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Elizabeth Taylor's First Authorized Biography: 'She Said Her Entire Life Was a Fight'

Author Kate Andersen Brower had access to 7,358 personal letters, and conducted over 250 interviews, for Elizabeth Taylor: The Grit & Glamour of an Icon

The first time author Kate Andersen Brower encountered Elizabeth Taylor , it wasn't in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? or Cleopatra . It was in the supermarket.

The New York Times bestselling author remembers going to the store with her mother growing up in the '80s, and seeing Taylor's face on tabloids — with ex-husband Larry Fortensky, with Michael Jackson , and often critiqued for her weight. That's how Brower was introduced to the Academy Award winner. And as she reveals in the authorized biography Elizabeth Taylor: The Grit & Glamour of an Icon (out Dec. 6 via HarperCollins), she was much more than just those fragments of her life. She was human.

"I had this kind of image of her — the punchline, someone who was out of control," Brower tells PEOPLE of her childhood memories of Taylor, who died in March 2011 at the age of 79.

"Getting to go through her life, to see her inner thoughts and how she was working through things psychologically all the time. And also how empathetic she was to other people, how she struggled being a working mother of four kids, struggled to find true love… I just think there was so much more to her than we could see."

For the biography, which is three years in the making and marks the first-ever authorized story of the icon's life, Brower dives into the "more."

With the go-ahead to explore the family and estate's archives (including 7,358 letters and personal notes) and interviews with 250 of Taylor's closest loved ones and other acquaintances, the author took on the "tremendous responsibility" to document Taylor's life, in her own words, and in the words of those who knew her best.

Brower spoke to notable names like Demi Moore , Carol Burnett, and Colin Farrell for the book, the actress' four children, and even some of Liz's former loves — including George Hamilton, Robert Wagner , and her last surviving husband Senator John Warner, who initially gave Bower the green light to write the book before he died in 2021.

With their help, and the help of Taylor's archives, she was able to tell the story of not just a woman who was an iconic actress, who was struggling with addiction, who was a victim of abuse, or who was a champion for those with AIDS in the '80s — but as someone who considered herself a "full-fledged human being, as she liked to say."

"She said her entire life was a fight," Brower shares. "The resilience is the refusing to be a victim. Her father did beat her up. And he beat her because he felt intimidated that his 12-year-old was making more money [as a child star] than he was. And they had a reconciliation when she was in her 20s. But I mean, the fact that she wouldn't let herself be victimized even though she was on paper, a victim. I think that's terrible that he did that. But she got up again, like she almost died in her 20s when she had pneumonia, and she kept going and going. It was the never giving up."

Addiction is a heavy topic in The Grit & Glamour of an Icon , as Taylor opened up in personal letters about the struggles she faced being addicted to drugs.

At one point, her son Chris told Brower about a specific incident that took place in the '70s, which prompted him to move away. Chris, in the book, recalled how his mother asked him to give her an injection of Demerol in her knee sometime when she put her skirt around her hips and handed him a needle to do it himself.

He couldn't bring himself to do it, Brower says.

"And he walked out of the room and left Washington, DC because she was just so unhappy there," she says. "He said she had this dead behind-the-eyes look on her face handing him the syringe. It's just like 'God, you think she has everything.' But really, there was always a void as she was trying to fill."

In the book, the author makes note of instances of abuse that Taylor suffered at the hands of her loved ones. The actress was married eight times to seven husbands throughout her life, and Brower writes of one moment where Eddie Fisher, Taylor's fourth husband, held a gun to her head in 60s and said "Don't worry, you're too beautiful to kill."

RELATED VIDEO: Kathy Ireland Says Elizabeth Taylor Friendship 'Forever Changed My Life': She 'Became Family'

"She said being married to him was a slow suicide," Brower explains. "So she needed to leave. So she got out of these situations that she was in that were abusive. But I think that the thing about her too, is that she always thought that she was her best when she was married. But if you just look at it, the period of time when she was the most impactful and was when she was single."

Some of the letters Taylor wrote were never even sent, including ones she penned to Richard Burton and close friend Michael Jackson after they died.

As for those who knew Taylor well and are still remembering her legacy today, Brower says the family was happy with the book, after finally being "ready" to tell Taylor's story for the first time.

Never miss a story — sign up for PEOPLE's free daily newsletter to stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer, from juicy celebrity news to compelling human interest stories.

"I got a call from her son, Chris, who had read it and said that it was hard for him to read sometimes, but that it brought back all of these memories about his mom," she says.

"But that there were things that he learned in reading it because her life was so big, no one person was there for all of it. She was always surrounded by an entourage of people. But in the long run, the family is happy with it, because they were ready."

If you or someone you know is struggling with substance abuse, please contact the SAMHSA helpline at 1-800-662-HELP.

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Elizabeth Taylor's First Authorized Biography Gives a Horrifying Glimpse Into Her Toxic Marriage to Eddie Fisher

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When you think about Elizabeth Taylor , a few things instantly come to mind, like her legendary acting in films like Cleopatra and Father of the Bride , and her bombshell love life. New York Times bestselling author Kate Andersen Brower just released the first authorized biography on Taylor called Elizabeth Taylor: The Grit & Glamour of an Icon, and quite a few things have come to light. With access to over 7,000 personal letters and after over 250 interviews, Brower is giving fans a glimpse that no one has had before, including on Taylor’s controversial-turned-toxic marriage to Eddie Fisher.

In the book, Brower talks about the abuse Taylor faced throughout her life, including at the hands of her fourth husband Eddie Fisher. The most terrifying detail was that Fisher reportedly held a gun to Taylor’s head in the 1960s, during the time she grew close to Richard Burton, and Fisher was fuming with rage. He held the gun to her head, and said, “Don’t worry, you’re too beautiful to kill.”

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“[ Elizabeth Taylor ] said her entire life was a fight. The resilience is the refusing to be a victim. Her father did beat her up. And he beat her because he felt intimidated that his 12-year-old was making more money [as a child star] than he was,” Brower wrote, per People . “The fact that she wouldn’t let herself be victimized even though she was on paper, a victim. I think that’s terrible that he did that. But she got up again, like she almost died in her 20s when she had pneumonia, and she kept going and going. It was the never giving up.”

Elizabeth Taylor: The Grit & Glamour of an Icon

Price: $24.99, originally $32.50

Click here to read the full article.

Taylor and Fisher’s affair started back in the 1950s, when Fisher left his first wife Debbie Reynolds (who was Taylor’s best friend) for Taylor. Many speculated, including Reynolds, that Taylor’s interest in Fisher was because she was mourning the sudden death of her third husband Mike Todd.

Taylor and Fisher’s marriage eroded quite quickly after Taylor started working with Burton. Fisher was fueled by rage, buying a gun to kill Burton and continually asking Taylor: “Is something going on between you and Burton?”

The two divorced in 1964, and she married Burton 10 days later.

If  you or someone you know has been the victim of sexual assault , harassment or violence, you can get help. To speak with someone who is trained to help with these situations, call the National Sexual Assault Hotline at 800.656.HOPE (4673) or chat online at  online.rainn.org . 

Before you go, click here to see the most shocking celebrity tell-alls of all time. 

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A starry-eyed Elizabeth Taylor biography misses a golden opportunity

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Elizabeth Taylor: The Grit & Glamour of an Icon

By Kate Andersen Brower Harper: 513 pages, $33 If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org , whose fees support independent bookstores.

I love reading biographies. I sink into an overstuffed chair and prepare two bookmarks — one for the main text and one for the source notes at the end — so I can flip back and forth between the two.

This is because a good biography is distinguished by two things: a unique take or thesis that structures the story and endnotes that explain where specific facts or quotes originated. As a critic and author of nonfiction, I confess that I swoon over endnotes. They provide ballast, reassurance and intimacy with the subject, even when the biography itself deserves skepticism. For all the qualms I had about the speculation in Benjamin Moser ’s controversial Susan Sontag biography, I fell in love with his endnotes, some of which exceeded a page in length.

I mention this because when I sat down with Kate Andersen Brower’s “ Elizabeth Taylor: The Grit & Glamour of an Icon ,” I expected to read a biography — a book that would offer both argument and documentation. But I was hard pressed to find any organizing principle beyond chronology and bursts of indiscriminate admiration, and what passed for endnotes dismayed me. They did not reference specific pages. Each chapter was noted with a jumble of interviewees and books, but no precise attribution.

Indeed, this 512-page object appears to have been miscategorized. Brower is obviously not Robert Caro . She does excel, however, as a fangirl, which is not terrible. “Elizabeth Taylor” is a rambling commemorative, the sort of tribute album that you get at a memorial service (with a dash of drug use thrown in for plausibility). And this too is not criminal.

I admire Dame Elizabeth — especially her late-in-life AIDS philanthropy — and (full disclosure) I wrote a book that dealt with the feminist themes of many of her iconic roles: In “ National Velvet ,” a movie she starred in at 12, her character challenges gender discrimination in horse racing; her next milestone, “A Place in the Sun,” is an abortion-rights movie; and even “ Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? ” for which Taylor won an Academy Award, can be read as a second-wave feminist parable. In other words, I’m happy to see her applauded, especially for her roles.

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And yet I can’t help wondering what might have been. Brower had a huge advantage over Taylor’s many previous biographers: the cooperation of Taylor’s family and access to the documents they guarded. Yet she also faced a challenge (in addition to requiring the estate’s approval) that Taylor’s earlier biographers did not. Young people often have no idea how the mechanism of stardom worked before social media and the internet. To describe Taylor’s “mythic” place in the old Hollywood ecosystem, Brower has to explain how it works.

Brower also faced a structural obstacle in telling Taylor’s life. Once established in the firmament, the star followed different paths at different times. First she was essentially the studio property of MGM, then a free agent earning a record $1 million for starring in “ Cleopatra .” Her later career abounds in twists and contradictions that make the reader alternately cheer and cringe: the pursuit of independence and money; the renunciation of U.S. citizenship to avoid back taxes; the commercials; the husbands; the drugs. In her many guises she is like Caro’s grand subject, Lyndon B. Johnson . But Caro gave each phase in Johnson’s life its own book.

In contrast, Brower tries to shove Taylor’s many identities — child star, substance-abuser, serial marrier, multimillionaire, mistreated political wife, tax exile — into a single volume. This doesn’t work. It leads to flatly descriptive narration ( and-then-and-then-and-then-and-then ) that doesn’t do justice to the extremes in Taylor’s life.

This studied neutrality also lulls readers into skimming, but I advise against that. Brower casually drops bombshells that a more salacious biographer would underscore: For instance, while married to her second husband, Michael Wilding, Taylor had an affair with Frank Sinatra, who impregnated her and forced her to have an abortion.

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If there is a big reveal in the book, it is that despite Taylor’s high-profile stays at the Betty Ford Center, she remained addicted to painkillers. Brower also theorizes that Taylor hired Chen Sam, who was by profession a pharmacist, to accompany her as a “publicist” to assist Taylor in getting drugs.

I learned some new things from the book. I knew Taylor’s mother, Sara, was a Christian Scientist. But I did not know how ardent — or apparently effective — her prayers had been. When Taylor was born in 1932, her face was “covered with black fuzz.” Sara prayed and the fur went away. She proceeded to pray through her stage mother years as well, with as much success.

I learned new words, like “grog blossoms,” for the burst blood vessels in a drinker’s face, which enticed Taylor when she first met actor Richard Burton , with whom she would conduct a scandalous affair before marrying him for the first of two times, in 1964.

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I was worried the book’s dedication to Sen. John Warner, Taylor’s seventh husband, might preclude an accurate portrait of their marriage. But Brower exposes his cruelty. After Taylor gains weight, Warner calls her his “little heifer.” He also discredits her impulsive offer in 1977 to trade places with Jewish hostages held at Entebbe Airport in Uganda, suggesting her “judgment” was way off.

Although the book’s star-flecked cover is as sparkly as the jewels Taylor collected, it leaves the reader feeling sad. In part, this has to do with its painful revelations, especially from Chris Wilding, Taylor’s son, whom Brower credits with the gift of access and cooperation. Wilding shows us what it means to be harassed as a famous person’s kid: A paparazzo follows him as a child to an ice rink, records a humiliating fall — and taunts him years later with photos. More horribly, we look over his shoulder as he watches his unsteady mother plunge a syringe of Demerol into her thigh.

Yet my sadness encompassed more than the book’s grimmer passages. “ The Richard Burton Diaries ,” published a decade ago, feature lots of Taylor and even more alcoholic despair. But Chris Williams’ introduction and detailed notes gave me hope: The diaries aren’t just voyeuristic; they are a resource for future scholars.

I wish Brower had been more respectful of the access she was given — not through lavish thanks or wide-eyed praise, but by approaching her project and her sourcing with more verve and rigor.

Nothing is sadder, after all, than a missed opportunity.

Lord, author of “The Accidental Feminist,” is the host of “Blood, Sweat & Rockets,” a new podcast from LAist Studios.

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Elizabeth Taylor gets her first-ever authorized biography: See the cover

The movie star is Earth Mother, and we are all flops.

