The photograph many people have never seen shows Elizabeth Taylor alone in a hotel room in Europe, with no makeup and no jewels, staring out a window. For a woman the world called the most beautiful in the world, who had been married eight times and lived her life under constant public scrutiny, the image captures something rarely discussed: a profound loneliness that never really went away. Understanding why Taylor’s marriages unfolded the way they did requires going back to the beginning, to a childhood that never really happened. Elizabeth Rosemond Taylor was born on February 27, 1932, in Hampstead, London, to Francis Taylor, an American art dealer, and Sara Sothern, a stage actress who had given up her career after marrying.
From the start, Sara had a plan for her daughter. The family moved to Los Angeles in 1939, and a family friend soon suggested that little Elizabeth audition for movies. Her violet eyes and remarkable face caught the attention of Hollywood almost immediately. Universal Studios signed her at age nine, and MGM picked her up not long after.
By 12, she was starring in National Velvet. By 15, fan magazines were describing her in terms that would make any modern parent deeply uncomfortable. She never got to be a teenager in any normal sense. The studio system of that era treated its young contract players almost like property.
Her schedule, her appearance, her weight, her public image were all managed and controlled by MGM. Her mother was almost always on set, pushing Elizabeth hard in ways that blurred the line between encouragement and pressure. Taylor later described her mother as both her greatest supporter and one of the most suffocating forces in her early life. The result was a young woman extraordinarily sophisticated in some ways, comfortable with cameras and public attention, yet completely underprepared in others.
She had almost no experience with normal adolescence or making her own choices. Young actresses at MGM were told who they could and couldn’t date. Some were put on amphetamines to stay thin and barbiturates to sleep, with a casualness that looks deeply troubling in retrospect. Taylor once described going to the studio as a child and essentially never leaving.
She said the first time she felt she had any real control over her own life was when she fell in love, which may explain everything that came next. In the spring of 1950, Elizabeth Taylor was 18 and, by Hollywood standards, practically overdue for marriage. The man she chose was Conrad Nicholson Hilton Jr. , known as Nicky, a 23-year-old heir to the Hilton Hotel fortune, handsome and charming.
The wedding took place on May 6, 1950, at the Church of the Good Shepherd in Beverly Hills, with 800 guests in attendance. The studio reportedly considered it excellent publicity. The marriage lasted eight months. What happened between the wedding and the divorce filing took years to become known.
Accounts pieced together over time described Nicky Hilton as having serious problems with alcohol and gambling and being volatile and at times physically threatening toward her behind closed doors. There were incidents during their European honeymoon that left Elizabeth frightened and confused. She had grown up in a controlled, structured environment and had no road map for being alone with a man who frightened her. People who spoke to her friends from that period described a young woman who returned from Europe visibly changed, quieter, thinner, less quick to smile.
The divorce was finalized in February 1951. Elizabeth was 19. She rarely spoke harshly about Nicky Hilton in public, but when asked once whether she had any regrets about the marriage, she said she regretted being so young and mistaking intensity for love. The press quickly moved on.
A brief marriage and a quiet divorce were practically standard Hollywood in 1951. But the second marriage would be something entirely different. Michael Wilding represented something Elizabeth Taylor had never really had: steadiness. Wilding was a British actor, 20 years her senior, gentle, calm, and completely unintimidated by her fame.
They married on February 21, 1952, in a simple civil ceremony in London. Elizabeth was 19. Michael was 39. They had two sons, Michael Jr.
, born in 1953, and Christopher, born in 1955. Elizabeth described the early to mid-1950s as some of the most peaceful years of her life. The peace didn’t last. As Elizabeth’s star continued to rise explosively, Michael’s began to fade.
Hollywood is unforgiving in that particular way, and being the husband of one of the most famous women on Earth while your own career recedes is its own kind of slow erosion. He struggled with being seen as secondary, an appendage. The steadiness that had attracted Elizabeth also meant he wasn’t wired for the intensity she seemed to generate and require. By 1957, the marriage was effectively over.
They divorced in January 1957 after five years together. There is a note of genuine sadness in almost every account of this marriage, not the dramatic sadness of some of her other relationships, but something quieter, a mismatch between a good man and a woman who needed more than good. Elizabeth remained fond of Wilding for the rest of her life. He later worked as her personal assistant for a period in the 1970s, which speaks to a warmth that outlasted the marriage itself.
But even as that marriage was ending, someone was about to walk into Elizabeth Taylor’s life who would change everything. Mike Todd was born Avrom Hirsch Goldbogen in 1909 in Minneapolis. He was a theatrical producer and showman who had been bankrupt twice and come back both times. He developed the widescreen film format Todd-AO and produced the 1956 blockbuster Around the World in 80 Days, which won the Academy Award for Best Picture.
He was 47 when he met Elizabeth. She was 24. What made Todd different from the men who had preceded him was that he seemed to genuinely delight in Elizabeth Taylor, not in managing her or being overwhelmed by her, but in matching her. He was theatrical in his affections and extravagant, giving her emeralds and diamonds on a scale that was almost absurd.
