59 Fun Facts About Elizabeth Taylor

In which city was Elizabeth Taylor born in 1932?

London. Her American father dealt in art there until 1939, when her mother took the children to California months before the war; the English accent she kept helped win her first big film roles.

Which US ambassador urged Taylor's father to bring the family home to America in 1939?

Joseph P. Kennedy. The father of a future president had his office urge Americans to get their families out, and her mother sailed with the two children in spring 1939, months before the war began.

Taylor's famous eyes were rimmed by dark double eyelashes caused by what?

A genetic mutation. It gave her a second row of lashes so dark that a cameraman on one of her first films took them for make-up and asked for it to be taken off.

Which studio dropped Taylor after a year and one film before MGM signed her?

Universal. It gave her one small part, in There's One Born Every Minute, and let her go within a year; MGM then cast her beside a collie in Lassie Come Home and made her a star.

In her first starring role, at 12, Taylor plays a girl who wants to ride as a jockey in which race?

The Grand National. The studio first judged her too small for the part and gave it to her only months later; decades on she still called it the most exciting film she ever made.

Which single word did Taylor record as Maggie Simpson's first, in a 1992 episode of The Simpsons?

Daddy. Maggie says it only after Homer has put her to bed and shut the door, so the father who had longed to hear the word from his children never does.

Taylor's 1946 children's book Nibbles and Me was about her pet what?

Chipmunk. She wrote the story in a school copybook and drew the pictures herself, and a New York publisher brought it out when she was 14.

Which March sister did Taylor play in MGM's 1949 film of Little Women?

Amy. In the novel Amy is the youngest sister, but with the much younger Margaret O'Brien cast as Beth, the film swapped their places and made Beth the baby of the family.

MGM used Taylor's 1950 wedding to hotel heir Nicky Hilton to promote which of her films?

Father of the Bride. She played Spencer Tracy's daughter planning her big day, and the comedy opened within weeks of her own ceremony; the real marriage was over in less than a year.

A Place in the Sun (1951), which Taylor called her first real acting job, was based on which novel?

An American Tragedy. Theodore Dreiser built the 1925 novel on a real case from 1906, when Chester Gillette took his girlfriend out on an Adirondack lake and was later executed for her murder.

Which heroine did Taylor play in MGM's medieval epic Ivanhoe (1952)?

Rebecca. The shoot changed her life off screen too: during it she began the romance with the British actor Michael Wilding, twenty years her senior, that led to her second marriage.

Taylor was loaned to Paramount for Elephant Walk (1954) after which original star fell ill?

Vivien Leigh. She had to withdraw soon after shooting began in Ceylon, and the finished film still shows her, not Taylor, in some of the long shots.

Which of Taylor's co-stars died in a car crash shortly after finishing his scenes in Giant (1956)?

James Dean. He was killed before the film was finished, and one mumbled speech had to be re-recorded after his death by his friend Nick Adams, imitating his voice.

Which film brought Taylor her first Academy Award nomination?

MGM hoped the Civil War drama would be another Gone with the Wind; she found her mentally disturbed Southern belle fascinating but disliked the film.

How did Taylor's third husband, the producer Mike Todd, die in 1958?

In a plane crash. His private plane, named the Lucky Liz after her, went down in a storm over New Mexico; she had wanted to fly with him but stayed home ill.

Taylor's affair with Eddie Fisher broke up his marriage to which actress, her close friend?

Debbie Reynolds. The two later made peace, and in 2001 they sent up their own images together in These Old Broads, a TV film written by Reynolds's daughter, Carrie Fisher.

Taylor won her first Oscar for playing a call girl in which film, one she openly hated?

BUtterfield 8. She made it only to finish her MGM contract, and believed the award was a sympathy vote: she had nearly died of pneumonia weeks before the ceremony.

For Cleopatra, Taylor became the first actress to be paid how much for a single film?

$1 million. She named the figure half in jest and the studio said yes; as the shoot overran, overtime more than doubled it.

During the Cleopatra shoot in 1961, Taylor's near-fatal pneumonia required which procedure?

One news agency wrongly reported her death; Fox scrapped the footage and restarted in Rome with a new director and a new Mark Antony.

Cleopatra's runaway costs came close to bankrupting which Hollywood studio?