Maureen Lee Lenker is a senior writer at Entertainment Weekly with over seven years of experience in the entertainment industry. An award-winning journalist, she's written for Turner Classic Movies, Ms. Magazine , The Hollywood Reporter , and more. She's worked at EW for six years covering film, TV, theater, music, and books. The author of EW's quarterly romance review column, "Hot Stuff," Maureen holds Master's degrees from both the University of Southern California and the University of Oxford. Her debut novel, It Happened One Fight , is now available. Follow her for all things related to classic Hollywood, musicals, the romance genre, and Bruce Springsteen.

No one was better at being a movie star than Elizabeth Taylor .

Rising from child star to respected actress and a key figure in the rise of celebrity culture as audiences lapped up her off-screen romances, Taylor was a star like no other. Her longevity and dedication to philanthropy only furthered that image. Her career spanned from actor to activist and so much in between.

But in spite of all that, Taylor has never been the subject of an authorized biography. Until now.

EW can exclusively debut the cover for Elizabeth Taylor: The Grit and Glamour of an Icon by Kate Andersen Brower.

Coming to bookshelves Dec. 6, the biography is the first to tell Taylor's story with the full cooperation of the Trustees of her estate: Barbara Berkowitz, Tim Mendelson, and Quinn Tivey.

"We are proud to announce the first-ever, authorized written biography about Elizabeth," said the estate in a statement. "Because she was the most famous woman in the world, everyone thinks they know her. We can assure you that they don't. Kate Andersen Brower will lean into her journalistic background and curiosity to delight readers and introduce them to an Elizabeth only those closest to her knew."

The biography will tell the story of Taylor's life using rare archival materials, never-before-seen love letters, unpublished photographs, and interviews with many close friends and family who have never spoken about Taylor publicly before. Brower's work will explore Taylor's indelible influence on pop culture and the concept of modern-day celebrity.

"I'm honored to be the first biographer granted access to the private archives of Elizabeth Taylor who is unmatched as the most famous celebrity and influencer of her time," Brower said in a statement. "I hope that reading Elizabeth's own words describing her many loves and losses, and her own revelations about what it takes to survive Hollywood will give the reader insight into who she really was and the nature of global celebrity. Her close friend the actor Colin Farrell said it well when he told me: 'She was honest and raw and brutal and grotesque and feminine and delicate and aggressive and soft and tender and warm and acerbic. She was limitless .'"

Brower, a CNN contributor and author of The Residence, First Women, and Team of Five, brings plenty of biographical experience to bear. "This is a perfect match of author to subject," said HarperCollins VP, Executive Editor Gail Winston in a statement. "A best-selling highly acclaimed author of intriguing biographical subject matter, Kate will bring grace, wonderful writing, empathy and style to a new consideration of this remarkable woman."

The biography is just one of a slew of projects about Taylor's life that the estate has in the works. There's also Elizabeth the First, a podcast about Taylor narrated by Katy Perry coming this fall, and a film, A Special Relationship , starring Rachel Weisz as Taylor.

See the cover to Elizabeth Taylor: The Grit and Glamour of an Icon above.

Want more movie news? Sign up for Entertainment Weekly 's free newsletter to get the latest trailers, celebrity interviews, film reviews, and more.

Related content:

• Elizabeth Taylor: 11 Roles for the Ages
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Beyond the Headlines, A Fuller Portrait Emerges in “Elizabeth Taylor”

• Our review of Kate Andersen Brower's new biography, "Elizabeth Taylor: The Grit and Glamour of an Icon".

Elizabeth Taylor helped define the concept of global celebrity that currently dominates the pop culture landscape. She was half of one of the first celebrity power couples, paving the way for Brangelina and Bennifer, and a tireless activist during the height of the AIDS epidemic. Yet beneath all that glitz, glamour, and jewelry, she craved stability and love most of all. Kate Andersen Brower’s new biography Elizabeth Taylor: The Grit and Glamour of an Icon , the first authorized biography since the star’s death in 2011, uses documents never before shared with biographers to present the most fully realized depiction of Taylor that’s been published. By focusing on her compassion for others and her lifelong battle to be seen as a distinct individual rather than a business entity, Brower provides readers with a well-rounded portrait of Taylor. She sums it up most concisely in the afterword: “She was a very real woman whose alter ego, the commodity created when she was twelve years old, was the most famous actress during the twentieth century.”

The biography succeeds most when it contrasts Taylor’s public persona with her personal life. Without pathologizing her, Brower effectively chronicles how Elizabeth Taylor channeled the pain she experienced in her personal life into a desire to help others. Raised by a controlling mother and abusive father and fed as a child to the MGM studio system that dictated her every move, Taylor was often told what to do, where to be, and how to think. She could have become bitter and callous had she not discovered how to use her fame in the service of the greater good. A critically-acclaimed actress, public figure, and businesswoman at a time when actresses were often sidelined by powerful men, there was no blueprint to follow. She was a trailblazer, but that was never her goal: “I would rather be a good woman than a great actress.” It’s this quotation that seems to encapsulate Brower’s mission with this biography. She’s most interested in looking at who Taylor was beyond the raven hair and violet eyes—at what motivated her as a person rather than what the tabloids reported about her.

As expected (and appreciated), ample time is devoted to Taylor’s marriages, especially her first marriage to Richard Burton. One of the most compelling sections of the book revolves around Taylor’s affair with Burton during the filming of Cleopatra . Brower ties the public outrage about the affair to the tides of social change that were roaring at the time, asserting that the Taylor/Burton affair contributed to the start of the sexual revolution in the US. She also wisely points out the “lengths that the mostly male press corps went to hide President John F. Kenned’s extramarital affairs taking place at the same time,” drawing an interesting parallel about the ways women were (and continue to be) vilified for expressing their sexuality publicly. In Taylor’s refusal to apologize for her sexuality, she presented a powerful example of a public figure taking control and living on her own terms, no matter what the press said about her.

The chapters following her marriage to Burton seem to stretch on and may have benefitted from a bit more editing. For instance, a significant amount of space is devoted to Taylor’s extensive jewelry collection. It was a major part of her life and public persona, but the anecdotes about jewelry acquisition seem to slow down the narrative flow and often feel superfluous. The tone of the book is also uneven at times as if Brower had a hard time deciding who her intended audience is. At over 400 pages, it’s already a hefty read, and it could stand to be streamlined.

Of the chapters that chronicle her post-Hollywood years, the ones that are most engaging and informative revolve around Elizabeth Taylor’s AIDS activism. Almost 40 years after she lent her celebrity to the cause, she’s still the model of using fame to accomplish good in the world, as she remained “acutely aware of her physical presence and she knew that she could do things that, at the time, nobody else was capable of doing.” Even now, when talking heads love to offer thoughts and prayers after senseless tragedies, Elizabeth Taylor is the gold standard for how to take action to promote lasting change. From fundraising, to personally funding research, to testifying before Congress to urge them to take action, she tirelessly advocated for people living with HIV and AIDS when many of her famous friends didn’t understand why she was risking her reputation. She had been taken advantage of so much in her life that she couldn’t stand to see it happen to anyone else, no matter what others thought of her.

Elizabeth Taylor: The Grit and Glamour of An Icon is a work befitting one of the most famous women of the twentieth century. Delicately balancing her public and private lives, it provides readers with new insight into what made her the cultural force that continues to influence celebrity culture to the present day. Enjoyable, insightful, and eminently readable, this is an engaging read for anyone who’d like to go beyond the tabloid fodder and get a little closer to who the true Elizabeth Taylor was. 

Elizabeth Taylor: The Grit and Glamour of an Icon

“Wings of Red”: An Education

by Kate Andersen Brower

Published on December 06, 2022

David is a nonbinary actor and bookseller living in Metro Detroit, who's obsessed with Classic Hollywood, Real Housewives, and all things Queer. He also writes for Buzzfeed. Contact him on twitter @david_vogel or by email at [email protected]

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New Elizabeth Taylor documentary series to be executive produced by Kim Kardashian

"Elizabeth Taylor was unapologetically herself, a fighter," Kardashian said.

Elizabeth Taylor's story will be told in a new documentary series.

The project, which is being called "Elizabeth Taylor: Rebel Superstar," is being commissioned by BBC Arts and will be executive produced by Kim Kardashian , who will also star in the series.

According to a press release , the series will be a three-part boxset documentary series about the Academy Award-winning legendary actress.

The series "gives Elizabeth Taylor the significance she richly deserves, in all her incarnations: as an actor, rebel, business mogul, and activist -- to reveal how Taylor created the blueprint for modern celebrity," the press release states.

MORE: Katy Perry to narrate Elizabeth Taylor podcast series

"The series will take a deep dive into Taylor's craft and technique as an actor -- one who mesmerised cinemagoers, but also changed the relationship between audiences and stars," the press release continues. "We'll see how she reinvented the nature of fame, even as she smashed the glass ceiling in Hollywood, before going on to become a billion-dollar businesswoman, activist and advocate."

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The series will include never-before-heard audio tapes, interviews and unseen TV footage, alongside footage from her films.

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"Elizabeth Taylor was unapologetically herself, a fighter," Kardashian said in a statement in the press release. "She is proof that you can keep evolving and changing and have different chapters in your life -- and she paved the way for all of us who came after her with that blueprint."

"Elizabeth Taylor: Rebel Superstar" is currently in production and will air on BBC Two and BBC iPlayer.

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Elizabeth Taylor: The Grit & Glamour of an Icon Hardcover – December 6, 2022

Purchase options and add-ons.

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Residence and First Women , the first ever authorized biography of the most famous movie star of the twentieth century, Elizabeth Taylor.

No celebrity rivals Elizabeth Taylor’s glamour and guts or her level of fame. She was the last major star to come out of the old Hollywood studio system and she is a legend known for her beauty and her magnetic screen presence in a career that spanned most of the twentieth century and nearly sixty films. But her private life was even more compelling than her Oscar-winning on-screen performances. During her seventy-nine years of rapid-fire love and loss she was married eight times to seven different men. Above all, she was a survivor—by the time she was twenty-six she was twice divorced and once widowed. Her life was a soap opera that ended in a deeply meaningful way when she became the first major celebrity activist to lead the fight against HIV/AIDS. A co-founder of amfAR, she raised more than $100 million for research and patient care. She was also a shrewd businesswoman who made a fortune as the first celebrity perfumer who always demanded to be paid what she was worth.

In the first ever authorized biography of the Hollywood icon, Kate Andersen Brower reveals the world through Elizabeth’s eyes. Brower uses Elizabeth’s unpublished letters, diary entries, and off-the-record interview transcripts as well as interviews with 250 of her closest friends and family to tell the full, unvarnished story of her remarkable career and her explosive private life that made headlines worldwide. Elizabeth Taylor captures this intelligent, empathetic, tenacious, volatile, and complex woman as never before, from her rise to massive fame at age twelve in National Velvet to becoming the first to negotiate a million-dollar salary for a film, from her eight marriages and enduring love affair with Richard Burton to her lifelong battle with addiction and her courageous efforts as an AIDS activist. 

Here is a fascinating and complete portrait worthy of the legendary star and her legacy.

Elizabeth Taylor features a photo insert.