For a woman who had spent much of her life being managed and shaped by other people’s visions, this was intoxicating. They married on February 2, 1957, in Acapulco, Mexico, just weeks after her divorce from Wilding was finalized. Their daughter, Liza Todd, was born in August of that year. By all accounts, the marriage was genuinely happy, though turbulent.
Todd could be domineering, and his financial life was perpetually chaotic. But there was a mutual recognition between them. Elizabeth later said that with Mike Todd, for the first time in her life, she felt like a woman rather than a girl, or a star, or a symbol. On March 22, 1958, 14 months after their wedding, Mike Todd boarded his private plane, named Lucky Liz, for a flight from Burbank to New York.
Elizabeth had wanted to be on that flight. She had a bad chest cold, and Todd insisted she stay behind, overruling her pleas to come along. The plane crashed in the Zuni Mountains of New Mexico. Mike Todd and everyone else on board were killed.
He was 50. Elizabeth Taylor was 26. The grief that followed was not the composed, dignified kind Hollywood expected from its stars. She was completely and visibly shattered.
She lost weight rapidly and could barely function. People who saw her in the weeks after the crash described someone who looked like she was moving through water. She could not sleep and stopped eating with any regularity. Friends took turns staying with her because she couldn’t be alone.
She had a toddler, Liza, not yet a year old, and caring for a baby while barely able to care for herself was overwhelming. Elizabeth also had to live with the knowledge of how close she came to being on that plane. If she hadn’t been sick, if Todd hadn’t overruled her, she would have been there. She lived with that awareness for the rest of her life.
In the chaos of that grief, she reached for the nearest person. That person was Eddie Fisher, Mike Todd’s best friend and the husband of one of Elizabeth’s closest friends. Eddie Fisher was, in 1958, one of the most popular entertainers in America, with a television show, a recording career, and a wholesome public image. When Todd died, Fisher was one of the first people at Elizabeth’s side.
He flew to be with her and helped manage the immediate aftermath of the tragedy. Over the following months, whether through grief, proximity, a genuine emotional bond, or some combination of all three, Elizabeth Taylor and Eddie Fisher fell into a relationship. The fallout was immediate and severe. Debbie Reynolds, Fisher’s wife, was enormously popular, and the public narrative was simple and brutal: Elizabeth Taylor, the homewrecker, had stolen America’s sweetheart’s husband.
Fan mail turned vicious. Movie theaters were picketed. A columnist wrote that Taylor was a scarlet woman who deserved to be run out of Hollywood. The reality was more complicated.
Fisher and Reynolds’ marriage had its own problems, and Fisher was not simply a passive victim who had been seduced. But in 1958, the full weight of public anger landed almost entirely on Elizabeth. The cultural rules of that era held women to a different standard than men in these situations. Taylor did not apologize and didn’t perform contrition for the cameras.
She and Fisher married on May 12, 1959, in Las Vegas. The press continued to watch her with particular intensity. The irony is that the Fisher marriage was, by almost every account, not a particularly happy one. The relationship was born in crisis and grief and couldn’t quite survive the return to ordinary life.
Fisher struggled with the gravitational pull of Elizabeth’s celebrity. He drank and developed a dependency on prescription medications. By 1961, it was effectively over, though the formal end wouldn’t come until 1964. By then, Elizabeth Taylor was already somewhere else entirely, on a film set in Rome.
The film was Cleopatra, and the man she was falling for was already married. His name was Richard Burton. In January 1962, Elizabeth Taylor arrived in Rome to begin filming Cleopatra for 20th Century Fox. The production had already been a disaster, with a year of delays, a near-fatal illness that had hospitalized Elizabeth in London, and sets rebuilt again and again.
By the time cameras actually rolled, the film had become the most expensive movie ever made up to that point. Richard Burton arrived to play Mark Antony. He was Welsh, a classically trained Shakespearean actor with a voice like a cathedral organ and a reputation as one of the most gifted men of his generation. He was also married to Sybil Williams, his first wife, with whom he had two daughters.
The broad facts of what happened on the set of Cleopatra are not disputed. Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton began an affair during filming. Both were still technically married. The Italian press discovered it and published photographs.
The Vatican issued a public statement condemning Elizabeth Taylor’s conduct. The American and British press went into a frenzy. But what tends to get lost in the scandal is that people who witnessed it consistently described this as not a casual affair. Both seemed genuinely stunned by what was happening.
Burton, who had a reputation as a serial romantic, was reportedly destabilized by his feelings for Taylor. He told friends he never felt anything like it. Elizabeth made no attempt to hide what she felt. They both finalized their divorces and married for the first time on March 15, 1964, in Montreal.
What followed was the most public, most scrutinized, and in many ways most genuinely passionate relationship of Elizabeth Taylor’s life. The Burton-Taylor years have been so thoroughly documented that it’s almost impossible to separate reality from mythology. What is clear from people who knew them is that they were deeply matched, intellectually, emotionally, in their appetites for life and its extremities. They traveled the world together.
