No one, but no one, commanded a room like a young Elizabeth Taylor—a Hollywood legend celebrated as much for her diva-like behavior as her Oscar-winning performances. This is someone who built her outfits around her megawatt Van Cleef & Arpels diamonds, and who once flounced out of a 1965 Beverly Hills dinner before Princess Margaret, the guest of honor, had even arrived, after taking objection to the seating plan. (Taylor felt strongly that she and her then husband Richard Burton should have been at Margaret and Lord Snowdon’s own VIP table.) When the late Queen Elizabeth II traveled to Washington, D.C., on her 1976 tour of America, she decided to host a 1,500-person reception at the British Embassy. All night long, a fleet of television crews shadowed Her Majesty as she moved around the embassy’s velvet-soft green lawn, shaking hands with her many guests—until, suddenly, the cameramen up and disappeared in a frenzy. It turned out that Taylor had made her long-overdue grand entrance, and MGM royalty trumped actual royalty in terms of TV ratings—a fact Elizabeth II found deeply amusing.
Now, with the star on everybody’s lips yet again thanks to one Taylor Swift—“I’d cry my eyes violet / Elizabeth Taylor / Tell me for real / Do you think it’s forever?” she sings in “Elizabeth Taylor,” the second track on her latest album, The Life of a Showgirl—we take a look back at the early years of the Elizabeth Taylor, one of Hollywood’s greatest legends.
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Elizabeth Taylor at two, with her mother, former stage actress Sara Taylor (née Sothern), and her brother, Howard.
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Taylor appeared in her first film, There’s One Born Every Minute (1942), at nine. Roles in Lassie Come Home (1943), Jane Eyre (1943), and The White Cliffs of Dover (1944) would soon follow.
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A promotional still for National Velvet (1944). Taylor was famously given The Pie (formerly King Charles), her horse in the film, as a birthday gift after wrapping.
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By 13, Taylor had become a major teen star. Her seven-year contract with MGM at the time included a weekly salary of $750 (nearly $13,000 today).
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Dancing with a young Roddy McDowall at a Hollywood ball.
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On the set of Victor Saville’s 1949 thriller Conspirator.
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Bathing her dogs at 17.
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Hanging around with a young Jane Powell, one of her co-stars in Mervyn LeRoy’s Little Women 1949).
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Striking a sophisticated pose in a velvet dress at about 18.
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With her first husband, Conrad Hilton Jr., after their wedding at the Church of the Good Shepherd in Beverly Hills. Their troubled marriage would last eight months.
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At the premiere of Mervyn LeRoy’s Quo Vadis with her future husband Michael Wilding.
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c. 1951
With Montgomery Clift in George Stevens’s A Place in the Sun (1951).
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With a head full of lather at about 20.
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Exiting La Tour d'Argent in Paris with her second husband, Michael Wilding.
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With James Dean, during a break from filming George Stevens’s Giant.
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Taylor bore two children during her five-year marriage to Wilding, Michael (at left) and Christopher.
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Doing a bit of painting en plein air.
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With her third husband, producer Mike Todd. Their marriage would be cut short by Todd’s death in a plane crash in 1958.
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At the 1957 Cannes Film Festival, where Around the World in 80 Days, which Todd produced, screened out of competition.
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Doing publicity for Edward Dmytryk’s Raintree Country (1957), co-starring Montgomery Clift, Eva Marie Saint, and Lee Marvin.
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c. 1958
With Paul Newman on the set of Richard Brooks’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.
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On the set of Joseph Mankiewicz’s Suddenly, Last Summer, co-starring Clift and Katharine Hepburn.
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Arriving in London with her family, including Eddie Fisher, her fourth husband.
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On a boat in Ischia with Richard Burton during a break from filming Cleopatra (1963). The circulation of this image in the press led to Taylor and Burton’s famous condemnation by the Vatican for “erotic vagrancy.” (She was still married to Fisher at the time.)
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Trying a blond wig on for size.
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In Montreal, at her first wedding to Burton.
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On the set of Vincente Minnelli’s The Sandpiper (1965), co-starring Burton and Eva Marie Saint. Over the course of their careers, Taylor and Burton made 11 films together.
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1965
On the set of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf—which would win Taylor her second Academy Award (the first was for 1961’s BUtterfield 8)—with Burton and director Mike Nichols.
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On the set of Franco Zefferelli’s The Taming of the Shrew (1967), also co-starring Burton.
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With Burton, near the coast of Sardinia, on their yacht Kalizma.
