Roush Review: Film Legend Elizabeth Taylor Tells Her Incredible Life Story

Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes

Matt's Rating:

“It was truly like an eclipse of the sun,” Hollywood producer Samuel Marx is heard gushing about his first glimpse of Elizabeth Taylor, whom he helped launch to movie stardom when he cast the precocious beauty at age 10 in 1943’s Lassie Come Home.

Few stars blazed so brightly, with as much electrifying glamour, as Taylor (1932-2011). Her tumultuous life in the public spotlight was even more the stuff of legend. It’s her voice we mostly hear, speaking candidly, with the occasional girlish — dare we say flirtatious? — giggle in director Nanette Burstein’s fascinating documentary Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes, culled from 40 hours of newly discovered audio recordings during interviews with journalist Richard Meryman.

“Maybe because of my personal life, I suggest something illicit,” Taylor muses. “But I am not illicit. I am not immoral. I have made mistakes, and I have paid for all of them.”

As she speaks, we’re regaled with a trove of photos, film clips, home movie and newsreel footage, covers of tabloids and newspaper headlines, all a testament to her status at the pinnacle of Hollywood royalty. Whatever she did, whomever she wed and later divorced, was front-page news.

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The Lost Tapes is an invaluable guide through Taylor’s remarkable life, from National Velvet ingenue to her Oscar-winning triumph in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? She remembers pushing her parents to put her in movies: “The idea of being in films was like the most magical extension of make-believe.” The fantasy soon soured when she was thrust into adult roles as a teenager: “I had to behave like a sophisticated woman, and in my own world, I was a terrified little girl.”

That terror and insecurity would haunt Taylor through her first marriages and much of her career, but when she was swept off her feet by boisterous producer Mike Todd, 25 years her senior, “I learned to enjoy life much more,” until his untimely death in a plane crash. The scandal that followed, when Todd’s best friend Eddie Fisher left “America’s sweetheart” Debbie Reynolds for the grieving Taylor, was eclipsed when Taylor dumped Fisher for Richard Burton following their notoriously torrid affair on the set of Cleopatra.

The film also touches on her friendships with closeted gay actors such as Roddy McDowall and Rock Hudson and her activism for AIDS research. Ultimately, Taylor found peace by compartmentalizing her private and public personas: “One is flesh and blood, and one is cellophane.” Neither will be forgotten soon.

Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes, Premieres Saturday, August 3, 8/7c, HBO