• Print length 512 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Harper
• Publication date December 6, 2022
• Dimensions 6 x 1.57 x 9 inches
• ISBN-10 006306765X
• ISBN-13 978-0063067653
• See all details

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From the Publisher

Editorial Reviews

“A dazzling portrait of an incredible woman. Elizabeth's life was more captivating than any film could ever be." — Demi Moore

"Brower’s book takes the reader into the private world of the most famous celebrity of the 20th century. Elizabeth’s heart, mind, and passion come vividly alive on each page. We see her as a woman who struggled and ultimately survived to rewrite the playbook on celebrity and power. I never wanted it to end!" — Brooke Shields

“Many should be inspired by all that Elizabeth accomplished as an HIV and AIDS activist. Brower’s book took me back to the early days when Elizabeth fought so hard against the stigma surrounding people living with HIV and AIDS. She lived by the credo, ‘To whom much is given, much is required.’ Elizabeth was not perfect, but she always tried to improve and be better. Her true nature is revealed here in these pages and her life story deserves to be told in a moving and transparent way.” — Magic Johnson

"Brower’s behind-the-curtain look at the most private thoughts of such an enormous cultural icon is a true page turner! I feel like I know what made Elizabeth tick after reading it." — Andy Cohen

“The last great movie star of the Hollywood studio system, the legendary Elizabeth Taylor was as complex and captivating as any role she ever played. Kate Andersen Brower vividly captures the icon throughout her eventful but tempestuous life, as an accomplished actress, much-married wife, devoted mother, loyal friend, savvy businesswoman, compassionate humanitarian, and international celebrity.” — Mark K. Updegrove, president & CEO of the LBJ Foundation and author of  Incomparable Grace: JFK in the Presidency

"Magnetic and mercurial, ferocious and funny, sensual yet maternal, with explosive energy and a luminous purity of profound emotion, Elizabeth Taylor was a brilliant virtuoso of the camera and the greatest screen actress in Hollywood history." — Camille Paglia, author of Sexual Personae

“There is perhaps no bigger (or more misunderstood) star than Elizabeth Taylor, who at last gets an authorized biography courtesy of Kate Andersen Brower and the Taylor estate. With access to Taylor's unpublished letters, diary entries, and off-the-record interview transcripts, as well as her own interviews with 250 of Taylor's closest friends and family, readers will get the most personal look at Taylor ever put to paper.” — Entertainment Weekly

“Told with style and great detail, making this a must read for new fans and longtime admirers alike.” — Town & Country

“Not unlike one of Taylor’s performances, Brower’s book captures your attention and won’t let go.” — AV Club

“In this first authorized biography of the last of the great Hollywood studio-system stars, Brower mines previously unpublished interviews, personal letters, and diary entries as well as input from hundreds of friends and family to offer a comprehensive and intimate biography of a true icon. . . . Taylor's tumultuous life unfolds in Brower's portrait like one of her own epic screen adventures. A must-read for Taylor’s legions of fans and all who savor well-told and well-documented tales of Old Hollywood.” — Booklist

“A well-researched, gossipy portrait of a star…Brower chronicles Taylor’s career, illnesses, marriages, affairs, and notoriously lavish lifestyle.” — Kirkus Reviews

"Brower convincingly depicts Taylor as a complex woman whose glamour, even today, is 'intoxicating.' The result is a mesmerizing appreciation of a legendary star." — Publishers Weekly

"The book shares never-before-published details that capture her many sides. This well-researched biography gets as close to telling Taylor’s story in her own words as readers will ever get.  VERDICT  There have been countless biographies of Elizabeth Taylor, but this one offers fascinating insight and may stand as the definitive one about the legendary actress." — Library Journal

About the Author

Kate Andersen Brower is the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller The Residence , First Women —also a New York Times bestseller—and First in Line . She is a CNN contributor who covered the Obama White House for Bloomberg News and is a former CBS News staffer and Fox News producer. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times , Vanity Fair , and the Washington Pos t . She lives outside Washington, D.C., with her husband and their three young children.

Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Harper (December 6, 2022)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 512 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 006306765X
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0063067653
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.68 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 1.57 x 9 inches
• #242 in Rich & Famous Biographies
• #533 in Actor & Entertainer Biographies
• #608 in Women's Biographies

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Review of Elizabeth Taylor: The Grit and Glamour of an Icon

Marie Dubuque

About the author

Kate andersen brower.

Kate Andersen Brower is the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller THE RESIDENCE and the New York Times bestseller FIRST WOMEN, and FIRST IN LINE. Her latest book TEAM OF FIVE looks at the relationships between members of the Presidents Club and includes an Oval Office interview with President Trump. Her book THE RESIDENCE had been optioned by Shonda Rhimes for Netflix. She has written for Vanity Fair, Time, the Washington Post, and the New York Times. She covered the Obama White House for Bloomberg News and is a former CBS News staffer and Fox News producer. She lives outside of Washington, D.C., with her husband, their three young children, and their Wheaten Terrier.

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Elizabeth Taylor

(1932-2011)

Who Was Elizabeth Taylor?

Elizabeth Taylor made her film debut in One Born Every Minute (1942) and achieved stardom with National Velvet (1944). Although she won Academy Awards for her work in Butterfield 8 (1960) and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1965), Taylor was just as famous for her many marriages, extensive jewelry collection and stunning violet eyes.

Elizabeth Rosemond Taylor was born on February 27, 1932, in London, England. One of film's most celebrated stars, Taylor fashioned a career that's covered more than six decades, accepting roles that have not only showcased her beauty, but her ability to take on emotionally charged characters.

Taylor's American parents, both art dealers, were residing in London when she was born. Soon after the outbreak of World War II, the Taylors returned to the United States and settled into their new life in Los Angeles.

She soon signed a contract with Universal Studios, and made her screen debut at the age of 10 in There's One Born Every Minute (1942). She followed that up with a bigger role in Lassie Come Home (1943) and later The White Cliffs of Dover (1944).

Her breakout role, however, came in 1944 with National Velvet , in a role Taylor spent four months working to get. The film subsequently turned out to be a huge hit that pulled in more than $4 million and made the 12-year-old actress a huge star.

In the glare of the Hollywood spotlight, the young actress showed she was more than adept at handling celebrity's tricky terrain. Even more impressive was the fact that, unlike so many child stars before and after her, Taylor proved she could make a seamless transition to more adult roles.

Mainstream Success and Marriages

Her stunning looks helped. At just 18 she played opposite Spencer Tracy in Father of the Bride (1950). Taylor also showed her acting talents in 1954 with three films: The Last Time I Saw Paris , Rhapsody and Elephant Walk , the latter of which saw Taylor take on the role of a plantation owner's wife who is in love with the farm's manager.

Her personal life only boosted the success of her films. For a time, she dated millionaire Howard Hughes, then at the age of 17, Taylor made her first entrance into marriage, when she wed hotel heir, Nicky Hilton.

The union didn't last long and, in 1952, Taylor was walking down the aisle again—this time to marry actor Michael Wilding. In all, Taylor has married eight times during her life, twice to actor Richard Burton .

While her love life continued to make international headlines, Taylor continued to shine as an actress. She delivered a riveting performance in the drama A Place in the Sun , and turned things up even more in 1956 with the film adaptation of the Edna Ferber novel, Giant, that co-starred James Dean . Two years later, she sizzled on the big screen in the film adaptation of Tennessee Williams' Cat on a Hot Tin Roof . The following year, she starred in another Williams classic, Suddenly Last Summer . Taylor earned her first Oscar, capturing the coveted Best Actress award for her role as a call girl in Butterfield 8 (1960).

Personal Life in the Spotlight

But Taylor's fame was also touched by tragedy and loss. In 1958, she became a young widow when her husband, pioneering film producer Mike Todd, was killed in a plane crash . After his death, Taylor became embroiled in one of the greatest Hollywood love scandals of the era when she began an affair with Todd's close friend, Eddie Fisher . Fisher divorced Debbie Reynolds and married Taylor in 1959. The couple stayed married for five years until she left Fisher for Burton.

The public's obsession with Taylor's love life hit new heights with her 1964 marriage to Burton. She'd met and fallen in love with the actor during her work on Cleopatra (1963), a film that not only heightened Taylor's clout and fame but also proved to be a staggering investment, clocking in at an unprecedented $37 million to make.

The Taylor-Burton union was a fiery and passionate one. They appeared onscreen together in the much-panned The V.I.P.'s (1963), and then again two years later for the heralded Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? a film that earned Taylor her second Oscar for her role as an overweight, angry wife of an alcoholic professor, played by Burton.

The subsequent years proved to be an up-and-down affair for Taylor. There were more marriages, more divorces, health obstacles and a struggling film career, with movies that gained little traction with critics or the movie-going public.

Later Years and Death

Still, Taylor continued to act. She found work on television, even making a guest appearance on General Hospital , and on stage. She also began focusing more attention on philanthropy. After her close friend Rock Hudson died in 1985 following his battle with HIV/AIDS, the actress started work to find a cure for the disease. In 1991, she launched the Elizabeth Taylor HIV/AIDS Foundation in order to offer greater support for those who are sick, as well fund research for more advanced treatments.

Largely retired from the world of acting, Taylor received numerous awards for her body of work. In 1993, she received the American Film Institute's Life Achievement Award. In 2000, she was made Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE).

Taylor overcame a litany of health problems throughout the 1990s, from diabetes to congestive heart failure. She had both hips replaced, and in 1997, had a brain tumor removed. In October 2009, Taylor, who has four children, underwent successful heart surgery. In early 2011, Taylor again experienced heart problems. She was admitted to Cedars-Sinai Hospital that February for congestive heart failure. On March 23, 2011, Taylor passed away from the condition.

Shortly after her death, her son Michael Wilding released a statement, saying "My mother was an extraordinary woman who lived life to the fullest, with great passion, humor, and love ... We will always be inspired by her enduring contribution to our world."

QUICK FACTS

• Name: Elizabeth Rosemond Taylor
• Birth Year: 1932
• Birth date: February 27, 1932
• Birth City: London
• Birth Country: England
• Gender: Female
• Best Known For: Actress Elizabeth Taylor starred in films like 'Cat on a Hot Tin Roof' and 'Butterfield 8' but was just as famous for her violet eyes and scandalous love life.
• Astrological Sign: Pisces
• Death Year: 2011
• Death date: March 23, 2011
• Death State: California
• Death City: Los Angeles
• Death Country: United States

We strive for accuracy and fairness.If you see something that doesn't look right, contact us !

CITATION INFORMATION

• Article Title: Elizabeth Taylor Biography
• Author: Biography.com Editors
• Website Name: The Biography.com website
• Url: https://www.biography.com/actors/elizabeth-taylor
• Access Date:
• Publisher: A&E; Television Networks
• Last Updated: February 17, 2021
• Original Published Date: April 3, 2014
• I think I'm finally growing up—and about time.
• My mother says I didn't open my eyes for eight days after I was born, but when I did, the first thing I saw was an engagement ring. I was hooked.
• I don't pretend to be an ordinary housewife.
• Some of my best leading men have been dogs and horses.
• One problem with people who have no vices is that they're pretty sure to have some annoying virtues.
• Success is a great deodorant. It takes away all your past smells.
• You find out who your real friends are when you're involved in a scandal.
• If someone's dumb enough to offer me a million dollars to make a picture, I'm certainly not dumb enough to turn it down.
• I, along with the critics, have never taken myself very seriously.
• I'm not taking anything away from Debbie [Reynolds] because she never really had it.
• [Michael Jackson] is one of the most normal people I know.
• I'm more of a man's woman. With men, there's a kind of twinkle that comes out. I sashay up to a man. I walk up to a woman.
• I don't want to be a sex symbol. I would rather be a symbol of a woman who makes mistakes, perhaps, but a woman who loves.
• It would be glamorous to be reincarnated as a great big ring on Liz Taylor's finger.

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'It's like a high pitched scream in my heart.' Elizabeth Taylor's unseen heart-wrenching letter to Michael Jackson AFTER his death is revealed - as new bio tells how the troubled stars bonded over their broken childhoods and battled their addictions

• Elizabeth Taylor: The Grit and Glamour of an Icon , by Kate Andersen Brower reveals the actress's never-before-seen letter to Michael Jackson after his death
• 'You are in my thoughts and heart continuously. It is like a high-pitched scream is in my heart. I mourn you. I am in pain. When will I ever see you again?' it read
• The new biography explores the pair's unlikely 25-year close friendship - which was formed after they bonded over their broken childhoods
• Mutual friend and fellow star Lionel Richie believed that  without Taylor, Jackson's life 'might have been a disaster much sooner than it was' 
• Taylor's housekeeper also spoke at her horror after Jackson left a used syringe in her bathroom, as actress herself was battling her own addiction to pills

By Daniel Bates For Dailymail.com

Published: 15:50 EDT, 9 December 2022 | Updated: 16:26 EDT, 9 December 2022

View comments

Michael Jackson's untimely death came as a 'high pitched scream in the heart' for Elizabeth Taylor , who sobbed hysterically 'for hours' after learning her close friend was gone, according to a new book.

The late actress poured her heart out to the King of Pop in a heart-wrenching letter she wrote after his 2009 overdose, which is revealed for the first time in new biography, Elizabeth Taylor: The Grit and Glamour of an Icon , by Kate Andersen Brower, published December 6. 

In the emotional posthumous note, the Hollywood icon said Jackson was in her 'thoughts and heart continuously' and that she was in 'pain' over his loss. 

The poignant message marked the end of an unlikely friendship between two child stars that lasted 25 years.

A new biography about Elizabeth Taylor reveals new details about her unlikely, close friendship with fellow superstar Michael Jackson (pictured together in 1997)

MJ and La Liz met in 1984 and quickly bonded over their shared experience being thrust into the spotlight as children

The book reveals a never-before-seen heart-wrenching letter a grieving Taylor wrote to Jackson posthumously after his death in 2009

Taylor and Jackson - who were 26 years apart in age - were almost as famous for their tight bond as they were for their glittering careers. 

The book reveals new details of their troubled lives behind closed doors, such as how Jackson used to ' shoot up' in Taylor's bathroom, leaving her housekeeper horrified at the sight of a used syringe.

At the same time, the actress herself was struggling with her own addiction to pills, as previously reported by DailyMail.com . 

Taylor even staged an intervention in 1993 to help Jackson beat his drug demons, meeting him off the stage at a performance in Mexico City and using a decoy to smuggle him away.

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She also stood by him during his child sex abuse allegations and said that she remained 'fiercely loyal' to him at all times.

The new biography - released on December 6, was authorized by La Liz's own family

Friends of the pair, such as singer Lionel Richie believed Taylor was Jackson's 'safety blanket' - and without her in his life he could have died much sooner.

Taylor and Jackson bonded over being thrust into the spotlight as children, with Jackson becoming a star at the tender age of eight with the Jackson 5 and Taylor making her on screen debut at age 12 with 1944 film National Velvet.

