7 Bombshell Details from Elizabeth Taylor's Colorful Life

Jack Smart, Carson BlackwelderMon, March 23, 2026 at 1:00 PM UTC

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From left: Elizabeth Taylor poses for a portrait in New York City, circa 1960; Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton pose on the set of 1965's 'The Sandpiper'Credit: TPLP/Getty; API/GAMMA/Gamma-Rapho via Getty I -

Elizabeth Taylor was a British-American actress best known for starring in films like National Velvet (1944), Giant (1956), Cleopatra (1963) and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966)

The two-time Oscar winner died of congestive heart failure in March 2011 at the age of 79

Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes, a 2024 HBO documentary, delves deep into Taylor's private life and career through unearthed interviews recorded in the mid-'60s

Elizabeth Taylor lived her life in front of the cameras, but — in the decades since her death — we're still learning more about one of the most popular stars of classic Hollywood cinema.

Director Nanette Burstein's documentary Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2024 before its release on HBO in August 2024. The nearly two-hour docufilm delves deep into both the Oscar-winning actress' at-home life and movie career like never before by pulling from 40 hours of unearthed conversations between Taylor and journalist Richard Meryman recorded between 1964 and 1965.

"So much had been written about her and scandalized about her," said Tim Mendelson, co-trustee of Taylor's estate and her executive assistant from 1990 until her death from congestive heart failure at age 79 on March 23, 2011. The Lost Tapes, he told PEOPLE, "sets the record straight."

The documentary covers Taylor's career and celebrity, while also revealing who she was as a wife, mother, activist and friend.

"If everybody could go through life with someone like Elizabeth Taylor over their shoulder supporting them," said Barbara Berkowitz, Taylor's lawyer and co-trustee, "we'd have a much nicer world."

To mark the 15th anniversary of Taylor's death, here's a look back at some of the biggest revelations from Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes.

Taylor remembered herself as a "terrified little girl"

Elizabeth Taylor poses for a portrait with a kitten in the 1940sCredit: API/GAMMA/Gamma-Rapho via Getty

The London-born actress needed no encouragement from her art dealer father, Francis Taylor, or stage actress mother, Sara Sothern, to give Hollywood a try when the family relocated to Los Angeles when Taylor was a young girl. However, the joys of acting gave way to irritation over her "grim" school on the MGM studio lot, nonstop chaperones and, in her teenage years, being "stuck as an ingenue" opposite much older actors.

In The Lost Tapes, the National Velvet star speaks candidly about having to grow up fast: Her first kiss was a week before her first on-camera one. "The film kiss was better," she quips.

Taylor married her first husband, hotel heir Conrad "Nicky" Hilton Jr., in May 1950. In one of the conversations with Meryman, she reluctantly recalls that she suffered a miscarriage during their eight-month marriage after a drunken Hilton kicked her in the stomach.

She drove with James Dean earlier on the day he died

Elizabeth Taylor as Leslie Benedict and James Dean as Jett Rink ride in a car together in a scene from the 1956 film 'Giant'Credit: Warner Brothers/Getty

Taylor became close with many of her costars, including on a project she particularly enjoyed: George Stevens' hit 1956 Western Giant, costarring Rock Hudson and James Dean.

In the tapes, she recalls Dean "would tell me about some of the grief and unhappiness in his life and some of his loves and tragedies. And the next day on the set I'd say, 'Hi, Jimmy!' And it was almost as if he didn't want to sort of recognize that he had revealed so much of himself the night before."

Taylor also recalls learning the news of Dean's death by car accident on Sept. 30, 1955, when Giant was in post-production. Taylor says that she had "just been with him that day, driving around the studio in his Porsche."

She adds, "He was so alive, he was so vital. I couldn't believe that he was dead."

Taylor's popularity was so heightened that some likened it to Beatlemania

Elizabeth Taylor poses for a photo in a green dress with a white fur wrap, circa 1950Credit: Silver Screen Collection/Getty

Fans are seen being physically held back by police at one point in the documentary; however, the hysteria wasn't at a film premiere. It was at Taylor's 1952 wedding to her second husband, British actor Michael Wilding, in London.

"It's early on, well before any scandals, when she's not even at the height of her fame," director Burstein told USA Today in August 2024 of the scene. "But it looks like The Beatles just turned up. That was shocking to me."

