“This Film Is Drawn from an interview session between Elizabeth Taylor and journalist Richard Meryman as research for a book.”

Elizabeth Taylor is considered one of the best actresses to work in Hollywood. She started out as an actor at a very young age in Lassie Come Home. She struggled to make a name for herself at first, but eventually, she ended up getting some bigger roles in films such as The Last Time I Saw Paris, Cleopatra, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. and A Place In the Sun. She wouldn’t be considered a first-rate actress until she won that coveted first Academy Award. She was mostly considered a paparazzi queen or an. In Elizabeth Taylor’s The Lost Tapes, she goes into all the details of her life.

Those details include her six Marriages and subsequent weddings to Nick Hilton, Michael Wilding, Michael Todd, Eddie Fisher, Richard Burton, and John Warner.  She fell head over heels for these men, but most of the time, she fell out of love just as quickly. She didn’t have children until the third marriage, but all the relationships she was in care about her kids from other marriages. They seemed like a good family at first. Before she got bored with them for whatever reason. She was not much of a homebody; she liked to travel and such, but the paparazzi made it difficult for her and the children.

She had made friends who were gay that she hung out with at first in her life because she knew they weren’t interested in her sexuality.  Roddie McDowell,  Rock Hudson, and Montgomery Clift were among the men. She could just go to the beach with us or have drinks. These men helped give her a security blanket.  These days women would just have a gaggle of other women around them to protect them. It was different back in the 60s. Once her career kicked into gear she didn’t have that luxury anymore.  

This documentary as the title suggests uses Tapes that were recorded by Taylor & journalist Richard Maryman. He asked a lot of penetrating questions. She was very helpful and gave him a lot about her life. The viewers who are watching this film get to see these words that were dictated to Maryman in the form of archival footage as well as photos, and Home videos. These were great visuals to see what truly transpired in her life. I was glad that this documentary did that. They were very helpful. The good documentaries do that well.

Taylor had her fair share of good moments in her life, but she had a lot of bad moments that were all over the television and in the tabloids.  What they rarely captured were the good things she did in her life. She became a humanitarian by creating AMFAR (The American Foundation For Aids Research) Aids was an epidemic that mainly affected gays and lesbians in the 1980s. The foundation was formed in 1985 and has been the thing she has done in her entire career. This came right from her mouth. 

As a kid, I watched a lot of classic cinema.  Taylor was in some of those films I watched. Others I saw when I was an adult. Specifically Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.  Being that it’s about a group of people who are alcoholics it hit a chord with me and made me glad I’m sober for going on eleven years now. I made a lot of mistakes as an alcoholic myself so it was like looking into a mirror while watching this movie. The entire cast was stellar in this film. 

One of the things about celebrity documentaries is the microphone that is put on these people’s lives. Unbeknownst to Taylor, Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes very effectively went into all aspects of her life. The films, the husband’s, marriages and divorces as well as her humanitarian work. I was glued to my computer while watching this film because I wasn’t that knowledgeable about her attire life so I liked all the turns her life took, good and bad. The director Nanette Burstein, and writer Tal-Ben David showed that perfectly.

4 ½

Dan Skip Allen