20th Century Fox. The epic was among the biggest box-office earners of 1963, yet it had cost so much and taken so long to make that the studio behind it came close to ruin.

Taylor's affair with Richard Burton began in 1962 while Cleopatra was shooting in which Italian city?

Rome. The rumours were confirmed that June, when a paparazzo photographed the two, both still married to other people, together on a yacht off the island of Ischia.

During the Cleopatra affair, a Vatican weekly accused Taylor of what?

'Erotic vagrancy'. The phrase came in April 1962, when she and Burton were each still married to someone else; two years later they were married to each other.

Taylor won her second Oscar as a blowsy, middle-aged faculty wife in which film?

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? She put on weight and a greying wig to play a woman far older than herself and won, while Burton, nominated as her on-screen husband, lost.

In a 1966 Oxford staging of Doctor Faustus with Burton, Taylor played which non-speaking character?

Helen of Troy. The two gave a week of performances to raise money for Oxford's student theatre, and her whole part was a brief, wordless appearance.

Which director made the 1967 film of The Taming of the Shrew with Taylor as Katharina?

Franco Zeffirelli. He had first pictured Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni as the leads; Taylor and Burton came aboard as co-producers as well as stars.

Which old friend did Elizabeth Taylor want for Reflections in a Golden Eye before he died and Brando replaced him?

Montgomery Clift. She made his casting a condition of her own and offered her salary as his insurance, but he died of a heart attack shortly before shooting was due to begin.

Taylor's diner waitress in Hammersmith Is Out (1972) won her a Silver Bear at which city's film festival?

Berlin. The festival hands out bears because the animal stands on the city's coat of arms; hers was for best actress, in a Faust spoof directed by Peter Ustinov.

Taylor's sixth husband, John Warner, held what office?

US Senator from Virginia. She campaigned hard to get him elected in 1978, then found the life that followed so dull that she called herself 'the loneliest person in the world'.

Taylor made her Broadway debut in 1981 as Regina Giddens in which Lillian Hellman play?

The Little Foxes. Bored as a political wife, she turned to the stage, and took the production on to the West End the following year.

Taylor became the first celebrity to openly admit herself to which clinic, in December 1983?

The Betty Ford Center. On a return stay in 1988 she met a fellow patient, a construction worker named Larry Fortensky, and three years later he became her last husband.

Which was Taylor's last theatrically released film, in which she played Pearl Slaghoople?

The Flintstones. She played Fred's disapproving mother-in-law and then left cinema behind: by the 1990s raising money to fight AIDS had become her main work.

Elizabeth Taylor's four CBS sitcom cameos on one night in February 1996 promoted what?

A new fragrance. It was called Black Pearls, and CBS tied the four shows together with a running story about her missing string of black pearls.

Which two best-selling perfumes did Taylor launch in 1987 and 1991?

Passion and White Diamonds. In the television advert for the second she tosses a diamond earring into a card game and purrs, 'These have always brought me luck.'

How many weddings did Taylor have, and to how many men?

Eight, to seven men. Richard Burton accounts for the extra wedding: they divorced in 1974 and remarried sixteen months later, and the second attempt lasted less than a year.

Where did Taylor and Burton remarry in October 1975?

Kasane, Botswana. Their first wedding had been in a Montreal hotel; the second, sixteen months after their divorce, was in a hamlet of mud and grass huts beside a river.

At whose ranch did Taylor marry her last husband, Larry Fortensky, in 1991?

Michael Jackson's Neverland. The press was kept out, so one photographer parachuted in, coming down within yards of the couple among the guests, the giraffes and the llamas.

To which religion did Taylor convert in 1959?

Judaism. The conversion had a price: after she bought $100,000 of Israeli bonds that year, Arab countries banned her films from their cinemas.

In 1976 Taylor offered herself as a replacement hostage after which hijacking?

Entebbe. Her offer stayed private until Israel's ambassador revealed it a year later; by then commandos had long since freed the hostages, and she had acted in a TV film about the raid.

Which famous 50-carat pearl, a gift from Richard Burton, did Taylor own alongside the Krupp Diamond?

La Peregrina. Burton paid $37,000 for the pear-shaped pearl, once owned by Philip II of Spain; after her death, on the ruby and diamond necklace she had made for it, it sold for more than $11 million.

Which jeweller outbid Richard Burton for a 69-carat diamond at auction in 1969, then sold it to him?