The paparazzi — which is said to have been invented to cover Taylor's eventual affair with Richard Burton — often swarmed her daily life.

"Photographers dressed up as priests would come to the door. Photographers would get inside the house dressed up as workmen or plumbers," Taylor says in the doc. "Paparazzi would climb over the wall, and we'd turn the hose on them."

Mike Todd was the love of her life — until Richard Burton

Elizabeth Taylor and Mike Todd pose for a portrait on their honeymoon in Acapulco, Mexico, on Feb. 7, 1957Credit: Bettmann Archive

Few would argue that Hilton, Wilding, Eddie Fisher, John Warner or Larry Fortensky (husbands one, two, four, six and seven, respectively) were the true loves of Taylor's life. At least not compared to Mike Todd, the Oscar-winning Around the World in 80 Days producer who swept her off her feet, fathered her first daughter, Liza, in 1957 and tragically died in a plane crash just 13 months into their wedded bliss.

"Their love affair is very touching," Burstein told PEOPLE, admitting they "had a complicated relationship too."

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Taylor's need "to be dominated," as the actress confesses, led to her tempestuous relationship with Burton, their 11 films together and their two marriages and two divorces between 1964 and 1976.

She attempted suicide during her marriage to Eddie Fisher

Elizabeth Taylor and Eddie Fisher are photographed after their wedding ceremony at Temple Beth Shalom in Las Vegas on May 12, 1959Credit: getty

While mourning the loss of Todd, Taylor tied the knot with his friend Fisher in 1959 — three hours after his divorce from Debbie Reynolds was finalized.

"I never loved Eddie," Taylor says in the new tapes. "I liked him. I felt sorry for him. And I liked talking [to him]. But he was not Mike."

She also reveals in the documentary that while married to Fisher, she was so miserable that she attempted suicide by taking sleeping pills "deliberately, calmly and in front of Eddie."

"I'd rather be dead than face divorce," she recalls. "I was fed up with living."

Taylor came to see her suicide attempt as "self-indulgent," saying that the consequences for her children made it "horrific" to look back on.

Ultimately, Taylor said in the tapes she looked back on her marriage with Fisher as "one big, friggin' awful mistake."

Taylor believed her first Oscar win was a sympathy vote

Elizabeth Taylor poses with her Best Actress Oscar for 'Butterfield 8' at the 33rd Academy Awards in Santa Monica, Calif., on April 17, 1961Credit: Archive Photos/Getty

Before her heralded turn in 1966's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? earned her a second Academy Award for Best Actress, Taylor won her first for 1960's Butterfield 8.

As it turns out, she despised the latter film, calling it — and her performance in it — "a piece of s---" in The Lost Tapes.

A severe bout with pneumonia while filming Cleopatra resulted in a highly publicized tracheotomy, during which Taylor later claimed she was pronounced dead four times. She laments in the documentary that she "won the Oscar for my tracheotomy."

In the end, family life and activism were more important to Taylor than acting

Elizabeth Taylor (center, bottom) and Richard Burton (top center) pose with their children: Michael Wilding Jr., Christopher Wilding, Liza Todd and Maria Burton in 1967Credit: Bob PENN/Gamma-Rapho via Getty

The final scenes in The Lost Tapes show Taylor founding the American Foundation for AIDS Research (amfAR) in 1985 and the Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation (ETAF) in 1991.

During a press conference, she notes that "no one wanted to talk about" the disease.

Taylor adds, "It so angered me that I finally thought to myself, 'Bitch! Do something yourself!' "

Friendships with gay men like Hudson, who died from AIDS in October 1985, awoke Taylor's activist spirit, but it was her "love and compassion" that made her frame the disease as a medical — rather than moral — issue.

"Everybody wanted to judge the people who had AIDS and how they got AIDS," Mendelson said. "She understood that because she was so judged, [including] for who she slept with."

Berkowitz said Taylor visited hospitals' AIDS wards and "made it all about the patient" — without cameras and prying eyes, for the first time in her very public life.

Most of all, Taylor thought of herself as a "big family person," according to Berkowitz.

"In the 20-plus years that I worked with her, she always had her family there for holidays. It was very important to her to be the glue that kept all of her children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren together," Berkowitz added.

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