Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes allows Elizabeth Taylor’s own voice to narrate her story, inviting audiences to rediscover not just a mega star of Hollywood’s Golden Age but a complex woman who navigated lifelong fame, personal identity, and public scrutiny on a global stage from early childhood. Through newly recovered interviews with Taylor and unprecedented access to the movie star’s personal archive, the film reveals the complex inner life and vulnerability of the Hollywood legend while also challenging audiences to recontextualize her achievements and her legacy.
In 1964, at the height of her fame, Elizabeth Taylor sat down with journalist Richard Meryman for a candid, extensive interview. Drawing from 40 hours of the newly unearthed audio interviews and extraordinary access to personal photos, home movies, archival interviews, and news footage, illustrated with clips from the iconic roles that mirror her real-life challenges and triumphs, Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes provides the most intimate portrait of the actress to date.
Modest, bawdy, charming, honest, at times frustrated, Taylor comes to life as she discusses her film debut in 1943’s “Lassie Come Home,” her struggle to free herself from the limitations of ingénue roles, her benchmark roles in “Giant,” “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” and “Butterfield 8,” for which she won her first of two Academy Awards®, and the excesses of shooting the troubled epic 1963 film “Cleopatra.” Taylor also speaks unguardedly about her marriages and children, her close friendships with Rock Hudson, Montgomery Clift, and Roddy McDowall, and her fifth marriage to Richard Burton, with whom she would star in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,” winning her second Academy Award. Peeling back the layers of one of cinema’s most enduring icons, the conversations reveal a woman at odds with her screen image, yearning for respect and agency, while forever under the microscope of scrutinizing press and the public.
Featured Participants:
Alongside Elizabeth Taylor, the documentary features the voices of actors Roddy McDowall, Debbie Reynolds, Richard Burton, George Hamilton, producer Sam Marx, agents Marion Rosenberg and John Heyman, longtime assistant and co-Trustee Tim Mendelson, and friends Liz Smith and Doris Brynner.