Both also had domineering fathers who were physically abusive and pushed them to become celebrities.

The two met in 1984, at a time when Taylor's storied career was on the decline while Jackson's star was rising, and the pair bonded over the death of actor Richard Burton, who Taylor was twice married to.

Taylor spoke fondly of Jackson in the public eye and once spoke of their bond saying: 'There is something in him that is so dear and childlike - not childish, but childlike - that we both have and identify with.' 

Charlie Nicholson, who worked for Taylor in the late 1980s, recalled seeing the unlikely pair at a dining table together where Elizabeth was hand-feeding Jackson a salad.

'She was lovingly feeding him, like a mother would feed a toddler,' he said. 

Mark Harmon also recalled one bizarre moment when he spotted Taylor and Jackson at a dinner in 1990 where the singer was hiding under the table. When they asked what he was doing, he said nothing, according to the author. 

Mutual friend Lionel Richie, who was interviewed for the book, believed that without Taylor, Jackson's life 'might have been a disaster much sooner than it was'

The pair first met at a time when Taylor's storied career was on the decline while Jackson's star was rising, and they bonded over the death of her husband Richard Burton

Taylor remained 'fiercely loyal' to him at all times and stood by Jackson during his child sex abuse allegations

Mutual friend Lionel Richie, who was interviewed for the book, revealed that when he once asked Jackson why his friendship with Taylor was so important to him he had replied: 'She understands.' 

'I can understand what a safety blanket she was. But you couldn't be there all the time,' Richie said. 

'As long as he was able to be near her or able to talk to her, that's one thing, but as time went on he got so big that it was almost kind of impossible to counsel him at a certain point.

'There was a danger to his innocence, there was also a sweetness to his innocence ... without her in his life it might have been a disaster much sooner than it was.'

Jackson was such good friends with La Liz that he let her use his Neverland ranch as the venue for her eighth and final wedding in 1991 to husband Larry Fortensky, a construction worker who was 20 years her junior.

He even walked Taylor down the aisle and, in front of celebrity guests like Nancy Reagan and Brooke Shields, posed as the 'father of the bride.' 

The ranch was where Taylor and Jackson would 'go on picnics together, two broken adults trying to recapture their stolen childhoods,' according to Andersen.

Jackson once said about their friendship: 'We try to escape and fantasize. I can really relax with her because we've lived the same life and experienced the same thing'.

Their shared experience of the 'great tragedy of childhood stars' meant they liked the same things: circuses, amusement parks and animals. 

Andersen characterizes Jackson and Taylor's friendship as one of the 'closest celebrity relationships' that included spontaneous visits, such as the time when the pop star asked to come around to the actress's house - with his chimpanzee. 

The book reveals that during the early days of their friendship, MJ had asked to come around to Taylor's house - with his chimpanzee, Bubbles 

Jackson's Neverland Ranch was where Taylor and Jackson would 'go on picnics together, two broken adults trying to recapture their stolen childhoods,' the author writes 

Jackson was such good friends with Taylor that he let her use his ranch as the venue for her eighth and final wedding in 1991 to husband Larry Fortensky and even walked her down the aisle

Jackson turned up at her door holding hands with Bubbles, his infamous pet chimp, and they were friends ever since.

Taylor once said that she 'knew what it was like to be used by your family for money and fame.' 

When a journalist suggested that Jackson and Taylor were like Peter Pan and Wendy, the pop star said: 'But Elizabeth is also like a mother - and more than that. She's a friend. She's Mother Teresa, Princess Diana, the Queen of England, and Wendy.'

Taylor's protective feelings towards Jackson were displayed in 1993 when he was indicted on 10 child sex abuse charges, which were later dismissed after a high profile and controversial trial.

With his career in grave peril, Taylor flew to Mexico City to whisk him away to get treatment for his painkiller addiction.

Andersen writes that she 'escorted him to his private dressing room and convinced him to get treatment.'

Taylor arranged a plane for Jackson but wouldn't even tell the pilot where they were going, such was the secrecy.

Once they arrived, a security guard who was about Jackson's height served as a Jackson's decoy, dressing in a robe and a hood, returning to his hotel to fool the press.

A police escort even followed her car while Taylor put Jackson on a plane and told him: 'I am getting you out of here' into a rehab facility.

According to Jackson's lawyer at the time, Bertram Fields, his painkiller addiction was becoming 'all-consuming.' 

He said: 'He was barely able to function adequately on an intellectual level. I'm not going to talk about his individual symptoms, but they were manifest.' 

The two stars - who were 26 years apart in age - were almost as famous for their tight bond as they were for their glittering careers

Behind closed doors, however, both were deeply troubled and were battling drug addictions

But, Andersen writes: 'Members of Jackson's family were furious at Elizabeth because they did not want him admitting to his addiction.

'Jackson's life was so carefully controlled that Jackson had to ask his head of security for his own passport,' the book states. 

'Like Elizabeth's experience at Betty Ford, institutional life was humbling for Michael, who learned how to use a vacuum cleaner and how to perform other mundane tasks in treatment. 

'But for all the planning and subterfuge, nothing came of Jackson's attempt to stop using.' 

At the time Taylor was struggling with her own addictions as well, which her longtime housekeeper Bernadeta Bajda said was difficult to witness.

She said: 'I cried all the time when she asked for pills. Sometimes she wanted to have alcohol. Someone told us not to give her alcohol, so we hid it very high and she couldn't find it. 

'She was desperate. She was searching, searching, but she didn't find it. Soon enough she did find the champagne.'

Bajda also revealed the moment she discovered a 'terrible secret' at Taylor's home when Jackson was visiting.

She said: 'Michael was in Ms. Taylor's restroom and a moment later he ran downstairs. 

'I was in the bedroom and he didn't see me, he ran past me. I went into the bathroom and I found an obviously used syringe on the floor.

'But I didn't touch it, I was scared to death. Then I heard him coming upstairs to pick it up so I hid and he took it and ran back downstairs. That moment to me was so, so sad.' 

Elizabeth Taylor Michael Jackson attend the 20th Annual American Music Awards held at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles, California in January 1993

Tragedy would eventually strike and claim the life of the King of Pop in 2009, when Jackson took a fatal dose of Propoful at his home in Los Angeles administered by his personal doctor, Conrad Murray. 

When Taylor learned Jackson had been taken to hospital she began to call his assistants in a panic. She eventually got a hold of one of them who broke the news to her. 

Taylor became 'hysterical' and screamed: 'No! No!', and had to be consoled and held for hours while she sobbed, according the book. 

She also decided against attending his star-studded public memorial at the Staples Center as she didn't want to 'put her grief on display' because Jackson wouldn't have waned her to do.

She did however attend a private funeral months later and tearfully said her goodbyes.

Such was Taylor's grief for Jackson after he died that she wrote him a heartbreaking posthumous letter.

She wrote: 'My Beloved Michael, I hope you remember how much I love you - and miss you.

'You are in my thoughts and heart continuously. It is like a high-pitched scream is in my heart. I mourn you. I am in pain. When will I ever see you again? I love you too much and always will. Yours, Elizabeth.'

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The Incredible Story of How Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton Began Hollywood's Most Famous Affair

An excerpt from the new book Elizabeth Taylor: The Grit & Glamour of an Icon reveals the beginnings of their iconic love story with never-before-seen letters.

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The first day that Elizabeth Taylor saw the handsome Welsh actor Richard Burton on the set of Cleopatra he walked over to her and whispered, “Has anybody ever told you that you’re a very pretty girl?” It was not a great pickup-line by anyone’s standards, especially since Elizabeth, who was on the cusp of 30 and at the height of her smoldering sensuality, was already the most famous star of the twentieth century known for her raven hair and legendary blue eyes that some swore were an otherworldly shade of violet. “Here’s the great lover,” she joked, “the great wit, the great intellectual of Wales, and he comes out with a line like that.” Plus, Richard’s reputation as a married man with a penchant for seducing his leading ladies had preceded him.

But her feelings changed on January 22, 1962, when they filmed their first scene together. Elizabeth starred as Cleopatra, the woman who had conquered empires, and Richard played Marc Antony, the powerful Roman general who became Cleopatra’s lover. Richard, then thirty-six, had gone on a bender the night before, drinking everything he could get his hands on. It was five o’clock in the afternoon, and he had not slept for two nights. He got a cup of coffee, but he could not bring the cup to his lips because his hands were shaking so badly. He asked Elizabeth for help. “Hold this, love, will you hold it to my mouth?” She held the cup up to his mouth and started to giggle.

“He was such a slob,” she said later, “he was such a mess, and I looked into those green eyes that were twinkling and smiling at me and he drank the whole mug and we kept staring at each other.” She remembered, being so close to him, seeing the grog blossoms—the burst blood vessels on the face of a heavy drinker—and strangely falling for him in that moment. He was not the arrogant stage actor she had imagined, instead he was achingly vulnerable.

The feeling was mutual. “I fell in love at once,” Richard said later. “She was like a mirage of beauty of the ages, irresistible like the pull of gravity.”

The problem was that both of them were married, Elizabeth to singer Eddie Fisher and Richard to the actress Sybil Burton, with whom he shared two daughters. Fisher stopped coming to the set when Richard and Elizabeth had a scene together; their flirtation was too obvious and too humiliating. Sybil believed that her husband’s affair with Elizabeth would be no different than all the others.

But there was no way to ignore them once they became a global phenomenon – Richard called it “Le Scandale” - a love affair that marked the beginning of the world’s obsession with celebrity. Long before “Brangelina,” “Bennifer,” and “Kimye,” “Liz and Dick” practically invented the paparazzi. Images of them kissing on yachts in the Mediterranean and walking along Rome’s fashionable Via Veneto knocked John Glenn’s orbit of the Earth in 1962 off the front pages. “I’ve had affairs before,” Richard told a publicist working on Cleopatra . “How did I know the woman was so fucking famous? She knocks Khrushchev off the front page.”

Their affair was such enormous news that even the Vatican was paying attention. In an open letter in Vatican City’s weekly newspaper, Elizabeth was charged with “erotic vagrancy” because she was sleeping with Burton while still married to Fisher (never mind that Richard was cheating on his wife too). The Vatican decried “this insult to the nobility of the hearth.”

Elizabeth and Richard didn’t let the moralizing stop them. Richard ended one note to Elizabeth with: “Would you, incidentally, permit me to fuck you this afternoon?” In another, he wrote: “I love you badly like a disease. I dream of you curled up asleep. I’m even jealous of the bed. . . .”

Eventually, they each got divorced and they were married in Montreal on March 15, 1964. Elizabeth was thirty-two and Richard was thirty-eight, he was her fifth husband and she became his second wife. The minister started the ceremony by saying, “You have gone through great travail in your love for each other.” They had been hounded and harassed, pilloried and praised. They stayed up talking, laughing, and crying until 7:00 a.m. the next morning. “I’m so happy you can’t believe it,” Elizabeth gushed.

John Springer was Elizabeth’s publicist during this period of her life and he had also represented Marilyn Monroe. “One thing Marilyn could do and Elizabeth can’t do is walk on the street by herself,” he said. “Marilyn could put on dark glasses or a dark wig or something, she could walk on the street.” Elizabeth and Richard could not even leave their hotel room without being mobbed, which made them miserable.

Some time, Elizabeth dreamed, when they were older, they would put an end to their frenetic lifestyle. Richard would become a writer like he always wanted to and she would stop acting and take care of their home. She lit up at the mere idea of it; it gave her such pleasure to think of what it would be like to live a quiet life. In the end, it was a beautiful fantasy.

They found solace in each other. In 1969 Elizabeth wrote:

“As long as he loves her everything is O.K. pimples, stupid hips, double chins, and all—She loved him more than her life and always will.—Wife.”

They starred in films together and made millions. But they possessed and craved each other one minute and could not bear the sight of each other the next. “We were like magnets,” Elizabeth said, “alternately pulling toward each other and, inexorably, pushing away.” For their 1966 masterpiece Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Elizabeth won an Oscar for her incredible transformation as Martha and he did not. “Maybe I’m jealous of her power or something, I don’t know,” Richard once admitted.

It was a love too all-consuming to last. So many of Richard’s letters to Elizabeth include apologies for whatever alcohol-fueled fight had taken place the night before. “I shall be good today and surprise you,” he wrote on October 9, 1972. “Thank you for taking care of me yesterday.”

After one particularly rough night Elizabeth wrote:

There have been times that I have loved you more than my

more than my children.

Something must be very wrong with the two of us if I’m put

in the position of having to take sides—having

to choose between

you or my kids.

Your behavior tonight has sickened me and I think made my

children not like you very much—not

that you give a fuck. But they

do care about each other and I care about them.

Sorry about you.”

“Liz and Dick” soon became the “Battling Burtons.” We were “mutually self-destructive,” Elizabeth said. “Maybe we have loved each other too much.”

To mark their tenth wedding anniversary in 1974, Elizabeth wrote:

My darling (my still) my husband, I wish I could tell you of my love for you, of my fear, my delight, my pure animal pleasure of you—(with you)—my jealousy, my pride, my anger at you, at times. Most of all my love for you, and whatever love you can dole out to me—I wish I could write about it but I can’t. I can only “boil and bubble” inside and hope you understand how I really feel.

