less about Stanislavski than Natalie Wood, yet she became old and fat for Virginia Woolf and now tops it off with being simpleminded as Leonora.”
—writer Gloria Steinem in a note to producer Ray Stark about his Reflections in a Golden Eye
“She’s said the actress she most admires is the Italian movie star Anna Magnani, known for her earthiness and spontaneity. She also admires Miss Magnani’s gravelly voice.”
—Dick Hanley, ET’s secretary
“She is generous to her friends. Roddy McDowall was a child star who isn’t an adult star . . . he grew from sweet to acerbic. But Elizabeth secured him the plum role of Octavian, the future Roman emperor Augustus, in Cleopatra. I, for one, wasn’t as fortunate.”
—Cleopatra costar Robert Stephens
“I was paid $125,000, although no one ever told me what my job was. My job description was primarily ‘Elizabeth’s husband.’ I was to be there just in case she needed me, and to make sure that she got to the set on time and prepared. All Elizabeth had to do to earn her salary was act in the picture [Cleopatra]. I had to take care of Elizabeth. As it turned out, she had the easier job.”
—Eddie Fisher
“Cleopatra was to have been two films. It was enough of a life for three. The real Cleopatra had more than the one sibling . . . her brothers and sisters conspired to kill each other to attain the throne, and Cleopatra herself engaged in fratricide. . . . The film includes only her child by Julius Caesar . . . she and Mark Anthony had three children, including twins. . . . By the way, Anthony, unlike Caesar, was entirely heterosexual and fell too much under Cleopatra’s spell for his own good.” —Richard Burton
“If you can imagine, 20th Century-Fox executives were afraid the Taylor-Burton affair would harm Cleopatra’s box office once it was finally completed. Au contraire, the public fascination with the pair’s developing relationship in Rome was their best possible advertising.” —Italian producer Franco Rossellini
“After Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Taylor would have done well to act apart from Burton and pursue serious British films rather than bloated, hollow Hollywood projects whose lack of artistic and financial success only served to down-grade her.”
—UK director John Boulting
“There were hopes of Richard Burton returning to the stage, here in England. . . . We were all well pleased when he filmed a student production of Doctor Faustus, acted in it gratis, and donated the profits to the Oxford Playhouse. The participation of his wife as Helen of Troy was a splendid bonus and a generous one, inasmuch as she had no speaking lines.” —Frank Hauser, theater director
“They couldn’t win for losing. They did Faustus as a goodwill gesture. However, the British press generally felt Richard, who co-directed, was being condescending and that Elizabeth’s glamorous cameo appearances were sheer vanity. The reviews were scathing.”
—Sir John Gielgud
“Richard Burton wanted to do a popular Shakespeare movie—a tall order. He and Elizabeth Taylor invested heavily in The Taming of the Shrew. . . . Problems arose when she insisted on Hollywood designer Irene Sharaff to do her costumes. A compromise was reached when Burton didn’t care who did his . . . he preferred authenticity.”
—Richard Burton biographer Alexander Walker
“The Burtons gave Zeffirelli his first chance to direct a movie, and an A-list one. At first he was so happy, nodding, smiling, grateful, but then . . . it reminds me of Mark Twain’s remark that the difference between a man and a dog is if you take a dog in and feed it and clothe it and make it rich, it won’t turn on you. Zeffirelli’s personality and habits kept him from becoming a Hollywood director, yet who does he blame for that? He’s said it various times: ‘those Hollywood Jews.’ Yeah, like Elizabeth Taylor, who once accepted a first-time unknown director.” —director Gene Saks
“Before filming of Shrew began, Burton took their director to meet Philip Burton, who would authenticate details and answer questions about the production. Richard clearly still idolized the man whose surname he took. . . . It became the first Shakespeare-based hit movie in decades.” —Emlyn Williams, Welsh actor and playwright
“Richard was dying to do The Taming of the Shrew. He talked Elizabeth into it . . . and into waiving, as he did, her usual sizeable acting fee. Instead, they took a percentage. Richard told me, ‘I don’t think the concept of doing a film for the love of it had ever occurred to her before.’” —UK journalist Michael Munn
“Elizabeth now really loathes him, largely because he is a ruthless selfish multi-faced ego-mad coward. It is this last that both of us find most objectionable. I am by no means heroic morally but I can make decisions and accept advice. This chap can do neither.”
