I think I was probably born a ham.
Elizabeth, circa 1944.
© Photofest
Before she became one of the most legendary actresses of Hollywood’s golden age, Elizabeth was just like any other girl…with violet eyes.
Although both of her parents, Francis Lenn Taylor and Sara Viola Warmbrodt, were from the American Midwest, Elizabeth Rosemond Taylor was born in a district of London called Hampstead, on February 27, 1932. The Taylors, including Elizabeth and her older brother, Howard, were comfortable in this semirural pocket of London’s northern edge. Francis was an art dealer, who had left the United States to start a gallery in London; her mother, Sara, was a former actress, who gave up her career when she married Francis.
Although the Taylors had strong connections to the theatre and art worlds, their approach to child-rearing was anything but bohemian. The Taylors were disciplinarians, emphasizing proper appearance and manners. For Elizabeth, this strict upbringing tempered her naturally precocious personality. When she did something wrong, she was “sent to Coventry”—a form of British punishment whereby parents ostracized their disobedient children by not speaking to them. Ignoring Elizabeth was one way of wrestling with—or perhaps encouraging—her rebellious nature. “Of course,” Alexander Walker observes in his biography of Elizabeth, “in those days, it didn’t cost a film company millions to ignore Elizabeth Taylor.” Despite her parents’ attempts to keep their daughter from getting too much attention, it wasn’t long before Elizabeth found a wider audience.
When Elizabeth was four years old, she, along with several other children, performed at a benefit dance recital for the Duchess of York (the wife of George VI and the future queen mother) and her two daughters, the future Queen Elizabeth II and Princess Margaret, at the Hippodrome, a theatre in London. At curtain call, Elizabeth, dressed as a butterfly, curtsied to the royal party—and continued fluttering around the stage until her mother was finally forced to retrieve her. As Sara declared later, “I knew from the benefit recital that Elizabeth had inherited a certain amount of ‘ham.’” The incident became a part of the myth—the genesis story—of Elizabeth Taylor, movie star. At the very least, this childhood anecdote foretold her future as an actress who was never shy at demanding attention—both in her public and private life—and who was able to hold an audience captive, on screen and off.
Until she was seven, Elizabeth lived in England, where she loved to escape from her parents’ strict household by exploring the wild countryside of her godfather’s estate in Kent on horseback. When World War II broke out, the Taylors returned to the United States, and settled in Los Angeles. Little did Elizabeth know that Hollywood would quickly subsume the idyllic years of her childhood. This new country, as foreign to her as it was exhilarating, forever changed her life, destroying any real chance she had for leading a quiet, normal existence.
On life before acting
My happiest moments as a child were riding my Newfoundland pony, Betty, in the woods on 3,000 acres of my godfather’s estate near the village of Cranbrook.
Those years before I started acting were truly happy.
Elizabeth with her brother, Howard, and mother, Sara, circa 1937.
© Photofest
On staying in England
Probably if there hadn’t been a World War II, I would have been a debutante, lived in England, and married someone very secure and staid. I never would have become an actress. I would have had as many children as I could physically have had.
Had I been raised in England, my life would have been completely different. Because [my family] settled in Los Angeles, I became a movie star. It was not a normal life, of course. The demands, particularly on the emotional level, were killing.
On being a child star
My [childhood] was overscheduled and overdisciplined.
Looking back I can see that, between the demands of the studio and my parents’ strict discipline, it was an impossible way to grow up. But it did make me tough.
Working at age nine is not a childhood.
From the age of nine I began to see myself as two separate people: Elizabeth Taylor the person, and Elizabeth Taylor the commodity. I saw the difference between my image and my real self.
Sometimes [as a child] when I was out riding, I would pretend to be part of a fantasy high school or campus scene, but a few hours later I would be back on the set creating the public Elizabeth Taylor.
Ever since I’d been ten, I’d been a child star with no privacy.
Looking back at myself as a child, I can recognize my precociousness. There was something inside me that wasn’t childlike.…I was unusually mature. Given my life, how could I not have been? I grew up surrounded by adults and had adult responsibilities.
Elizabeth and her mother, Sara, 1947.
© Popperfoto/Getty Images
Elizabeth with her parents, circa 1950.
© Photofest
On growing up on screen
At barely seventeen, I grew up for all America to see.