She was essentially the most well-known lady on the earth. Her marriages (there have been eight), affairs, jewellery and medical disasters have been all exhaustively chronicled by the tabloids and paparazzi. However away from the klieg lights, a unique aspect of Elizabeth Taylor — witty, wounded, determined to show herself — was shared with the tight circle of confidants who surrounded her throughout her tumultuous life.
And it’s one which Nanette Burstein, director of the brand new HBO documentary “Elizabeth Taylor: The Misplaced Tapes,” was in a position to spotlight after the Taylor Property contacted her and allowed her to type by means of 40 hours of unreleased audio from interviews the display screen legend performed within the Nineteen Sixties with journalist Richard Meryman.
“It’s extraordinarily uncommon to have a legendary film star be so candid about their internal life,” Burstein says. “It was a chance to not solely perceive this revered particular person in cinema historical past, but in addition to chart the arc of the ladies’s motion and the way in which that feminine roles began to shift within the Nineteen Fifties and ’60s.”
Taylor got here up by means of the studio system, first breaking hearts because the 12-year-old jockey in “Nationwide Velvet,” then rising into extra grownup roles as wives and debutantes in movies like “Conspirator” and “Father of the Bride” whereas nonetheless a teen. Burstein’s movie contains promotional materials for a 16-year-old Taylor that each one however salivates over her appears to be like. It’s an advert marketing campaign that hasn’t aged properly.
“She was being mentioned as a sexpot earlier than she was even 18 years previous,” Burstein notes. “They even give her measurements and her weight.”
Then there have been Taylor’s off-screen relationships, the great (her union of equals with producer Mike Todd), the unhealthy (her abusive marriage to Conrad Hilton) and the sophisticated (her co-dependent connection to Richard Burton, which blazed brightly earlier than collapsing in a torrent of booze). Taylor noticed Todd, who died in a airplane crash roughly a yr after they married, as the good love of her life.
“My principle is that it could have endured,” Burstein says. “He was the perfect match for her. I feel they’d have made a variety of films collectively and in a wholesome means, as a result of among the ways in which she made films with Richard Burton weren’t so wholesome.”
There have been skilled triumphs after Todd died — together with Oscar-nominated roles in “Cat on a Scorching Tin Roof,” “Immediately, Final Summer time” and, after all, “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” — that tapped into Taylor’s volcanic feelings, permitting her to stretch and snarl in ways in which her studio overlords initially resisted.
However Taylor’s enduring legacy was in all probability her work advocating for AIDS. Her friendship with homosexual males like Roddy MacDowall, Montgomery Clift and Rock Hudson, whose dying helped draw consideration to AIDS, gave her a private connection to the illness. She grew to become one of many first stars to make use of her platform to push for extra AIDS analysis, leveraging her celeb to lift cash.
“AIDS was seen as this ‘gay illness’ and no one wished to do something about it,” Burstein says. “It enraged her that nobody would speak about it. So she thought, ‘Effectively, I’ve this fame. It’s at all times been a poisonous a part of my life, however why don’t I exploit it to do superb issues? And he or she did. In her thoughts, that was her best achievement.”