12 Things We Learned From ‘Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes’

Elizabeth Taylor was arguably Earth’s most famous woman from age 10 until her death in 2011. And yet, throughout her triumphant and tragic, one-of-a-kind life, she was defined by others — Hollywood studios, seven husbands, the insatiable press. Now, in Nanette Burstein’s revelatory HBO Original Documentary, Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes (debuting Aug. 3 on HBO and Max), the late star finally gets the chance to define herself once and for all.

Culled from more than 40 hours of previously unreleased audio interviews by turns bawdy, vulnerable and defiant, we get to listen in as she candidly discusses what it was like on the other side of the cameras — what it was like to be Elizabeth Taylor. Here are 12 of the most fascinating things we learned from the must-see new film.

She didn’t think she was beautiful.

Taylor tells an interviewer she always felt like a fraud when people discussed her beauty, saying she is “not so pretty … I mean, on the inside.” Because of her messy personal life — eight marriages to seven men (she wed Richard Burton twice) — she thought she suggested something “illicit and immoral” to people. Not that she felt immoral — and she adds that she more than paid the price for her mistakes.

Courtesy HBO

Her ambition burned early.

During a life-changing visit to the Warner Bros. studio with her parents at 10, she was transported. Her only desire was to become an actress — her mother, a former actress, was dead set against it. After her debut in Lassie Come Home, Taylor studied for three hours a day in MGM’s studio school, then went to the set for eight hours of acting. Told she was too small for the lead in the horse-racing film National Velvet, she claims she obsessively stretched every day until she grew 3 inches. Impressed by her tenacity, the director gave her the part.

She was sexualized at a young age.

Playing actor Robert Taylor’s wife in the film Conspirator at 16, Elizabeth Taylor had to kiss her costar (no relation) onscreen — just one week after her first kiss in real life. “The film kiss was better than my real-life kiss,” she says. “I was thrown into the adult world … but in my own world I was a terrified little girl.” MGM’s publicists sent her out on phony dates to feed the press. At 18, she met and married 23-year-old hotel heir Conrad Hilton Jr. “I was not prepared to be an adult,” she recalls. “I’d been sheltered and protected — the repercussions were that I made horrendous mistakes.” Taylor was so scared to consummate her first marriage that she locked herself in the bathroom on her wedding night. “Nothing happened for three days,” she says, laughing, adding that it only did with the help of some liquid courage.

(Left to right) Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor

Alamy

Her eyes were not purple.

Asked what color her world-famous eyes are, Taylor replies, “dark blue,” adding that the legend of her purple peepers was “some journalist’s romantic idea.”