The woman who always had to be in love: A personal tribute to Elizabeth Taylor from the Mail's Baz Bamigboye

By Baz Bamigboye



Stars: Elizabeth Taylor with Richard Burton as Martha and George in the film Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? in 1966. Of her eight marriages, she was wed to him twice. 'She should be Welsh but she wasn't born here. But it's as if I bred her in my Welsh bones,' he once said


Richard Burton called Elizabeth Taylor his greatest love both on and off screen and that’s how many will remember the actress who has died at the age of 79.

She’s the last of the great stars of the silver screen. She was like a goddess who prowled her way through the Forties, Fifties, Sixties and into the Seventies and, although her box-office stature had waned, she had an allure that held a strange sway over us.

There were few who knew how to seduce a man in a movie. ’I’ve done it in real life so I know how to do it’, she told me once.


She was a star almost from the time her second film Lassie Come Home came out in 1943 when she was eleven years of age but it was National Velvet, released the following year, which catapulted her to a kind of superstardom that doesn’t exist any more. She had a luminosity that most stars today don’t possess let alone know how to spell.


She won two Oscars for best actress and starred in everything from Father Of The Bride to Giant, Cat On A Hot Tin Roof and Cleopatra, but it was her many marriages that kept her in the public gaze.

She married eight times, twice to the same man, Richard Burton.

In an interview in the early Eighties, Burton told me how Elizabeth - she hated being called Liz - was the kind of woman who always had to be in love.

He described her as being fiery and tempestuous. ’She should be Welsh but she wasn’t born here. But it’s as if I bred her in my Welsh bones,' Burton told me during the interview at the Dorchester Hotel.

Glamorous: Elizabeth Taylor arrives with second husband Michael Wilding in London in 1953. They had two children together but the marriage was over within five years


She and Burton didn’t meet until they were in Cleopatra together in 1963 for which she was the first actress to break through the million dollars a picture barrier. He was her Mark Antony. Both were married to others but it didn’t matter. Passion could not keep them apart.

Elizabeth maintained that she was an old fashioned ‘girl’ and once she was in love she had to marry the object of her affection.

The first was Conrad Hilton Jr on May 6 1950 but by February 1 of the following year the relationship was over. Less than a year later she wed gentle actor Michael Wilding, they had two children together but the marriage was over within five years.

She had already caught the eye of showbusiness impresario Mike Todd and he was as tough as they come. He tamed her for a while, sort of.

They had one child together - but tragedy struck when he was killed in a plane crash in 1958.

Todd's best friend, heart-throb singer Eddie Fisher soon progressed from a shoulder to cry on to the next Mr Taylor.

Their initial romance became a huge scandal because Fisher was married at the time to Debbie Reynolds.


Elizabeth Taylor with third husband, showbusiness impresario Mike Todd. They had one child together but tragedy struck when he died in a plane crash in 1958. She was consoled by singer Eddie Fisher, who would become her next husband


Fisher and Reynolds, at the time, represented a sense of wholesomeness and Elizabeth was seen as the home-wrecker.

When Elizabeth and Fisher got together imagine Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt, to the power of ten.

But Fisher must have known that Elizabeth was the kind of woman who changed her men the way most women change their hairstyles. Once she wanted someone else you were out and this time it was Richard Burton’s turn and she said he was the only one who was man enough for her.

They were together from early 1964, broke up, remarried and divorced for good in 1976. She took away his heart and the diamonds he had lavished on her. Diamonds were something that made her famous violet eyes sparkle. She adored them and they became almost as big a trademark for her as a new husband.

Even though Burton was no longer by her side in a marital bed they, in their own way, never stopped loving each other. I saw Burton up until he died in 1984 and, although he had remarried, he often talked of his desire for Elizabeth. ‘Elizabeth and I, off and on, have been together for twenty years. I’ve known a great deal of women, but Elizabeth is the matrix of the human condition. She’s not like us. She comes from another planet. She’s remarkable’, Burton told me.

After Burton, Elizabeth married the courtly Washington insider Senator John Warner and although the couple got on she found life in the American capital a trifle dull.


A few years later she met Larry Fortensky, a builder, when they were both in rehab. They married in a lavish ceremony amongst the circus animals and the fun fair of Michael Jackson’s Neverland estate.

They had a short honeymoon and within days Elizabeth was back on the road drumming up publicity for her fragrance. Movies were few and far between and it was to perfume she turned to help maintain her in the manner to which she had long become accustomed.

But she wasn’t accustomed to men like Fortensky. As sweet as he was he couldn’t adjust to her world and she couldn’t adjust to his.

By 1996 she was on her own again. But never really alone. She maintained friendships from her childhood in Hampstead, North London, and from the friends she made in the early years of her acting career.


Style switch: Elizabeth Taylor went through a series of image changes following her marriage to eighth husband, builder Larry Fortensky in 1991. But she wasn't accustomed to men like him. As sweet as he was he couldn't adjust to her world and she couldn't adjust to his


It was to those people she turned to at times of crisis and they always came running to help her get back on her feet. Those friends were needed often because there were things that often ailed Elizabeth. She was in back pain for decades, she had many operations to put that right and she took many pills when those operations failed.

But whenever she appeared in public, to flog a fragrance or to raise funds for the various AIDS causes she was involved in, she looked and behaved every inch the star she was.


Elizabeth won her Oscars for Butterfield 8 in 1961 and six years later she won again for her Martha in the film of Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? In 1993 the Academy bestowed the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian award on her for her tireless efforts to raise funds for AIDS research.

She was made a Dame of the British Empire by the Queen in 2000.

Elizabeth once told me that she thought her career was over before she hit her teens. She recalled how she made There’s One Born Every Minute, her first film. ‘The studio didn’t like me and dropped me. I was ten years of age. It was cruel.Then MGM signed me up and I made Lassie Come Home and never looked back after that. You have to remember that in the days of those early films I made people went to the movies all the time, sometimes two or three times a week. Television hadn’t taken hold then. People listened to the radio and went to the movies.

'The magazines and gossip writers followed your every move. You can’t imagine what it was like. But we had the time of our lives. We had the best of it. We made movies then, they don’t really make them now, do they?’ the actress wondered during a conversation we had in London several years ago.

I was lucky enough to follow Elizabeth Taylor throughout much of my career and I always measured other stars against her firepower, and most of the time she won.

Her best films, Cat On A Hot Tin Roof with Paul Newman, Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? opposite Burton, Giant with James Dean, Father Of The Bride with Spencer Tracy, Suddenly Last Summer, National Velvet, A Place In the Sun and The Taming Of The Shrew are still shown on television and they’re worth viewing just to see how an actress's career was developed and sustained during the golden age of movies.

Movie memories: Elizabeth Taylor in one of her most passionate performances alongside Paul Newman in Cat On A Hot Tin Roof in 1958

It’s difficult to imagine now , but the $1million she was paid to make Cleopatra, a flop which almost sank Fox, was mammoth - it's the equivalent of Angelina Jolie asking for, let’s say, $50million dollars today. Interestingly, Jolie is in talks to star in a new Cleopatra film based on Stacy Schiff’s book.

It will be fascinating to see what happens to all of Elizabeth’s gems, particularly her diamonds. Somehow though the memory of her, the sheer sexiness of her and that sparkle she had when she was at her best will linger on.

When she heard that I had covered her wedding to Larry Fortensky she approached me at a function a few days later and told me I was foolish to risk my life to cover her nuptials. Then she grabbed me and hugged me.’I’m glad you’re safe and I’m privately glad you were, in your own way, at the wedding’.

Now that was a hug by a real star that I have never forgotten.
And never will.


source:dailymail