Anyway I lust thee, your (still) wife. P.S. O’Love, let us never take each other for granted again! P.P.S. How about that—ten years!

A month later they announced that they would be getting a divorce. But they could not stay away from each other for long. On October 10, 1975, they married for the second time in a secret ceremony on the banks of a river in Botswana. She wrote in a diary entry: “We exchanged rings, fathomless looks, and were married once again, back where we belonged. Always belonged.” Letters they wrote to each other after the ceremony reveal how much they wanted to start a new life together.

Elizabeth Taylor: The Grit & Glamour of an Icon

Dear Husb.,

How about that! You really are my husband again and I have news for you, there will be bloody no more marriages—or divorces.

We are stuck like chicken feathers to tar—for lovely always.

Do you realize that we shall grow old together and I know the best is yet to be!

Anyway, my little big one I love you and have a deep tranquility in my heart and the tug of love is over and we are one once more. I’m happy, I hope you are,

Yours Truly,

But on July 29, 1976, less than ten months after they married for a second time, Elizabeth and Richard were granted their second divorce. “I love Richard with every fiber of my soul,” Elizabeth said, “but we can’t be together.” She was forty-four years old and alone, but she was determined to follow her own advice: “Pour yourself a drink,” she famously advised the heartbroken, “put on some lipstick, and pull yourself together.” She knew another love was waiting around the corner—and she was right.

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The ROLE of HER LIFE

A new biography reveals the details of elizabeth taylor’s lonely battle as activist during the aids crisis—and her struggle to persuade her famous hollywood friends to help..

The ROLE of HER LIFE KATE ANDERSEN BROWER February 2023

A T AROUND 4 P.M. on a Friday in 1998, Elizabeth Taylor, the most famous movie star of the 20th century, was dressed in her nightgown, applying makeup, and showing her friend Dorothy Flagler, a salesperson at Van Cleef & Arpels in Beverly Hills, a magnificent new yellow diamond ring. Flagler sat cross-legged on the floor of Taylor’s bathroom as they chatted away.

But when Taylor’s assistant Tim Mendelson walked in and told them that a friend of a friend had passed away from AIDS-related causes that day, the mood in the room changed dramatically.

“He really doesn’t have anyone and he has no money,” Mendelson told them. There was no money even to bury him.

Taylor told Mendelson to get her business manager on the phone, because she wanted to arrange for his burial. Mendelson called his office and was told that it would have to wait until Monday. When he relayed the message to Taylor, she threw the brush she was using down on the bathroom counter and her eyes went wild.

“We will not fucking wait until Monday. We will do it right now. Get him on the phone again. I want to talk to him. No mother’s son is going to lay on a cold, hard slab for the weekend when I can do something to stop it.”

When Mendelson called him back and handed her the phone, Taylor made her message crystal clear: “I don’t care what time it is! Get that money over to the funeral home. Now.”  She was just as furious as she had been in 1985,13 years earlier, when she became the most high-profile and most dedicated celebrity to shine a spotlight on a virus that was ravaging the gay community and further isolating people who were already ostracized by society. She had been fighting against injustice most of her life. “The most awful thing of all,” she famously said, “is to be numb.”

In 1944, when she was 12 years old, Taylor played the lead in National Velvet and became a heroine to girls around the world. She was the last star created by the Hollywood studio system, and her global fame is rivaled only by a handful of other women: Jackie Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe, and Queen Elizabeth II. Kennedy (who was fascinated by Taylor) withdrew into a private world, Monroe collapsed under the pressure, and the queen was buffered by the walls of Buckingham Palace. Taylor, by contrast, flourished. In 1963, when Taylor was just 31 years old, The New Yorker magazine’s film critic Brendan Gill noted that she was “less an actress by now than a great natural wonder, like Niagara or the Alps.”

She made 56 films and 10 television movies over nearly 60 years, but her lust for life has eclipsed her professional accomplishments. She is famous, even infamous, for her eight marriages to seven different men. By the time she was 26, she was twice divorced and once widowed. Her stardom was organic and so much a part of who she was. Long after she stopped acting, the drama surrounding her personal life was on display on magazine covers at every supermarket checkout counter in the world. But beneath the psychic clutter of her own mythology was a bawdy woman, quick to laughter and self-deprecation. What is most remarkable about Taylor is not how she maintained a stratospheric level of celebrity, it is the way that she singularly turned it into a force for change that saved countless lives and inspired so many others to follow her lead.

“I resented my fame,” she once said, “until I realized I could use it.”

It is impossible to overstate the fear and bigotry surrounding HIV and AIDS in the 1980s. Crosses were burned in front of AIDS patients’ houses; postal workers refused to deliver mail to people with AIDS, fearful that any human contact could spread the virus; a government worker burned her dress after handling an application touched by a person with AIDS; people would not eat at restaurants if the waiter was gay; children with AIDS were being cast out of their communities. People living with HIV and AIDS were being denied jobs and life insurance, and they were completely alienated and ostracized.

The disease confounded the medical community; it was a mystery that in its earliest years was ravaging the bodies of previously healthy young men. On July 3, 1981, The New York Times published an article, “Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals.” By the end of that year, 337 cases of the lethal disease thought to be a rare cancer called Kaposi’s sarcoma were diagnosed. In 1982, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention referred to the virus for the first time as acquired immune deficiency syndrome, or AIDS. In 1984,130,400 new HIV infections were reported globally.

At first, no one knew how the disease was transmitted. The July 1985 cover of Life declared: “Now No One Is Safe From AIDS.” President Ronald Reagan did not utter the name of the disease until that September, and then it was only to respond to a reporter’s question. In 1987, US surgeon general C. Everett Koop called for the use of condoms and sex education to prevent the spread of the virus, which cripples the body’s immune system. But it was not until the spring of 1987 when Reagan gave a major speech about AIDS—at Taylor’s urging. By the end of the year, 40,809 Americans had died.

Almost at the exact time, a reactionary backlash rose, led by figures like Anita Bryant and Jerry Falwell Sr., whose Moral Majority fought against recognizing the rights of gay people. Homophobia was rampant, and AIDS became known as the “gay plague.” The virus devastated the entertainment community and spread to hemophiliacs and injection-drug users. Taylor was watching helplessly as many of her friends were dying. The word empathy comes from the German einfiihlung, or “in-feeling”—translated first as “empathy” in 1909. It means mingling your own feelings and consciousness with someone else’s experience, which had always come naturally to Taylor. She possessed what her stepdaughter Carrie Fisher called “rampant empathy.” And she was feeling powerless until she found what became her life’s calling.

B ILL MISENHIMER WAS the director of AIDS Project Los Angeles, and he knew that he needed Taylor’s help; there was no one who commanded as much respect within the entertainment community, and he knew that she had many close gay friends. In 1985, he met with Taylor’s assistant Chen Sam and asked if Taylor would agree to chair a fundraising dinner called Commitment to Life to benefit APLA. The dinner would be the first major celebrity fundraiser in the world for AIDS. Taylor was constantly being asked to help raise money and draw attention to different causes, and she wanted to make sure that everything she did had a clear purpose. In the end, Misenhimer said, he had to present a note from the philanthropist Wallis Annenberg, who was working with APLA, to prove to Taylor that they were a legitimate organization committed to helping AIDS patients.

Once she was convinced that APLA was an honest organization in need of her help, she was on board completely. Unlike today, there were very few celebrity activists, and Taylor was among a handful of other actors and musicians who championed causes and drew attention to issues. Among them were Jane Fonda, who had been the most vocal and high-profile celebrity antiwar activist during the Vietnam War; Harry Belafonte, who helped organize the Selma to Montgomery march for voting rights in 1965 and who still works on behalf of civil rights and social justice causes; Eartha Kitt, who fought for civil rights and LGBTQ+ rights; Audrey Hepburn, who was an ambassador for UNICEF; and Paul Newman, who was a Democratic activist and philanthropist.

While she was waging her battle, Elizabeth must have been thinking of her close friends MONTGOMERY CLIFT, JAMES DEAN, AND ROCK HUDSON.

In the early days it was a lonely battle. Studio heads whom Taylor had made lots of money for hung up on her. Worst of all, her friend and former lover Frank Sinatra turned her down when she first asked for his help. Michael Jackson was also hesitant. So many people made excuses not to help that it shocked her. Some of her friends and advisers told her to stay away from HIV and AIDS because it could end her career.

“Who gives a goddamn about careers,” she told them, “when the people, without whom we wouldn’t have a career, are dying?”

Taylor fired the first and most audible shot in the long ongoing war to eradicate AIDS when she hosted the dinner and raised $1.3 million for APLA on September 19,1985. Eventually more than 2,500 people showed up, including Shirley MacLaine, Sammy Davis Jr., and Carol Burnett. There were also AIDS patients at the dinner who could be easily identified because their tuxedos hung loosely on their bodies.

“She was very, very sweet,” Burnett said. “She cared for people. Yes, she was rich; yes, she was beautiful; yes, she was famous. But it did not go to her head.”

While she was waging her battle, Taylor must have been thinking of her close friends Montgomery Clift, James Dean, and Rock Hudson. “If it weren’t for homosexuals, there would be no culture,” she said. “The idea that God should choose his children [to suffer]—his geniuses to whom he had given the talent to make it a different, more beautiful place for us mere mortals—made me so angry.”

She was definitely thinking of Hudson. While she was planning the Commitment to Life dinner, Taylor learned that he had AIDS. Publicly she said that she found out when the world did, on July 25,1985, two months before the September dinner. But in reality, she’d learned days before. “I thought Rock had cancer. Then one of his doctors called me and said, ‘Listen, I shouldn’t be telling you this, but I know how much you love him, and I’m going to because I’m not sure how much longer [he has].... Rock has AIDS.’ ”

Hudson’s announcement helped mobilize Hollywood’s elite into action because one of their own was sick. It helped make the dinner such a success that the venue had to be moved from the Century Plaza Hotel to the Westin Bonaventure because they needed a bigger ballroom. Taylor, an optimist, started to become cynical. Why, she thought, do people care more now just because someone who’s rich and famous has it? “When I found out that the ban had been lifted because of Rock, everybody could hardly wait to come [to the dinner], to show that they were broadminded,” Taylor reflected later. Hudson bought $10,000 worth of tickets, but he was too ill to attend and instead sent a telegram that was read aloud that evening. “I am not happy that I am sick,” he wrote. “I am not happy that I have AIDS. But if that is helping others, I can, at least, know that my own misfortune has had some positive worth.”

Hudson’s doctor, Michael Gottlieb, said that he was told by his bosses at UCLA, where he had been treating Hudson, that Hudson would be discharged. “Rock Hudson will die at home,” they told him. “He will not be readmitted.” Gottlieb knew the reason why: They did not want UCLA to be known as an AIDS hospital. And Hudson did die at home on October 2,1985. He was 59 years old.

Since there were no effective treatments in the early and mid-1980s, APLA used the money from the dinner to focus on patient care.

Taylor’s love and support was necessary during the early dark days of the epidemic. Misenhimer said that at APLA he and his colleagues would do interviews outside their office because television reporters were too afraid to come inside. AIDS patients would sometimes be discharged from the hospital to APLA because they had nowhere else to go. Misenhimer and his staff would put them up in a hotel nearby.

“I do know that she comforted me in tears often,” Misenhimer said of his friendship with Taylor. “She was so passionate and so compassionate. I’ve never been starstruck. I respected the legend of Elizabeth Taylor, but I loved the woman.”

In the summer of 1985, while working on the Commitment to Life dinner, Taylor thought about creating a national foundation to improve patients’ lives and raise money for a cure. She met with Gottlieb, Misenhimer, and Chen Sam at an inconspicuous French restaurant in Santa Monica. Misenhimer picked Taylor and Sam up in his brown Honda Accord and chauffeured them to dinner.

“We were an unlikely group,” Gottlieb recalled. “Me, a doctor who’s spent his life in laboratories; Bill Misenhimer, a Xerox executive turned activist who was openly gay; and the greatest living movie star in the world. But that night it all gelled.”

Misenhimer told Taylor how hard their path ahead would be, and she took his hand in hers and said with tears in her eyes, “Don’t worry, I’ve been through a lot.”

This was the moment that led to the creation of AmFAR, the Foundation for AIDS Research, the first major nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting research on AIDS. AmFAR’s first incarnation was the West Coast-based National AIDS Research Foundation that Taylor, Gottlieb, Misenhimer, and Sam created that evening. Rumors of the foundation reached Dr. Mathilde Krim in New York. Krim was a well-respected and fiercely dedicated research scientist who was married to movie executive Arthur Krim, a friend of super-producer Mike Todd, who was Taylor’s third husband until his death in 1958. Krim had created the AIDS Medical Foundation, which needed money. She reached out to inquire about a merger. In his will, Hudson left $250,000 to Taylor’s National AIDS Research Foundation, and two days after the Commitment to Life dinner, representatives from the National AIDS Research Foundation and the AIDS Medical Foundation met in Los Angeles to try to find a way to join forces.

