She was the most famous woman in the world. Her marriages (there were eight), affairs, jewelry and medical disasters were all exhaustively chronicled by the tabloids and paparazzi. But away from the klieg lights, a different side of Elizabeth Taylor — witty, wounded, desperate to prove herself — was shared with the tight circle of confidants who surrounded her during her tumultuous life.
And it’s one that Nanette Burstein, director of the new HBO documentary “Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes,” was able to highlight after the Taylor Estate contacted her and allowed her to sort through 40 hours of unreleased audio from interviews the screen legend conducted in the 1960s with journalist Richard Meryman.
“It’s extremely rare to have a legendary movie star be so candid about their inner life,” Burstein says. “It was an opportunity to not only understand this revered person in cinema history, but also to chart the arc of the women’s movement and the way that female roles started to shift in the 1950s and ’60s.”
Taylor came up through the studio system, first breaking hearts as the 12-year-old jockey in “National Velvet,” then growing into more adult roles as wives and debutantes in films like “Conspirator” and “Father of the Bride” while still a teen. Burstein’s film includes promotional material for a 16-year-old Taylor that all but salivates over her looks. It’s an ad campaign that hasn’t aged well.
“She was being discussed as a sexpot before she was even 18 years old,” Burstein notes. “They even give her measurements and her weight.”
Then there were Taylor’s off-screen relationships, the good (her union of equals with producer Mike Todd), the bad (her abusive marriage to Conrad Hilton) and the complicated (her co-dependent connection to Richard Burton, which blazed brightly before collapsing in a torrent of booze). Taylor saw Todd, who died in a plane crash roughly a year after they married, as the great love of her life.
“My theory is that it would have endured,” Burstein says. “He was the best match for her. I think they would have made a lot of movies together and in a healthy way, because some of the ways that she made movies with Richard Burton were not so healthy.”
There were professional triumphs after Todd died — including Oscar-nominated roles in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” “Suddenly, Last Summer” and, of course, “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” — that tapped into Taylor’s volcanic emotions, allowing her to stretch and snarl in ways that her studio overlords initially resisted.
But Taylor’s enduring legacy was probably her work advocating for AIDS. Her friendship with gay men like Roddy MacDowall, Montgomery Clift and Rock Hudson, whose death helped draw attention to AIDS, gave her a personal connection to the disease. She became one of the first stars to use her platform to push for more AIDS research, leveraging her celebrity to raise money.
“AIDS was seen as this ‘homosexual disease’ and nobody wanted to do anything about it,” Burstein says. “It enraged her that no one would talk about it. So she thought, ‘Well, I have this fame. It’s always been a toxic part of my life, but why don’t I use it to do amazing things? And she did. In her mind, that was her greatest achievement.”