Cartier. The firm paid $1.05 million and resold the stone to Burton almost at once for $1.1 million; it has been called the Taylor-Burton Diamond ever since.

Which friend and former co-star's illness spurred Taylor to co-found an AIDS research foundation in 1985?

Rock Hudson. Within weeks the foundation she had helped start joined forces with a New York one to become amfAR, which she chaired for years; her co-star from Giant died that October.

Taylor testified to Congress in support of the AIDS care act named after whom?

Ryan White. The Indiana teenager, a haemophiliac infected through a blood product, had been barred from his school; he died in April 1990, months before the act passed.

Which sitting US president came to speak about AIDS at a fundraising dinner for Taylor's foundation, amfAR?

Ronald Reagan. He began by recalling that wherever he went as a TV host, the first question people asked was whether Elizabeth Taylor was really that pretty, and that he always said, 'You bet.'

Which honour did Queen Elizabeth II give Taylor in the 2000 New Year Honours?

Dame Commander of the British Empire. She took the news in character: 'I've always been a broad,' she said, 'now it's a great honour to be a dame.'

Taylor's last public performance, in 2007, was an AIDS benefit reading of which play?

Love Letters. A. R. Gurney wrote it to be read from the page by two seated actors with nothing to memorise, so at 75, despite years of ill health, she could play it opposite James Earl Jones.

Taylor broke her back in a fall while filming which of her movies?

National Velvet. She was thrown during the shoot but finished the film, and the damage to her spine troubled her for the rest of her life.

Of what did Taylor die in March 2011, aged 79?

Congestive heart failure. She had lived with the diagnosis since 2004, and left word that her funeral should start fifteen minutes late, so that she would be late even for that.

Who tops the AFI's list of female screen legends, on which Taylor is seventh?

Katharine Hepburn. On screen the two legends were enemies: in Suddenly, Last Summer Hepburn played the rich aunt who wants her niece, Taylor, operated on to keep a family secret buried.

Taylor's third husband, Mike Todd, produced which 1950s Best Picture winner?

Around the World in 80 Days. The Broadway showman's star-packed epic took the top Oscar weeks after he married Taylor in 1957; little more than a year into the marriage she was a widow.

A song named after Elizabeth Taylor is the second track on which Taylor Swift album?

The Life of a Showgirl. It was the first song Swift wrote for the 2025 album; eight years earlier, on Reputation, she had already sung of a 'Burton to this Taylor'.

Who played Brick, the husband who spurns Taylor's Maggie, in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958)?

Paul Newman. Her husband died early in the shoot; she stayed off the set for a few weeks, then came back and finished the film.

In 1981 Taylor guest-starred at Luke and Laura's wedding on which daytime soap?

General Hospital. She played the vengeful Helena Cassadine for several episodes, and was soon dating the groom himself: Anthony Geary, the actor who played Luke.

A studio casting director wrote off the young Taylor with which complaint?

'Her eyes are too old'. The verdict began, 'The kid has nothing', and the studio let her go within a year; a rival signed her, and at twelve she was a star.

In Conspirator (1949), Taylor's first mature role, she plays a woman who suspects her husband is what?

A Soviet spy. Her first grown-up part came while she was still a schoolgirl in her teens; her screen husband, Robert Taylor, was about twenty years older.

Which playwright wrote Suddenly, Last Summer, filmed with Taylor in 1959?

Tennessee Williams. Like his Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, which she had filmed the year before, it turns on a man's hidden homosexuality, which Hollywood's censors would not let a film say outright.

Which actor played Julius Caesar opposite Taylor's queen in Cleopatra (1963)?

Rex Harrison. He took over the part from Peter Finch when the shoot started again from scratch, and of the film's three stars only he was nominated for an Oscar.

Which television film was the last that Taylor and Burton made together?

Divorce His, Divorce Hers. It showed one marriage ending twice over, first from the husband's side and then from the wife's; the following year its two stars divorced each other.

Which gossip columnist did Taylor play in the 1985 TV film Malice in Wonderland?

The same year she played a brothel keeper in the mini-series North and South.

Richard Burton, the husband Taylor married twice, was a coal miner's son from which country?

Wales. Born Richard Jenkins, the twelfth of thirteen children, he took his stage name from Philip Burton, the schoolmaster who coached him towards the theatre.