Original subtitles

Elizabeth Taylor, the unofficial Queen of Hollywood,

two-times Oscar winner and star of over 40 films,

including Cat on a Hot Tin Roof...

I don't mind making a fool of myself over you.

..and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

I'll show you who's sick.

I'll show you who's sick!

I'll show you!

She was the first actress to bag $1 million for one movie.

Her high-octane love life resulted in eight marriages...

She liked her men larger than life

and her jewels larger than 30 carats.

..marked by passion and excess...

The Pope denounced them as sexual vagrants.

..and diamonds.

Princess Margaret looked at it and said, "It's perfectly vulgar."

Her many addictions threatened to destroy her.

She was using whiskey as a prop for coffee on the set.

In this programme, we reveal the toughness

that helped her survive the Hollywood system,

kick her bad habits, become a savvy businesswoman

and transform herself into an AIDS activist.

She would sit on patients' beds, treat them with respect and dignity,

and they were floored.

With incredible access,

we learn what she was really like from her colleagues...

She would take things in of what was happening.

It was like, "Oh, is that how that works?"

..her director...

He called her things in front of us which we were horrified by.

..her public relations director...

It was a sarcastic comment said out of a bathtub that ended up

making her the highest-paid actor in the world.

..and even her stepson.

She slaps him and he slapped her back.

She slaps him back.

Jerry and I are like, "Whoa!"

We've never seen anything like this.

Beyond the booze, brawls and baubles,

this is the story of the survival and transformation

of one of cinema's greatest stars, Elizabeth Taylor.

2011, Christie's, New York.

Under the hammer, a collection of clothing and gems fit for a queen,

but no ordinary queen.

The legendary jewels from the many collections of Elizabeth Taylor.

It definitely was an auction of a lifetime, right?

It was super exciting.

You know, every serious collector in New York City was there.

Liz Taylor's jewels say absolutely everything

you need to know about her.

They're big, they're shiny, they're expensive, they're strong.

They last forever.

I mean, that's Liz Taylor in a nutshell.

60,000 now. 65,000...

It was estimated the auction would raise $50 million,

but prices kept going up.

At $130,000.

This was not about the innate value of the stones.

This was not about the rubies in the Cartier necklace.

This was about the value of rubies that Mike Todd had given

Elizabeth Taylor and she'd worn in a swimming pool.

- Sold for you, sir. $7,800,000. - APPLAUSE

Thank you very much.

The jewellery alone raises $137 million.

The auction encapsulated Elizabeth Taylor's life -

the glitz, the media spotlight, the extraordinary wealth,

and with a chunk of the proceeds going to her AIDS charity,

the philanthropy of her later years.

But how did an ordinary London girl end up reigning in Hollywood

and as rich as a royal?

Let's go back to the beginning.

She was born in London on February 27, 1932,

to a life of privilege.

Elizabeth grew up in the kind of house that had staff.

There were cooks and nurse maids and nannies and beautiful clothes.

Her parents were Americans who moved in high society -

her father, Francis, an art dealer in exclusive Bond Street,

her mother, Sarah, a frustrated stage actress

who enrolled Liz in singing and dancing lessons at the age of two.

So, her mother, Sarah, was extremely controlling,

some have said manipulative,

but incredibly charming, charismatic and powerful,

I think, as a personality.

You know, she sort of swept everyone before her.

One of Liz's earliest memories

was of dancing for a very select audience.

She can recall, at the age of three, appearing ballet dancing on stage

in front of the royal family and basking in the applause

and the great reception she got.

While on the surface, her parents marriage looked idyllic,

all was not as it seemed.

Francis Taylor may have been gay and may have had affairs with other men.

There are rumours about Sarah and her relationships

with certain men in their lives.

I think certainly Elizabeth had this very odd notion of marriage

from her own parents' relationship.

This unorthodox set-up continued

when, with the onset of the Second World War,

the Taylors returned to the States and set up home in Los Angeles,

a stone's throw from the film studios of Hollywood.

Elizabeth's mother was a canny operator,

and when she got to the United States,

she realised that the growth industry was Hollywood.

- ARCHIVE: - On the most powerful medium of expression

the world has ever known,

an art form as great as any in man's history.

Lucy's mother Sarah was convinced her daughter's striking looks

would be enough to win over studio bosses.

Now in her 90s, Margaret Kerry worked with Elizabeth

as a child actor.

I was the live action model for Tinker Bell.