When they announced the creation of their new foundation—AmFAR—at a press conference, the power struggle between the two groups was already evident. It was to be based on both coasts. Taylor was the national chairman (she did not want to be called “chairwoman”), and Krim and Gottlieb were chairs. Krim admired Taylor’s commitment and her dedication to treating AIDS patients with dignity and respect, but her ultimate goal was always to find a cure.

When Taylor could get on the phone and make an impact, or travel for an AIDS fundraiser, she did. “People always ask, ‘Does Elizabeth Taylor work hard?’ ” said Misenhimer, who became the first director of AmFAR. “You’ve got to put it in perspective, because what’s hard work for Elizabeth isn’t necessarily what everybody else would call hard work.... Once, we had a board meeting at the Bank of Los Angeles. Afterward she said, ‘So this is what a bank looks like.’ She’d never been in one.”

Sally Morrison, who held top positions at AmFAR for 13 years and worked closely with Taylor, said that Krim and Taylor were powerful women who had a common goal but different ways of getting there. “Dr. Krim was very empathetic, but to her it was so clear we needed to address this problem through science,” said Morrison. “I think for Elizabeth it was very difficult not to address food and housing and patient services. She had a lot of friends who were sick.”

The war was only beginning with the creation of AmFAR. In 1986, the conservative author and longtime friend of Reagan William F. Buckley Jr. wrote an op-ed in The New York Times calling for people with AIDS to be tattooed on their buttocks and arms as a means of “private protection” in order to “identify all the carriers.” Buckley said that Taylor was no hero, but a living example of “self-indulgence.” But Taylor could not care less what Buckley—or anyone else—thought of her. In 1987 she gave a speech at the National Press Club in Washington, DC, and reflected on what had made her become an activist.

“I became so incensed and personally frustrated at the rejection I was receiving by just trying to get people’s attention. I was made so aware of the silence, this huge, loud silence regarding AIDS, how no one wanted to talk about it and no one wanted to become involved. Certainly no one wanted to give money or support, and it so angered me that I finally thought to myself, Bitch, do something yourself. Instead of sitting there getting angry. Do something.”

I N 1987, TAYLOR launched her first perfume, Passion, and followed it up in 1991 with White Diamonds, another enormous hit. She traveled around the country visiting the department stores that sold her perfume, and she vowed to visit AIDS hospices in every city that she could. But there were two caveats: She did not want any press to interrupt those private visits, and the perfume company and the department store would have to donate money to each of the hospices she visited. She vowed to match their contributions.

At the Coming Home Hospice in San Francisco’s Castro District, nurses were told in hushed tones that Taylor was on her way. She stopped in each of the hospice’s 15 small rooms, and she spent several minutes talking with each patient. She asked them if she could arrange to have their dogs walked; she asked if she could call their mothers for them or write letters for them.

Some patients cried when they saw her, said Guy Vandenberg, a health care worker and AIDS activist who was at the Coming Home Hospice when she visited. After she met with patients, he said, Taylor sat with the handful of staffers in their tiny kitchen and asked them how they were taking care of themselves. “How do you support each other?” she wanted to know.

They averaged three deaths a week in the 15-bed hospice, he said. “Sometimes I would get off my three-to-midnight shift and I would come back the next day, and one or two people might have died during the night,” Vandenberg said, his voice cracking. “The need was so great that the bed would not be empty more than a day at most; sometimes the bed would be filled right away. We didn’t have time to process the volume of death.”

Even amid all the darkness, there was joy. “A majority of our patients, as they were dying, were quite capable of laughter and gallows humor, and to an outsider that often felt really strange or inappropriate. When the hospice was taken over by a more corporate hospital, we got disciplined for too much laughter, and we were eating with the patients and that was not allowed,” Vandenberg said through tears. “She fit right in, she knew that was good. She joked with them. She hugged and kissed every single one of us, the patients and the staff.”

After one of her hospice visits, a patient woke up and said, “I had a vision that Elizabeth Taylor came to me in my sleep!”

“No, she was actually here,” a nurse told him.

Taylor wanted to look perfect for every visit (“I hope I haven’t overdone it!” she’d joke), so she always arrived with full hair and makeup and the famous 33.19-carat Asscher-cut Krupp diamond on her left ring finger. She wanted the patients to see her the way they had imagined her to be.

She told her assistant Jorjett Strumme, who would get emotional, that she could not come into hospices with her because she would start to cry if Strumme cried. She had to keep things light and happy, she said, but she’d get back in the car and she would bury her head in her dog’s soft white fur and be unusually quiet for a while.

Ed Wolf was a counselor in San Francisco General Hospital’s Ward 5B in the 1980s. San Francisco was second only to New York in the number of AIDS cases, and 5B was the world’s first revolutionary inpatient unit for people with AIDS. It was created in 1983 and run by registered nurses who specialized in caring for AIDS patients. In 5B patients were treated with compassion.

In the beginning nurses and doctors wore so much protective gear that they looked like astronauts. Food trays piled up outside of hospital rooms because no one wanted to touch them. But in 5B things were different. Nurses were not allowed to wear protective medical gear, including gowns and masks. They believed that physical touch was an important way to honor each patient’s humanity. They did seemingly little things, like re-creating the decor of patients’ living rooms in their hospital rooms, allowing their pets to visit them, and, of course, allowing their partners to stay with them. They even used Champagne glasses for water.

“We couldn’t cure people, but there was a possibility to heal,” Wolf said. “We held weddings for people on their deathbeds years before it would ever become legal. In five minutes families would find out that their son is gay and he has AIDS. One conservative family from a small town came every single day for two weeks until their son died. They saw all these gay people taking care of him and they did a one-eighty. They went back to their homes and started a support group for people whose kids had AIDS. In other cases, people would bring ministers to get their children to atone. It was a terrible and a beautiful place all at once.”

Cliff Morrison created 5B, and he remembered one visit when Taylor stayed for several hours. After she spent time with each patient, she asked if there was a lounge area so that she could meet with a larger group. Patients who were feeling well enough to leave their beds came and sat in a circle around Taylor. She told them to feel free to ask her anything. One patient asked her, “What kind of grief and sorrow have you had in your life and who was the love of your life?”

“I was married to Richard Burton twice, and he was the most passionate love of my life. Nobody fought more or loved more than we did,” she said. “But Mike Todd was my first true love.”

Morrison remembers it feeling like sharing a cocktail with old friends, but in this case it was coffee and cigarettes. “I couldn’t believe how comfortable she was,” he recalled. They named the lounge after Taylor.

In 1986 someone she had never met before wrote her a letter telling her that one of his friends who had done some work on her house was in the hospital dying of AIDS. She had a note delivered with a purple orchid—purple was her favorite color and her eyes looked violet in a certain light—to his hospital bed: “My whole house needs redoing.... This time in deep purple and lavender—so you have to get out in a hurry and help me. All my love, ET.”

From Elizabeth Taylor: The Grit & Glamour of an Icon by Kate Andersen Brower. Copyright © 2022 by Kate Andersen Brower and ERT. To be published December 6,2022, by Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Excerpted by permission.

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Vanity Fair

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Elizabeth Taylor remains one of the world’s most iconic women. Renowned for her independent spirit, enduring strength, and unwavering compassion, she has captured the hearts of millions.

With striking beauty and undeniable talent, Elizabeth Taylor captivated audiences. As a precocious child actor and unforgettable leading lady, she played legendary female characters who embodied strength, integrity, and unapologetic femininity. Her career, which spanned six decades, earned her five Oscar nominations and two Best Actress wins.

Along with her singular talent, Elizabeth was a savvy businesswoman. Her instinctive sense of her own worth led her to negotiate the first $1 million dollar contract for an actor for her role in Cleopatra. She was also the first celebrity to launch a hit fragrance brand and became the first female social entrepreneur.

From the mid-1980s until her death, Elizabeth’s greatest role was that of activist. In a society paralyzed by fear, she used her fame to shine a light on the injustice and ignorance surrounding the HIV/AIDS epidemic. She co-founded amfAR and founded The Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation, receiving many awards for her advocacy, including the Légion d’honneur, the Presidential Citizens Medal, and the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award at the 65th Academy Awards. In 2000, Queen Elizabeth II named her a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire.

Throughout her life, Elizabeth possessed an abiding will to survive in the face of personal tragedy and an extraordinary capacity for love. She was married eight times to seven men, and her greatest joy in life was her family of four children, ten grandchildren, and four great-grandchildren. In 2011, Elizabeth died in Los Angeles at the age of 79.

Elizabeth Taylor at her Beverly Hills home circa 1956 Sanford Roth / A.M.P.A.S.

Elizabeth’s Life

Scroll down to move horizontally through the timeline. Dive deeper into each entry by clicking on the photograph.

After an idyllic early childhood in England, Elizabeth Taylor and her family emigrate to the United States. Not long after, a star is born in the sun-drenched city of Los Angeles.

Elizabeth signs with Metro Goldwyn Mayer and appears in Lassie Come Home , Jane Eyre , The White Cliffs of Dover , Life with Father , Julia Misbehaves , A Date with Judy , and Little Women . She first graces the cover of LIFE and meets her best friend Montgomery Clift. Above all, the decade is defined by Elizabeth’s career-making performance in National Velvet .

***File Photo***

Elizabeth Taylor dies

Hollywood icon {DAME ELIZABETH TAYLOR} has died at the age of 79.

The actress, who was suffering from congestive heart failure, passed away in Los Angeles in the early hours of Wednesday morning (23Mar11) with her children by her side.

Her son, Michael Wilding, confirmed the sad news and paid tribute to his late mother in a statement, which reads, “My mother was an extraordinary woman who lived life to the fullest, with great passion, humour, and love. Though her loss is devastating to those of us who held her so close and so dear, we will always be inspired by her enduring contribution to our world.

“Her remarkable body of work in film, her ongoing success as a businesswoman, and her brave and relentless advocacy in the fight against HIV/AIDS, all make us all incredibly proud of what she accomplished. We know, quite simply, that the world is a better place for mom having lived in it. Her legacy will never fade, her spirit will always be with us, and her love will live forever in our hearts.”

Carl Alfalfa Switzer, Elizabeth Taylor (film debut)

There’s One Born Every Minute (1942)

Directed by Harold Young

This is a PR photo. WENN does not claim any Copyright or License in the attached material. Fees charged by WENN are for WENN’s services only, and do not, nor are they intended to, convey to the user any ownership of Copyright or License in the material. By publishing this material, the user expressly agrees to indemnify and to hold WENN harmless from any claims, demands, or causes of action arising out of or connected in any way with user’s publication of the material.

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Elizabeth graduates from high school, marries four times, and gives birth to three children. She stars in audience favorites, like Father of the Bride and Ivanhoe , while holding her own against heavy hitters Montgomery Clift, Spencer Tracy, Rock Hudson, James Dean, and Paul Newman in critically acclaimed films. She experiences one of the greatest tragedies of her life, receives three Oscar nominations, and ends the decade by extricating herself from the clutches of MGM.

Actress Elizabeth Taylor, 18, (Feb. 27), sporting cap & gown while holding her diploma after graduation at Hollywood’s University High School. (Photo by Peter Stackpole/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images)

Elizabeth wins her first Oscar for a movie she hated, nearly dies in London from pneumonia, and adopts a daughter. And then her first role since leaving MGM changes her life forever. While playing Cleopatra – the role for which she negotiated the first $1 million contract for an actress – Elizabeth enters into a relationship with her second great love, igniting a global scandal along the way. Together, she and Richard Burton go on to make eleven more movies, including Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, for which Elizabeth wins her second Oscar. During this time, Elizabeth writes her 1964 memoir, becomes the custodian of two legendary diamonds, and emerges as the first modern-day celebrity.

Throughout the 1970s, Elizabeth co-stars with some of Hollywood’s biggest names: Warren Beatty, Michael Caine, Henry Fonda, Andy Warhol, Jane Fonda, and Ava Gardner. She divorces Richard Burton, remarries him a year later, and divorces him the following year. After appearing in some TV movies, Elizabeth goes to Washington on the arm of her sixth husband, Republican senator John Warner.

Elizabeth makes her broadway debut, divorces John Warner, and checks herself into the Betty Ford Clinic. She writes her second book, Elizabeth Takes Off , which details her weight loss and recovery from addiction. She mourns Richard Burton’s death but discovers new passions: building a perfume empire and confronting a public health crisis. As America reluctantly addresses the HIV/AIDS epidemic, Elizabeth becomes an early and outspoken advocate for those suffering from the disease.

LOS ANGELES, CA – SEPTEMBER 19: Elizabeth Taylor attends AIDS Project Los Angeles Benefit on September 19, 1985 at the Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Ron Galella/WireImage)

Elizabeth’s AIDS activism becomes her full-time job as she establishes The Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation. She marries (and divorces) for the last time and launches a string of highly successful perfumes. She earns the Lifetime Achievement Award from AFI and the number seven spot on their list of greatest female film legends. She gives a rousing acceptance speech for her Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award at the 1993 Oscars and bravely undergoes brain surgery.

