Elizabeth Taylor once said that the only time she ever felt truly steady was when she came home to her children. It was a rare admission from a woman whose every public moment was performance, and it was tested relentlessly by four very different lives. There was Liza, born into the brief calm of her mother’s happiest marriage, who lost her father before she could form a single memory of him. There was Maria, adopted from postwar Germany with a serious hip deformity, who endured nearly twenty operations just to walk like other children.
There was Christopher, whose marriage drew him into the orbit of one of the most infamous kidnapping cases of the twentieth century. And there was Michael, the eldest, who traded Hollywood for a commune and eventually for a sculptor’s studio in the New Mexico desert. The daughter who never met her father was born in August 1957 in New York City, the child of Elizabeth Taylor and producer Mike Todd, the man many believed was the great love of her early life. She arrived by cesarean section, small and early, and for a few months her parents’ household looked like the calmest Taylor had ever known.
That calm ended in March 1958, when Todd boarded a private plane nicknamed the Lucky Liz, a tribute to his young wife, and set off for New York on business. Over New Mexico the aircraft hit a storm and went down. Everyone on board was killed instantly. Liza, not yet eight months old, would grow up with no conscious memory of her father, only photographs and the stories other people chose to tell her.
Taylor was twenty-six, a widow with an infant daughter, and she was expected to grieve in front of a press corps that allowed no privacy. Her life moved quickly afterward. She married singer Eddie Fisher, then divorced him, then married Richard Burton, the man history most associates with her now. Burton became something close to a real father to Liza, and the bond outlasted his marriage to her mother.
But where Taylor thrived under attention, Liza shrank from it. She was quiet and watchful, more at ease with horses than with adults trying to talk to her at premieres. She never tried to turn her access into a career. Instead she picked up a chisel.
Liza trained seriously as a sculptor, working mostly in bronze, depicting horses and wildlife with anatomical precision that takes years to earn. Most people who worked with her for years had no idea who her mother was until someone else mentioned it. Her work was eventually recognized in a well-regarded book on racehorses in fine art, alongside only one other living sculptor. In 1984 she married an artist named Hap Tivey, and they settled on a large wooded property in the Hudson Valley, raising two sons, Quinn and Ree.
To the boys, their grandmother was simply the woman who showed up for birthdays and asked pointed questions about schoolwork. Liza and Hap separated in 2003 after nearly twenty years, but the split was gentle, and they still live a few miles apart on good terms. One of her most talked-about pieces was a life-sized bronze of a rescue dog, cast from material recovered from the wreckage of the World Trade Center, made as a tribute to the search and rescue teams of September 11th. Later her focus shifted to African wildlife, and she worked directly with an elephant orphanage in South Africa, building an exhibition around the animals she came to know there.
The child who endured the most physical suffering came into the family a few years later from Munich. In the early 1960s, while married to Eddie Fisher, Taylor began adopting a girl named Maria, born in the summer of 1961 in Germany. Maria had been placed for adoption as an infant and was born with a serious hip deformity. Taylor reportedly chose her specifically because she was unwell, drawn toward a child who needed more help rather than away from one.
The adoption was still being processed when Taylor’s marriage to Fisher collapsed. When she married Richard Burton in 1964, he stepped in and completed the legal adoption himself, and Maria took his name. To correct her hip, Maria went through a long series of surgeries throughout her childhood, by some counts close to twenty separate operations. While her siblings were at school plays or riding horses, Maria was often recovering, relearning how to walk, spending months in casts and braces meant to slowly reshape her hip.
Yet by most accounts she was never treated as fragile. Taylor made a deliberate point of including her in everything, in every family portrait, every trip. As an adult, Maria moved into design and fashion work while staying involved in her mother’s charitable causes. Her personal life carried turbulence.
She married Steve Carson, had a daughter named Elizabeth, and divorced around the turn of the millennium. She remarried in 2002 to a man named Tom McKeon and had a son, but that marriage also ended, in 2004, amid pointed accusations about family resources that Maria and her representatives pushed back on. Today she lives quietly in Idaho, largely removed from the entertainment world, still connected to her mother’s charitable legacy. Christopher Edward Wilding was born on February 27, 1955, sharing a birthday with his mother.
He was the younger of Taylor’s two sons from her marriage to British actor Michael Wilding. As a boy he appeared briefly as an extra in his mother’s 1967 film alongside Richard Burton, an experience he later remembered with amusement, the itchy costume, the braces, the cameras. As an adult he built a steady, unglamorous career behind the camera, working in sound and assistant directing. Colleagues had no idea, at least at first, that the quiet crew member was the son of one of the most famous women alive.
That anonymity was exactly what he wanted. His personal life, though, generated plenty of attention. In 1981 he married Aileen Getty, granddaughter of oil tycoon J. Paul Getty, a man whose personal fortune was compared to the economic output of small nations.