—from Richard Burton’s diary entry for April 27, 1966, referencing Taming of the Shrew director Franco Zeffirelli
“There was always, at that time, grousing about how much Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton were earning. Naturally she earned more for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? than Cleopatra, which had been years earlier. . . . Our picture ran over schedule by some thirty days, which contractually meant they were to be paid an extra million dollars between them. They simply waived the overtime.” —Woolf screenwriter Ernest Lehman
“Working with them was extraordinary. They were like royalty and yet Richard was so approachable. They called each other names. I think it was in fun.”
—Woolf costar Sandy Dennis
“The whole cast was Oscar-nominated—the two women, the two men. The two women won.”
—screenwriter and AMPAS (Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences) president Fay Kanin
“Only the two of them could know how closely, or not, George and Martha paralleled their own lives. But it does seem as if the longer they were together the more they put each other down, in jest or otherwise.”
—Irish actor Richard Harris, one of whose wives later wed Rex Harrison
“You knew the Liz-and-Dick globe-trotting caravan and circus had gotten out of hand when they let themselves be cast for big-big bucks in a movie of a flop Tennessee Williams play retitled Boom! The play had starred old Tallulah Bankhead and sexpot Tab Hunter. She’s rich and dying, he’s a young poet and the angel of death. The film casting made no sense, with Taylor too young and Burton too old. Boom! was a total fiasco and the beginning of their end, their last major costarring effort and the stop to each of them as a top box-office attraction.”
—novelist and biographer Gavin Lambert
“Elizabeth holds a fierce dedication to the work of Tennessee Williams, owing to her successes in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Suddenly, Last Summer. . . . She failed to discern the skimpiness of his play The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Any More, which made a skimpily plotted if lavish motion picture. I was paid handsomely but blushed deeply and often upon the film’s fierce rejection.”
—Sir Noël Coward, who played the Witch of Capri in Boom!
“They said some really nasty things to each other.” —Woolf director Mike Nichols
“Those who’ve suggested Miss Taylor would do better to work apart from her husband will have to reconsider. The year [1968] has seen her opposite the equally miscast Richard Burton in Boom! and minus Burton in the incomprehensible Secret Ceremony. Both mystifying. Both misfires, and then some.” —writer Helene Hanff
“In Secret Ceremony Liz Taylor shares a large bathtub with Mia Farrow. What does this mean? The film never clarifies the relationship . . . mother-daughter? sapphic? a hallucination? . . . Robert Mitchum is extraneous, tossed in—not into the tub—for the traditional sake of including a leading man. A nasty one.” —writer Arthur Bell
“I believe Elizabeth’s salary was back down to $1 million. However, Mitchum only received $150,000 and Mia Farrow, really the central character, got $75,000.”
—Secret Ceremony director Joseph Losey
“We paid Elizabeth Taylor $1.4 million but The Only Game in Town [1969] lost almost $6 million.” —producer Fred Kohlmar
“The ’70s is thus far Miss Taylor’s worst decade as an actress. Where once Richard Burton shared a platonic but kingly bed with Peter O’Toole in the historic Becket, she now, in a small role, shares a boozy bed with O’Toole in Under Milk Wood [1971]. . . . In Hammersmith Is Out [1972] she dons a blonde wig as a Southern slattern named Jimmie Jean Jackson. How long into her forties shall Elizabeth Taylor reappear in whore-ible movies?” —film critic Aimee Martin
“The distintegration of Elizabeth Taylor has been a very sad thing to stand by helplessly and watch. Something ghastly has happened over the course of her last four or five films. She has become a hideous parody of herself—a fat, sloppy, yelling, screeching banshee.”