Actress Elizabeth Taylor poses with her Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award at the 65th Annual Academy Awards at the Shrine Auditorium on March 29, 1993 in Los Angeles, California.

Elizabeth is awarded England’s highest honor, publishes a book on her jewelry collection, and retires from acting. She receives the Kennedy Center Honors and a spot in the California Hall of Fame.

LOS ANGELES – DECEMBER 01: ***EXCLUSIVE ACCESS*** Actress Dame Elizabeth Taylor inside to attend A.R. Gurney’s ‘Love Letters’, with James Earl Jones, to benefit The Elizabeth Taylor HIV/AIDS Foundation at the Paramount Studios Theater on December 1, 2007 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Jon Carrasco/ ETHAF/Getty Images)

After a long and deeply fulfilling life, Elizabeth passes away at the beginning of the decade. Her legacy will continue through The Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation and House of Taylor, who remain dedicated to preserving her vision for a kinder, more courageous world.

• House of Taylor
• World of Fragrance

St. Louis Jewish Light

• JPop Culture

Elizabeth Taylor’s Judaism, love for Richard Burton highlight epic new biography

ROBERT A. COHN , Editor-in-Chief Emeritus Published January 31, 2023

Few people can rival Elizabeth Taylor ’s impact on American popular culture. Taylor’s life was a warp-speed roller coaster of dizzying ups and downs.  Her heart-stopping physical beauty combined with bonafide acting ability launched her acting career when she was only 17. She was married eight times, including twice to Welsh actor Richard Burton. She battled alcoholism, drug addiction and fatal attraction to wealthy and powerful men; she was a flagrant and ruthless adulterer, who could destroy the marriages of her rivals. Raised as a Christian Scientist, Taylor became a Jew by choice and donated generously to Israel.

“Elizabeth Taylor: The Grit & Glamour of an Icon”

By Kate Andersen Brower HarperCollins, 495 pages, $32.50 Buy online

Elizabeth Taylor

Author and journalist Kate Andersen Brower has published what overnight has become both the definitive biography and the “authorized version” of Taylor’s life.  Brower had full access to Taylor’s archives, including unpublished letters, photographs and “private reflections.”  The nearly 500-page book covers in exhaustive detail every aspect of Taylor’s career.  Remember when Taylor choked on a chicken bone? Or when her limitless demands in the title role of “Cleopatra” nearly bankrupted MGM?  Both are given extensive coverage in Brower’s massive, encyclopedic tome.

Of particular interest to Jewish readers may be Taylor’s conversion to Judaism. Two of her many marriages were to Jews: Michael Todd and crooner Eddie Fisher, but Brower notes that Taylor insisted that the choice to embrace Judaism was not to placate her Jewish spouses but resulted from serious study.

Taylor asked the distinguished scholar Rabbi Max Nussbaum for books on Judaism and was attracted to its values and commitment to acts of kindness and social justice. These Jewish values influenced her decision to become an early advocate of support for people with HIV/AIDS.

Elizabeth Taylor becomes Jewish

Brower notes the death of Todd in a tragic plane crash, and Taylor’s decision to become Jewish: “On March 3, 1959, a year after Mike’s death, Elizabeth officially converted to Judaism at Temple Israel in Hollywood,” she writes.  “It was a way to keep (Mike) close and to find meaning during her grief. Raised as a Christian Scientist, she felt a deep connection to the Jewish faith and its people, especially having seen how they were persecuted during World War II.”

Brower adds: “Her Hebrew Name was Elisheba Rachel (who was the favorite wife of Jacob).”

Rabbi Nussbaum of Temple Israel in Hollywood visited Taylor while she was mourning. She asked Nussbaum why Mike died.

“He gave her books about the philosophy of Judaism, excerpts from the Bible, the history of the Jews, even the bestselling novel ‘Exodus,’” Brower writes. She quotes Taylor as saying, “In seven months, I knew that I had found what I had been searching for, for many years. Neither Mike Todd nor Eddie Fisher did anything to encourage me to become a Jew.”

As evidence of her commitment to the Jewish people, Brower notes that at a Friar’s Club dinner, she pledged to buy $100,000 in Israel Bonds.”

Brower adds that because she was Jewish and supported Israel, Egypt and every other Arab state at first banned her films. When Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser saw “Cleopatra,” he allowed the film to open in major cities across Egypt. Even Nasser could not resist Taylor’s violet eyes!

On May 12, 1959, Taylor married Eddie Fisher at Temple Beth Shalom in Las Vegas. Taylor flagrantly stole Fisher from actress Debbie Reynolds.

Taylor would soon find out that Fisher was no bargain; he was a gambling addict who stuck her with a $250,000 gambling tab.

Years later Taylor and Reynolds became friends through their shared contempt for Fisher.

True to her Judaism to the very end, Taylor instructed that her funeral at Forest Lawn Cemetery be held before sundown on Shabbat.

Brower’s comprehensive biography of Elizabeth Taylor is both a richly detailed almanac and a compassionate eulogy to a life lived to the fullest.

Robert A. (Bob) Cohn is a native of St. Louis (b. 1939). He is a graduate of University City High School (Class of 1957) and is a member of the U. City...

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Elizabeth Taylor took so many pills, a medical expert assumed she was dead

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Hollywood legend Elizabeth Taylor consumed so many pills in the 1980s that a medical expert who reviewed her files assumed the patient was dead — because “the dosages were incompatible with life.”

According to the new biography “ Elizabeth Taylor: The Grit & Glamour of an Icon ,” by Kate Andersen Brower, by 1983, the star’s pill-popping was so severe that her then-daughter-in-law, Aileen Getty, anonymously contacted a regulatory agency to complain that some of Taylor’s doctors were overprescribing.

That led to the discovery of just how much the “Cleopatra” actress was taking: Three of the actress’ doctors wrote a “combined 1,000 prescriptions for twenty-eight drugs between 1983 and 1988, including tranquilizers, sleeping pills, and painkillers, Brower writes.

At one point, things got so bad that Taylor — who had some surprising romantic dalliances — asked her son to inject her with the powerful synthetic opioid Demerol.

Christopher Wilding, the screen siren’s second son with actor Michael Wilding, reveals in the book that the disturbing request occurred while he was staying with his mother during her 1976-1982 marriage to Virginia Senator John Warner.

Wilding remembers his mother calling for him to come to her bedroom and that “she sounded wobbly … but it wasn’t until I saw her that I realized she was already pretty f–ked up on something. She was seated at the edge of the bed in her underwear, and she had a syringe of Demerol in her right hand.”

He explained that the Oscar winner then asked him to “administer the shot,” which he declined to do.

“She looked at me with deadened yet disappointed eyes, took a breath, steadied her hand, and plunged the needle into her flesh,” Wilding says in the book.

Taylor also struggled with alcohol addiction which worsened during her tempestuous marriages to Welsh actor Richard Burton, who was a severe alcoholic himself.

Brower writes that the couple’s first real encounter was on the set of “Cleopatra” when Burton, coming off a bender, couldn’t even raise a cup of coffee to his lips because his hands were shaking so badly. He asked Taylor for help, which she found endearing and attractive.

The pair’s famously combative relationship was fueled by alcohol —”the third partner in their marriage.”

“Elizabeth’s own growing problem with alcohol was easy to overlook because Richard’s was so debilitating,” notes Brower.

And the actress’s drinking and drug taking worsened during her marriage to Warner, which found her bored and lonely, living in Washington and packing on the pounds.

“Life as a senator’s wife in Washington, Elizabeth said later, made her ‘a drunk and a junkie,” Brower writes.

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By 1981, Taylor was divorced and back in Los Angeles. But her addiction to pain medication was worsening.

“She surrounded herself with assistants and housekeepers who became like family to her and were less likely to call her out on her growing problem,” Brower writes. “She manipulated her doctors into giving her the pills she wanted, when she wanted them; it was very hard to say no to Elizabeth Taylor.”

Eventually, a group of friends and family staged an intervention and Taylor checked into the Betty Ford Center in 1983 for a seven-week stay. She stopped drinking but still took pills — rationalizing them as legitimate because they were prescribed by a doctor.

Daughter Liza Todd remembers calling to speak to her mother one evening and being told that Taylor was unavailable after 9 p.m. — “not because she was asleep, but because she was high.”

In 1988, pal George Hamilton staged a second intervention and Taylor went back to rehab — but she refused to do the work and was asked to leave.

However, Taylor did manage to score herself another husband while in rehab: construction worker, Larry Fortensky, 20 years her junior. The two married in an over-the-top ceremony in 1991. Five years later, he had begun drinking again, and the two split.

For the rest of her life, Taylor battled her addictions before dying in 2011 at age 79.

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Did Elizabeth Taylor And Richard Burton Live Like Royals? Author Of Their New Biography Reveals

Roger Lewis is writing a new biography that will examine the life of the famous Hollywood couple Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. Did he mention that the two had a luxurious lifestyle? Find out.

What did Roger Lewis find out while writing the book?

• What did Lewis say about Taylor-Richard’s love story and lifestyle?

The classic couple Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton hailed from Britain but loved to live like Royalty despite being actors. The two were known for many things, but their luxurious lifestyle stole the show. 

The biography Erotic Vagrancy: Everything about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor is a new book by Roger Lewis set to come out on March 26 under Mobius Publishing. The biography will see the actors as a couple, their origins, how they started out as actors and their controversial marriage. However, their luxurious lifestyle will be a big part of it. 

Roger Lewis reveals how the one unique part of their marriage was the amount of people the couple had around them all the time. They were occupied by a number of secretaries, butlers, nannies, tutors of their children, lawyers, accountants, and vets for their numerous exotic pets.

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The two were very well established in their fields when they met each other and fell in love. 

What did Lewis say about Taylor-Richard’s love story and lifestyle?

Regarding their love story, Lewis says, “It didn't really matter to her that there would be someone having to clear up all this mess because she had the wherewithal to do that.” The two met when Taylor was a child actress and Burton worked on stage; their combination got them more money. 

Taylor had always loved animals, so animals had become integral to their outings. Lewis adds, “On this yacht of theirs that had very expensive carpets, they just used to be replaced every month or so because all the pets were not housebroken. And she never worried about all of that.” 

Roger Lewis has seen their life so closely that he believes Hollywood had made their lifestyle undergo so much pressure that it eventually impacted them as a couple. Regarding this, Lewis says, “[Their lifestyle was] very, very expensive to keep going, so they kept having to churn out these crazy films to pay the bills.” 

He also says that money needs one to earn more money, and no one can let go of such a chance. Lewis finds their brashness nice, and he admires it. He “was never, at any stage, appalled by their bad behavior and their vulgarity,” making him a perfect fit for the book.

Who says multiple people cannot live in one? Well, I am a nocturnal owl,  and a workaholic who

Who says multiple people cannot live in one? Well, I am a nocturnal owl,  and a workaholic who loves working most of the time and binging on the latest shows and movies by the night.  When not found engrossed in my avid reader spirit, you can also find me trying new Cafes and restaurants.  Writing comes to me faster than breathing, so I stick to that.  Apart from loving the most gruesome crime to crazy horror, I enjoy comedy too.  I have studied a Bachelor's in Journalism, Psychology and English that adds to the plethora of content I binge.

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Elizabeth Taylor (1932-2011)

IMDbPro Starmeter Top 5,000 114

• 40 wins & 43 nominations total

Photos 1459

• Maggie Pollitt

• Catherine Holly

• Mother Doris

• Beryl Mason

• Sarah (voice)

• Elizabeth Taylor

• Elizabeth Taylor (voice)

• Pearl Slaghoople

• Maggie Simpson (voice)

• Mrs. Andrews (voice)

• Princess Kosmonopolis

• Elizabeth Taylor (uncredited)

• Alice Moffit

• Marguerite Sydney

• executive producer
• producer (uncredited)

• associate producer (uncredited)

• performer: "You Must Meet My Wife", "Send in the Clowns", "Finale"

• performer: "Melody Of Spring" (1947), "It's A Most Unusual Day" (1948) (uncredited)
• performer: "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (to the tune of Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush)"

• performer: "Merry Christmastime Is Here", "It Came Upon a Midnight Clear" (1850) (uncredited)

• performer: "It's A Most Unusual Day (Reprise)", "It's A Most Unusual Day (Finale)"

• performer: "Melody Of Spring" (1947) (uncredited)

Personal details

• Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation
• Dame Elizabeth Taylor
• 5′ 2″ (1.57 m)
• February 27 , 1932
• Hampstead, London, England, UK
• March 23 , 2011
• Los Angeles, California, USA (congestive heart failure)
• Spouses Larry Fortensky October 6, 1991 - October 31, 1996 (divorced)
• Children Christopher Edward Wilding
• Parents Sara Taylor
• Howard Taylor (Sibling)
• Other works (5/21/99) "Elizabeth Taylor/Cinema Against AIDS Benefit", Cannes, France, with Ben Affleck , David Puttnam , Salma Hayek and others.
• 13 Biographical Movies
• 30 Print Biographies
• 4 Portrayals
• 2 Interviews
• 54 Articles
• 30 Pictorials
• 1152 Magazine Cover Photos

Did you know

• Trivia At one point during her life-threatening illness while filming BUtterfield 8 (1960) , she was actually pronounced dead.
• Quotes [on turning 53 years old] I think I'm finally growing up - and about time.
• Trademarks Dark hair, violet eyes and suntanned skin
• Salaries The Flintstones ( 1994 ) $2,500,000
• When did Elizabeth Taylor die?
• How did Elizabeth Taylor die?
• How old was Elizabeth Taylor when she died?

