The telephone rang at the Beverly Hills mansion just after three in the morning, and the news that came with it would set off one of the most public scandals of the 1950s. Elizabeth Taylor, the most gossiped-about woman in America, had just been told that her husband, the flamboyant producer Mike Todd, was dead. The plane he had chartered, the Lucky Liz, had crashed in a New Mexico thunderstorm, killing everyone aboard. And in the days that followed, the man who rushed to comfort the young widow was Todd’s closest friend, a crooner named Eddie Fisher.
Before long, Fisher was not just comforting Taylor. He was leaving his wife, the beloved actress Debbie Reynolds, to be with her. The affair exploded across the front pages, and American audiences, who had watched Taylor grow up on the screen, now turned on her. She was branded a homewrecker, vilified in the press, and cast as the villain in a story that seemed ripped from a Hollywood script.
She married Fisher on May 12, 1959, at Temple Beth Shalom in Las Vegas, but the damage to her reputation was only the beginning of a life that would be lived, for better and worse, in the spotlight. Taylor had been a star almost from birth. She was born in London in 1932 to American parents, and when war clouds gathered over Europe, the family relocated to Los Angeles in 1939. She was signed by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer as a teenager and became a national sensation at the age of twelve with National Velvet in 1944, the story of a girl who rides her horse to victory in the Grand National.
She was beautiful, precocious, and utterly at home in front of the camera. As she grew into adulthood, the child star gave way to a striking young woman, and the studios carefully moved her into more mature parts. In 1950 she charmed audiences in the comedy Father of the Bride, and a year later she earned serious critical praise for her performance in A Place in the Sun, a brooding drama about class and ambition in which she played a wealthy socialite caught in a doomed romance. By the mid-1950s, she had become one of the biggest names in the industry, starred in the sprawling Texas epic Giant in 1956, and in 1958 took on the role of Maggie the Cat in the film adaptation of Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, a performance that won her a Golden Globe and cemented her reputation as a serious actress.
In 1960 she took home the Academy Award for Best Actress for her role in Butterfield 8, a film that was itself overshadowed by the scandal of her private life. The scandal never seemed to slow her down. In 1961, while filming Cleopatra in Rome, Taylor, still married to Fisher, found herself working alongside the Welsh actor Richard Burton, a brilliant and notoriously hard-drinking stage performer who was also married. The two began an affair on set, and this time the media frenzy was even greater than the Fisher episode.
The press, which had already denounced Taylor for wrecking one marriage, now watched her wreck another. The Vatican condemned her. Columnists called her a homewrecker a second time, and audiences had to decide whether to separate the actress from the woman. Taylor and Burton seemed not to care.
They married in 1964, and the media dubbed them Liz and Dick. Together they made eleven films, including the glossy drama The V. I. P.
s in 1963, an adaptation of The Taming of the Shrew in 1967, and, most importantly, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in 1966, directed by Mike Nichols. That film, a brutal, shouting match of a marriage drama based on Edward Albee’s play, earned Taylor the best reviews of her career. She won her second Academy Award for Best Actress, and for a time, she and Burton were the most famous, most watched, and most talked-about couple on the planet.
But the marriage that had been built on passion and scandal burned hot and fast. The couple separated in the early 1970s, divorced in 1974, reconciled, and remarried in 1975, but the second marriage lasted barely a year. Their divorce in 1976 seemed to mark the end of something not just for them but for Taylor’s reign at the center of the Hollywood universe. Her acting career, which had been in decline since the late 1960s, continued through the mid-1970s with films like The Blue Bird and Ash Wednesday, but the parts grew smaller and less memorable.
The woman who had once commanded the screen was now better known for her marriages, her jewels, and her health problems. Her sixth marriage, to United States Senator John Warner, a Republican from Virginia, was a different kind of partnership. Taylor had married actors, a producer, and a singer, but now she married a politician. The union, which lasted from 1976 to 1982, saw Taylor step away from the screen and into a supporting role, attending campaign events and standing beside Warner in public life.
It did not last, but it signaled a shift in her priorities. The actress, who had spent her adult life pursued by cameras, began to turn her attention outward. In the 1980s, at a time when AIDS was devastating communities and carrying a heavy stigma, Taylor became one of the first major celebrities to publicly take up the cause. She lent her name and her energy to HIV/AIDS activism, helping to raise millions of dollars for research and care.
For a woman whose public image had been so heavily defined by scandal and excess, this work gave her later years a different meaning. She was no longer just the star of gossip columns, but a voice for people who had none. Elizabeth Taylor died on March 23, 2011, of congestive heart failure. She was seventy-nine years old.
Her funeral took place the following day, a private Jewish ceremony held at her request. The ceremony began fifteen minutes behind schedule, and those who knew her understood the joke, she had always been late, and she had always done things her own way. She was laid to rest in the Great Mausoleum at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California. The woman who had been married eight times, twice to the same man, who had been condemned and adored in equal measure, who had won two Oscars and survived a lifetime of public scrutiny, was finally at rest.
The films remain, the scandals have faded into history, but the life itself, lived so completely in the open, continues to define what it means to be a star.