She remembers the impact of her looks.

The first thing that you saw were these magnificent eyes.

And when she looked at you, it was like she was looking at you.

There was no question about it.

And she was absolutely gorgeous.

If she's in the room, she's the one that you looked at.

If you get up in the morning and you look in the mirror

and you see Elizabeth Taylor's face looking back at you -

confidence is built into the kind of beauty that she had by nature.

Through connections from Francis' gallery,

Sarah managed to get Liz seen by the right people in Hollywood,

and she was soon signed by Universal.

Nine-year-old Liz's debut came in 1941 in the comedy

There's One Born Every Minute.

In the film, Elizabeth gets the chance to sing

and show some kind of, sort of, bratty behaviour,

by being a little Know-It-All.

She looks angelic...

Buy or sell, stupid!

..but even then you can see that there's this quite confident,

cocky side to her.

..to the ladies of the Pahasket County Hysterical Society.

Historical!

It had all been so easy up to this point,

but Elizabeth was about to learn how brutal the film business could be.

# Take some care with the men you choose... #

While she had some energy and some vigour,

it wasn't enough to make sure that she survived ignominy

of a box office bomb.

Universal ditched her.

It looked like Elizabeth Taylor's film career was over

before it had even begun.

Working hard to get back into the movie business,

she would soon discover the harsh reality of the studio system...

They would change your appearance, try to control marriages.

They would try to stage manage every single aspect of a star's life.

..and how fairy-tale marriages don't always work out.

Hilton treated her like absolute garbage.

He gambled.

He drank.

He beat her.

At the age of nine,

Elizabeth Taylor had experienced the first setback of her career

when she was dropped by Universal after just one film.

But even at that tender age, she was resilient.

And when MGM needed a replacement co-star for Lassie Come Home,

she seized her chance to get back into the movies.

They wanted a child who could speak in an English accent,

so she just chatted to the dog and was chosen for the part.

Poor Lassie.

Poor Lassie.

Poor girl.

This performance impressed MGM so much,

they signed Elizabeth up to a seven-year contract at $100 a week,

the equivalent of £1,100 in today's money.

The prize would prove to be both a blessing and a curse.

Once you signed a studio contract,

you would have to give the studio control over, essentially,

every aspect of your life.

They would change your appearance. And as their stars got older,

they would try to control pregnancies, marriages.

They would try to stage manage every single aspect of a star's life.

Margaret Kerry was Elizabeth's body double at MGM

and remembers the strict environment.

What they wanted for you to do is do the part as a child

and then act as an adult

and never do anything wrong, never run around.

We were so well-disciplined that it was frightening.

Her education was not a priority.

She was still counting on her fingers at the age of 17.

She always had that sense of intellectual inferiority

that came with not having had the chance to have a proper education

at a very young age.

But the reward of all that sacrifice would be movie stardom.

MGM's Children's Matinee presents National Velvet.

In her breakout role as Velvet Brown in National Velvet,

she lit up the screen,

playing a feisty girl overturning gender stereotypes.

Isn't it perfect?

Perfect for what?

This young horsewoman is excluded from the Grand National.

And she challenges this exclusion by posing as a boy.

Mike? Could The Pie win the Grand National?

Velvet Brown, who do you think you are?

I'm the owner of The Pie.

This was a role that Elizabeth really wanted to play,

and Elizabeth and her mother really pulled out all the stops.

The studio thought that she was too fragile,

she was too small-looking.

In an early sign of the determination

she'd show throughout her life,

for three months, she exercised twice a day and stuffed herself

with hamburgers to bulk up.

When she went back, she said, "There you are. You see?

"I've grown, I've developed. I'm stronger, I'm tougher, I'm taller.

"I am right for this role." And she won it.

Elizabeth was thrilled at her success...

At that point, when I knew her, she was certainly not the prima donna,

just the opposite.

She was busy learning.

You can watch.

She would take things in of what was happening.

..and threw herself into the role.

Nothing to be frightened about, just like the hedge at Eton Meadow!

To the extent that she actually had a horse riding accident.

She fell off the horse.

And she must have been in pain, but she got back on the horse,

carried on riding. She was absolutely determined

to finish the shoot.

There's an indication, even at that early age,

of this very strong willpower and sense of strength of personality.

Traits she'd need to survive in the unforgiving world of Hollywood...

..and traits shared by her character, Velvet Brown,

who ends up winning the Grand National.