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Best Biographies » New Biography

The best biographies of 2023: the national book critics circle shortlist, recommended by elizabeth taylor.

Winner of the 2023 NBCC biography prize

G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century by Beverly Gage

Talented biographers examine the interplay between individual qualities and greater social forces, explains Elizabeth Taylor —chair of the judges for the 2023 National Book Critics Circle award for biography. Here, she offers us an overview of their five-book shortlist, including a garlanded account of the life of J. Edgar Hoover and a group biography of post-war female philosophers.

Interview by Cal Flyn , Deputy Editor

The Grimkés: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family by Kerri K. Greenidge

Mr. B: George Balanchine’s Twentieth Century by Jennifer Homans

Metaphysical Animals: How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life by Clare Mac Cumhaill & Rachael Wiseman

Up from the Depths: Herman Melville, Lewis Mumford, and Rediscovery in Dark Times by Aaron Sachs

1 G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century by Beverly Gage

2 the grimkés: the legacy of slavery in an american family by kerri k. greenidge, 3 mr. b: george balanchine’s twentieth century by jennifer homans, 4 metaphysical animals: how four women brought philosophy back to life by clare mac cumhaill & rachael wiseman, 5 up from the depths: herman melville, lewis mumford, and rediscovery in dark times by aaron sachs.

I t’s a pleasure to have you back , Elizabeth—this time to discuss the National Book Critics Circle’s 2023 biography shortlist. You’ve been chair of the judging panel for a while, so you’re in a great position to tell us whether it has been a good year for biography.

I’m also optimistic about the future.  As the world opens and libraries, archives and places where history happened are becoming more accessible. Figures—or groups—once regarded marginal are now being discovered or reappraised with new evidence and interpretation. Biographies are ambitious in structure and form, and focus beyond the pale, stale, and male.

That comes through in the shortlist, I think. There’s a real range here. I think any reader is bound to find something to appeal to their tastes.

Shaping a shortlist seems quite like arranging a bouquet. A clutch of peony, begonia, or orchid stems…each may be lovely, an exemplar in its own way. We aspire to assemble a glorious arrangement—a quintet of blooms that reflect the wildly varied human experiences represented in the verdant garden of biography.

Let’s talk about G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century first, then, shall we? It is your 2023 winner of the NBCC’s prize for best biography; it also won a Pulitzer Prize . It’s also, and correct me if I’m wrong, the most traditional of the biographies that made the list.

G-Man is traditional in as much as Beverly Gage captures the full sweep of Hoover’s life, cradle to grave: 1895 to 1972. In that way, structurally G-Man sits aside the epics of David McCullough ( Truman , John Adams ) and Ron Chernow ( Grant , Alexander Hamilton ).

Unlike those valorized national leaders, Hoover answered to no voters. The quintessential ‘Government Man,’ a counselor and advisor to eight U.S. presidents , of both political parties, he was one of the most powerful, unelected government officials in history. He reigned over the Federal Bureau of Investigations from 1924 to 1972. Hoover began as a young reformer and—as he accrued power—was simultaneously loathed and admired. Through Hoover, Gage skilfully guides readers through the full arc of 20th-century America, and contends: “We cannot know our own story without understanding his.”

In G-Man , Yale University professor Gage untangles the contradictions in Hoover’s aspirations and cruelty, and locates the paradoxical American story of tensions and anxieties over security, masculinity, and race.

“This year, many biographies were deeply rooted in American soil that required years of research to till”

Hoover lived his entire life in Washington D.C., and Gage entwines his story in the city’s evolution into a global power center and delves deeply into the dark childhood that led him to remain there for college. Critical to understanding Hoover, Gage demonstrates, was his embrace of the Kappa Alpha fraternity; its worldview was informed by Robert E. Lee and the ‘Lost Cause’ of the South , in which racial equality was unacceptable. He shaped the F.B.I. in his image and recruited Kappa Alpha men to the Bureau.

For Hoover, Gage writes, Kappa Alpha was a way to measure character, political sympathies, and, of course, loyalty. One of those men was Clyde Tolson, and Gage documents their trips to nightclubs, the racetrack, vacations, and White House receptions. Hoover did not acknowledge that he and Tolson were a couple, but in the end their separate burial plots were a few yards from one another.

While Hoover feels very much alive on the page, Gage captures the full sweep of American history, chronicling events from the hyper-nationalism of the early part of the century, moving into the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., making use of newly unclassified documents. When Hoover’s F.B.I. targeted Nazis and gangsters, there was clarity about good guys and bad guys. But by the mid-century, as the nation began to fracture, he regarded calls for peace and justice as threats to national security. Among the abuses of power committed by Hoover’s F.B.I., for instance, was the wiretapping and harassment of King.

Beyond Hoover’s malfeasance, Gage emphasizes that Hoover was no maverick. He tapped into a dark part of the national psyche and had public opinion on his side. Through Hoover, Americans could see themselves, and, as Gage argues, “what we valued and refused to see.”

A biography like this does make you realize how deeply world events might be impacted or even partially predicted by the family background or the personalities of a small number of key individuals.

We should step through the rest of the books on your 2023 biography shortlist. Let’s start with Kerri K. Greenidge’s The Grimkés: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family , which is the story not only of the Grimké Sisters Sarah and Angelina, two well-known abolitionists, but Black members of their family as well.

I was eager to read The Grimkés as I had admired Greenidge’s earlier biography, Black Radical , about Boston civil rights leader and abolitionist newspaper editor William Monroe Trotter. Greenidge, a professor at Tufts University, brings her unique, perceptive eye to African American civil rights in the North.

Now Greenidge’s The Grimkés sits on my bookshelf next to The Hemingses of Monticello , the Pulitzer Prize-winning book by Annette Gordon-Reed who exposed the contradictions of one of the most venerated figures in American history, Thomas Jefferson. In the Grimke family, Greenidge has found a gnarled family tree, deeply rooted in generations of trauma.

Sisters Sarah and Angelina Grimke have been exalted as brave heroines who defied antebellum Southern piety and headed northward to embrace abolition. Greenridge makes the powerful case that, in clinging to this mythology, a more troubling story is obscured. In the North, as the Grimké sisters lived comfortably and agitated for change, they enjoyed the financial benefits of their slaveholding family in South Carolina.

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After the Civil War, they learned that their brute of a brother had fathered at least two sons with a woman whom he had enslaved. The sisters provided some financial assistance in the education of these two young men, one attended Harvard Law School and the other Princeton Divinity School—and did not let their nephews forget it.

Not only does Greenidge provide a revisionist history of the Grimke sisters, but she also takes account of the full Grimké family and extends their story beyond the 19th century. She delves into the dynamics of racial subordination and how free white men who conceive children — whether from rape or a relationship spanning decades with enslaved women—destroy families. Generations of children are haunted by this history.  Poignantly, Greenidge evokes the life and work of the sisters’ grandniece Angelina (‘Nana’) Weld Grimké , a talented—and troubled—queer playwright and poet, who carried the heavy weight of the generational trauma she inherited.

This sounds like a family saga of the kind you might be more likely to find in fiction.

Let’s turn to Mr B . : George Balanchine’s 20th Century by Jennifer Homans, the story of the noted choreographer. Why did this make your shortlist of the best biographies of 2023?

The perfect match of biographer and subject! A dancer who trained with Balanchine’s School of American Ballet in New York and is now dance critic for The New Yorker, Homans has written a biography of the man known as ‘the Shakespeare of Dance.’ In felicitous prose, Homans channels the dancer’s experience onto the page, from the body movements that can produce such beauty to the aching tendons and ligaments. Training is transformation, Homan writes, and working with Balanchine was a kind of metamorphosis tangled with pain. She evokes the dances so vividly that one can almost hear the music.

“At the heart of biography is the quest to understand the interplay between individual and social forces”

Homans captures Balanchine in a constant state of reinvention, tracing his life from Czarist Russia to Weimar Berlin , finally making his way to post-war New York where he revitalized the world of ballet by embracing modernish, founding New York City Ballet in 1948. Balanchine was genius whose personal history shape-shifted over the years. Homans grounds Mr. B in more than a hundred interviews, and draws from archives around the world.

Homans captures Balanchine’s charisma and cultural importance, but Mr. B. is no hagiography. Homans grasps the knot of sex and power over women used in his work. He married four times, always to dancers. They were all the same kind of swan-necked, long-waisted, long-limbed women, and although Homans does not write this, his company often sounds more like a cult than art.

And, of course, there is the matter of weight, which Homans dealt with directly, as did Balanchine. He posted a sign: ‘BEFORE YOU GET YOUR PAY—YOU MUST WEIGH.’

I don’t think I’ve ever considered reading a ballet biography before, but it sounds fascinating.

The next book on the NBCC’s 2023 biography shortlist brings us to Oxford, England. This is Metaphysical Animals: How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life by Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman.

At the outset of World War II , a quartet of young women, Oxford students—Elizabeth Anscombe, Iris Murdoch, Philippa Foot, and Mary Midgley—were “bored of listening to men talk about books by men about men,” as Mac Cumhaill, a Durham University professor, and Wiseman, a lecturer at the University of Liverpool, write. In their marvelous group biography, MacCumhaill and Wiseman vivify how the friendships of these women congealed to bring “philosophy back to life.”

As their male counterparts departed for the front lines, this brilliant group of women came together in their dining halls and shared lodging quarters to challenge the thinking of their male colleagues. In the shadows of the Holocaust and Hiroshima, these friends rejected the logical positivists who favoured empirical scientific questions. They didn’t really create a distinct philosophical approach as much as they shared an interest in the metaphysics of morals.

Brilliant. A book that is ostensibly ‘improving’ but which turns out to be absolutely chock-full of gossip sounds perfect to me. Let’s move on to the fourth book on the NBCC’s 2023 biography shortlist, which is Up from the Depths: Herman Melville, Lewis Mumford, and Rediscovery in Dark Times by Aaron Sachs.

A biography about writing biography ! Very meta, and very much in the interdisciplinary tradition of American Studies. In his gorgeous braid of cultural history, Cornell University professor Sachs   entwines the lives and work of poet and fiction writer Herman Melville (1819-1891) and the philosopher and literary critic Lewis Mumford (1895-1990), illuminating their coextending concerns about their worlds in crisis.

While Melville is now firmly ensconced in the American canon, most appreciation and respect for him was posthumous. The 20th-century Melville revival was largely sparked by a now overlooked Mumford, once so prominent that he appeared on a 1936 Time  magazine cover.

Sachs brilliantly provides the connective tissue between Melville and his biographer Mumford so that these writers seem to be in conversation with one another, both deeply affected by their dark times.

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As Mumford grappled with tragedies wrought by World War I, the 1918 flu pandemic and urban decay, Melville had dealt with the bloody Civil War , slavery , and industrialization. In a certain way, this book is about the art of biography itself, two writers wrestling with modernity in a bleak world. In delving into Melville’s angst, Mumford was thrust into great turmoil. Sachs evokes so clearly and painfully this bond that almost did Mumford in, and writes that “Melville, it turns out, was Mumford’s white whale.”

There’s a real sense of range in this shortlist. But do you get a sense of there being certain trends in biography as a genre in 2023?

In many ways, this is a golden era for biography. There are fewer dull but worthy books, more capacious and improvisational ones. More series of short biographies that pack a big punch. We see more group biographies and illustrated biographies. But just as figures and groups once considered marginal are being centered, records that document those lives are vanishing.

The crisis in local news and the homogenization of national and international news will soon be a crisis for biographers and historians. Where would historians be without the ‘slave narratives’ from the Federal Writers Project , or the Federal Theatre Project ? Reconstruction of public events—federal elections, national tragedies, and so on—may be possible, but we lose that wide spectrum of human experience. We need to preserve these artifacts and responses to events as they happen. Biographies are time-consuming labors of love and passion, and are often expensive to produce. We need to ensure that we are generating and saving the emails, the records, the to-do lists of ordinary life.

The affluent among us will always be able to commission histories of their companies or families, but are those the only ones that will endure?

June 30, 2023

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Elizabeth Taylor

Elizabeth Taylor is a co-author of American Pharaoh: Mayor Richard J. Daley; His Battle for Chicago and the Nation with Adam Cohen, with whom she also cofounded The National Book Review. She has chaired four Pulitzer Prize juries, served as president of the National Book Critics Circle, and presided over the Harold Washington Literary Award selection committee three times. Former Time magazine correspondent in New York and Chicago and long-time literary editor of the Chicago Tribune, she is working on a biography of women in the Civil War and Reconstruction eras for Liveright/W.W. Norton.

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