That wealth came bundled with tragedy. Aileen’s brother, John Paul Getty III, had been kidnapped in Rome in 1973 at age sixteen. His captors demanded an enormous ransom. His grandfather initially refused to pay, telling reporters that if he paid for one grandchild, he’d have fourteen more kidnapped by morning.
The standoff dragged on for months. Eventually the kidnappers caused the teenager serious physical harm and sent evidence to an Italian newspaper with a note warning worse would follow. Only then did the family relent. A reduced ransom was paid, and the young man was released after roughly five months in captivity.
He survived but never fully recovered, struggling with substance use and later suffering a medical crisis that left him permanently disabled. Aileen carried that weight into her marriage. She later said the ordeal left her with a lasting suspicion of wealth itself, of the protection money was supposed to buy but clearly hadn’t. Christopher and Aileen eloped quietly at a small chapel, wary of the attention a proper society wedding would attract.
They adopted a son, then had a biological son in 1985. For a while it looked like the family might settle into something steady. Then things began to unravel. Aileen went through a difficult stretch of substance use and serious depression after the birth of her second son.
Elizabeth Taylor, worried about her daughter-in-law, brought her to Paris on a trip connected to her earliest work supporting AIDS research. Neither woman could have known that the disease being discussed would soon touch their family directly. In the mid-1980s Aileen learned she had contracted HIV. At first she told people the likely source was a blood transfusion, a less stigmatized explanation at the time.
Only years later did she reveal the real circumstances, that she had contracted it during an especially painful period in her marriage. The mid-to-late 1980s were the height of public panic and misinformation around the disease, when a diagnosis could end friendships and careers overnight. Christopher and Aileen divorced by the late 1980s, with Christopher taking primary care of their two young sons. But Aileen did not disappear from the family.
She and Elizabeth Taylor stayed close for the rest of Taylor’s life. Taylor treated her former daughter-in-law without judgment, and many close to the family said watching Aileen’s experience up close pulled Taylor into AIDS activism at a moment when the cause carried enormous stigma and almost no major public figures wanted anything to do with it. Taylor became one of the earliest and most visible celebrity advocates for HIV and AIDS research, founding her own foundation. Aileen became a long-term survivor and built a second career around advocacy, remaining an ambassador for the Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation to this day.
Christopher remarried a sound editor named Margaret Carlton and had a son in 1992. He keeps one particularly meaningful piece of his mother’s legacy in his home, the first Academy Award she ever won, not displayed for visitors, simply kept close. Michael Howard Wilding Jr. was Elizabeth Taylor’s firstborn, arriving in Santa Monica in January 1953, the son of Taylor and Michael Wilding.
As the oldest, he remembered a version of his mother before superstardom swallowed her life. He pursued acting more seriously than his siblings ever did, landing recurring roles on daytime soap operas through the mid-to-late 1980s, even sharing a screen credit with his mother in a television movie. But his personal life revealed how far he was willing to drift. In 1970 he married Beth Clutter, and the two had a daughter, Leila.
For a stretch of years afterward, Michael lived on a commune, as far removed from Beverly Hills as possible for the son of one of the most glamorous women alive. During that period he welcomed a second daughter, Naomi, born in 1975 with a partner named Johanna Lykke Dahn. His mother never held it against him, staying present in his life and his children’s lives through that unconventional stretch. In 1982 Michael married Brooke Palance, daughter of actor Jack Palance, and they had a son, Tarquin, born in 1989.
By 1991 he had stepped away from acting entirely and moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he began working as a stone sculptor. He described the process as a conversation with the material itself, carving slow, flowing shapes out of marble and limestone, drawn to forms that occur naturally when earth, wind, and water are left alone for long stretches. There is no undoing a wrong cut once the stone is gone, which he said was part of the appeal, a permanence acting never offered. He continues to show his work through galleries in Santa Fe and Los Angeles.
All three of his children became involved with the Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation. More than a decade after Elizabeth Taylor’s death in March 2011 at age seventy-nine, all four of her children remained connected to one another and to the legacy she left behind. Michael still works stone in Santa Fe. Christopher lives quietly behind the scenes in the film industry.
Liza continues sculpting in upstate New York, her focus on wildlife conservation. Maria has settled into a private life in Idaho. Between the four of them they gave Taylor ten grandchildren, several of whom now carry her legacy forward, running her AIDS foundation, managing her estate, keeping her memory active in the causes she cared most about. None of the four children ever chased the fame their mother carried for nearly seventy years.
If anything, each built a life around the opposite instinct entirely, privacy, craft, and real distance from the cameras that followed her everywhere. In old interviews Taylor rarely spoke of her children in terms of achievements. She spoke of them in terms of how they made her feel steady, how coming home to them was the one part of her life that never felt like performance.
Given how chaotic her world was, that steadiness might have been the rarest thing she ever had.