He bought her the Krupp diamond and the Taylor-Burton diamond, which at 69 carats was among the most famous gemstones on Earth. He wrote her letters of staggering beauty. He also drank, heavily and destructively, and Elizabeth, who had her own complex relationship with alcohol and prescription medications connected to chronic physical pain from a long history of injuries and illness, matched him drink for drink in some periods. The relationship’s intellectual dimension is often overlooked.
Burton was ferociously well-read, a Welsh working-class boy who had educated himself into one of the most formidable minds in the entertainment world. Elizabeth, who had never been given a conventional education, responded with genuine hunger. She read the books he recommended and engaged with his ideas. Their arguments were legendary, loud, theatrical, and occasionally genuinely cruel in the way only people who know each other completely can be cruel.
But in their best moments, they seemed to be two people who had found the only other person in the world who could actually hold them. The first marriage ended in June 1974 after 10 years together. People close to them pointed to the drinking on both sides and the intensity that had started to tip from passion into damage. Sixteen months later, in October 1975, they remarried in Botswana in a small ceremony.
It was impulsive and romantic. The second Burton marriage lasted less than a year. They divorced again in July 1976. Elizabeth Taylor was 44 years old.
The relationship did not fully end with the second divorce but continued unresolved until Burton’s death in August 1984. When he died, Elizabeth was devastated in a way that reminded people of her grief after Mike Todd. It was the grief of someone who had lost the person they considered their true counterpart. She was not at the funeral; his fourth wife controlled the arrangements.
Elizabeth sent flowers. After Burton, Elizabeth Taylor entered the most overlooked period of her life. She married John Warner, a Virginia politician who would go on to serve as a United States Senator for 30 years, in December 1976. He was not a movie star or a showman.
People who knew Elizabeth well theorized that she chose Warner because he was so different from what had come before. After the consuming intensity of the Burton years, she wanted something quieter, something stable, something that wouldn’t catch fire. She moved to Warner’s farm in Virginia and attended political functions as a senator’s wife. She gained weight, and the press covered it with remarkable cruelty.
Photographers went out of their way to catch her at unflattering angles, and columnists wrote about her body as though they had a right to it. The coverage missed the physical context entirely. Taylor had been dealing with back problems and a series of spinal injuries for decades, and chronic pain and the medications used to manage it frequently affect weight. Taylor spoke plainly about this period.
She was not happy. The quiet she had reached for turned out to be loneliness with better manners. She felt invisible in a new way, as though the person she actually was had ceased to be of interest to anyone, including, possibly, herself. The marriage ended in November 1982 after six years.
The final chapter of her romantic life was Larry Fortensky, a construction worker from Stanton, California, 20 years younger than Elizabeth. They met in 1988 at the Betty Ford Center, where both were seeking treatment for substance dependency. She was 56. He was 36.
They married on October 6, 1991, at Michael Jackson’s Neverland Ranch, a ceremony startling in its strangeness, with helicopters circling overhead and paparazzi trying to get photographs by any means available. The marriage lasted five years, ending in 1996. Fortensky said in the years since that he loved Elizabeth genuinely, but the world she inhabited was too large, too loud, too saturated with celebrity to allow anything like a normal life. After the divorce, Elizabeth Taylor never married again.
She spent her later years doing the work she described as the most important of her life: AIDS activism. She co-founded amfAR, the Foundation for AIDS Research, in 1985 at a moment when most of Hollywood was afraid to even say the word AIDS out loud. She raised hundreds of millions of dollars and testified before Congress, spending her personal capital, time, and health in the service of people the world had largely decided to look away from. Elizabeth Taylor died on March 23, 2011, of congestive heart failure in Los Angeles at the age of 79.
In the decades since her death, the tabloid framework around her life has slowly given way to something more honest. What was actually there was a girl who went to work at age nine and never really stopped, shaped and reshaped by an industry with very specific ideas about what she was for. She was married the first time before she had any real experience of making her own choices. She fell genuinely, catastrophically in love at least twice.
She survived physical, emotional, and professional challenges that would have flattened most people. From her teenage years onward, she dealt with spinal injuries, respiratory illnesses, surgeries, and chronic pain. By her 50s, she had undergone dozens of operations. The medications she depended on to manage that pain were the same ones that contributed to the dependencies she spent years fighting in treatment.
She was not reckless. She was someone who had never been taught how to be alone, who had been told from age nine that her value was in her beauty and her effect on other people, and who spent her entire adult life in a world that constantly confirmed that message. The marriages were not failures, exactly. They were searches.
Some found real love, real warmth, real connection, even if they couldn’t sustain it. Some were mistakes made in grief or loneliness. Some were acts of profound hope in the face of circumstances that probably didn’t warrant it. By most accounts, she was a genuinely loyal friend, an intensely loving mother, and a woman of surprising warmth and humor who bore very little resemblance to the myths that had accumulated around her name.
People who knew her personally described someone who was trying, always trying, to find something real in a world that kept turning her into a symbol. She found it in pieces, in her children, in her closest friendships, in her AIDS work, and sometimes in the marriages themselves, at least in the best of them.