—film critic Rex Reed
“It isn’t really about weight gain. The medications Elizabeth is given for her sciatica and other ailments bloat her face, they make her puffy. Strangers assume she’s eating too much. . . . One doctor ordered her to stay flat on her back for a month. She can’t do that. Within days she was out and about, dining with Dick and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor in London.”
—ET’s secretary Roger Wall
“Rich worries about the amount of alcohol Elizabeth consumes along with the drugs she’s given to ease the pain . . . or after an operation. Elizabeth mixes booze and drugs in as large or larger quantities than did Marilyn Monroe. Rich believes he will eventually die from drink while Elizabeth will sail blithely on. He dislikes the sometimes necessary role of being her caregiver.” —Richard Burton’s assistant Brook Williams
“After another big blow-out Richard went on a bender in Switzerland, partly to get back at Elizabeth. He took his favorite brother, Ifor, who’d been a coal miner. . . . Richard’s mother died before he was two, and his father was a coal miner who condemned acting as a profession. The bender ended suddenly when Ifor, the equally sloshed elder brother, slipped and broke his neck. Ifor was paralyzed from the neck down for the rest of his life. Richard blamed himself, justly.” —Sir Michael Redgrave
“He had so much, yet he was alcoholic before, during, and after Elizabeth Taylor. The periods of sobriety were few and his attempts to give up drinking were halfhearted or at any rate temporary. After the death of his brother Ifor in 1972 he made no further efforts to stop.” —MGM hairdresser and ET confidant Sydney Guilaroff
“Thank goodness she accompanied Richard to our Austrian location. She was like an assistant to me . . . invaluable. She sometimes kept Richard from drinking, and when he did drink was able to order him to do things he didn’t want to do. One day, he was so inebriated he thought a required wooden prop was actually high explosives. Richard kept insisting he wouldn’t touch it. We sent for Elizabeth . . . she arrived and yelled at him to get it over with and do the f---ing scene. And he did it. They were a great couple.”
—Brian Hutton, director of Where Eagles Dare, for which Richard Burton was paid $1 million (several times more than costar Clint Eastwood)
“Richard would drink solo or in company but Elizabeth didn’t like to drink alone. The problem was, when he was trying not to drink he sometimes fell off the wagon because she brought along a pitcher of martinis for lunch and would insist that he join her.”
—Peter Ustinov, their director and costar in Hammersmith Is Out
“Elizabeth and I both suffer from feelings of insecurity. We feel particularly unsure of ourselves when we are at a party because no one really wants to know us. They simply stare as if we are prize animals. What we do when we go to parties is drink to kill the icy isolation.” —Richard Burton
“Elizabeth is wonderful company if you’re not around her for very long. Only because of the drinking and the attention span.” —British actor Stewart Granger
“That whole generation of men didn’t want working or successful wives. Marilyn Monroe’s marriage to Joe DiMaggio lasted under a year because he wanted her to give up her career, move to San Francisco, become a housewife, and cook Italian meals for his relatives. Richard grew more and more jealous of Elizabeth’s career. He was making more films than her but nagged that she should work even less, that she’d already made her mark. . . . She had two Oscars and he was not pleased to become the actor most often nominated for Academy Awards without ever winning one. Even John Wayne, that eminent thespian, won an Oscar—in competition with Richard Burton!”
—Lynn Redgrave
“Elizabeth had a long, productive career. She was the most glamorous star of our generation. No one else could equal Elizabeth’s beauty and sexuality. Women liked her and men adored her, including my husband [Eddie Fisher]. Her love for her children is enduring. She was a symbol of stardom. Her legacy will last.”
—Debbie Reynolds’s press statement upon ET’s death