National Velvet was a box office smash.

It won them two Oscars and was a great success.

It also transformed Elizabeth Taylor into an MGM star.

But hitting her teens,

young Liz woke up to the reality of being owned by the studio.

She was schooled by MGM, she was styled by them.

They wanted to change her eyebrow shape, her nose shape,

even as a young teenager.

Photo shoots were set up, organised for her by the studio,

at home or with pets or with other teenagers,

to try and make it look like she was having

a relatively normal teenage life.

But she wasn't.

She didn't know about dating.

The only boys that you saw her with in the magazines

were somebody who had a contract at MGM,

and they wanted to build him up and her up at the same time.

It was so unreal.

On occasion, Liz did rebel.

In a 1992 interview, she describes a time

when the domineering head of the studio, Louis B Mayer,

shouted at her mother.

And he was swearing at her and being so abusive.

And I jumped up with tears pouring down my face and said,

"You and your studio can both go to hell."

For her to be able to intimidate middle-aged male studio bosses

when she was 14 years old,

what do you think she was like when she was 20 and 30 and 40?

She was a tough broad.

The knock-on from that was that she realised

nothing terrible happened to her.

She didn't get the sack.

She wasn't sent away.

They still wanted to employ her.

By now, she was the family's main breadwinner.

In a later interview, she explained how that fact soured relations

with her father.

My father was abusive when he drank.

And...

..he seemed to kind of, like, to bat me around a bit.

But I started thinking about my father

and how it must've felt for him...

..to have his nine-year-old daughter...

..making more money than he was.

Her father wouldn't be the last man to be jealous of her success.

Desperate for freedom, at just 17,

she got engaged to the wayward son of a hotel magnate.

Conrad Hilton seemed very marriageable.

He was the heir to the Hilton empire, stupendously affluent,

and she was a young starlet.

So, it seemed a marriage made in heaven

as far as the studio was concerned.

And perfect timing for the studio's PR machine,

as Elizabeth had just finished filming Father of the Bride,

in which she plays a young woman getting married.

- It's my wedding and my friends! - SHOUTING

No-one had to do anything!

When the time comes, I'll do everything. I mean everything!

Unlike the feisty independence shown by this fictional bride,

ironically, every aspect of her real-life marriage

would be stage managed by the studio.

They used the real marriage as a promo for this film

that they wanted to sell.

They organised the costumes, the catering, the photographs.

Even the bridesmaids were MGM extras.

- ARCHIVE: - And so a storybook union becomes a reality.

The 23-year-old bridegroom is heir to one of America's richest men.

Elizabeth, at 18, is famous for her loveliness and charm.

Elizabeth married Conrad "Nicky" Hilton in 1950.

But unlike the movie,

their romance would have a far from fairy-tale ending.

They went on a fabulous cruise on the Queen Mary

to the south of France as their honeymoon.

And Hilton treated her like absolute garbage.

He gambled. He drank.

He beat her.

Elizabeth spoke about it in a 1997 interview.

That's when the reality of the world hit me.

Abusive.

Oh, God, yes. I was...

..a bit of a punching bag.

Elizabeth said that in her marriage to Nicky,

he caused her to have a miscarriage after beating her,

which was terrible.

The violence only made Liz more resilient and determined.

And after just seven months,

she'd had enough and filed for a divorce.

The first real striking out on her own that Elizabeth did

was to end that first marriage.

Not all the relationships Liz would make at this time would be toxic.

MGM loaned her to Paramount for the 1951 film

A Place in the Sun.

A Place in the Sun is... It's a sort of tragic romance

about a man caught between two women and not knowing which way to turn.

Her dashing co-star, seen here playing pool,

would become a lifelong source of strength for Liz.

Hello.

Hello.

A Place in the Sun was the first real adult role

Elizabeth Taylor ever had.

And her co-star was Montgomery Clift.

Montgomery Clift was famous, handsome,

desired by women and men all over America.

You keep pretty much to yourself, don't you?

Yeah, sometimes.

He was also gay, which, had it been known publicly,

would have ended his career.

Liz gradually became aware of his hidden sexuality.

So, that was freeing for her to be able to develop a really intense

friendship with this man, who was far more experienced at acting,

who could really be not only a mentor to her,

but who also needed her.

She was able to comfort him and support him.

And I used to think I was complicated.

Many people felt very strongly that if he had been straight,

they would have married.

She loved him that much and he returned her love.

The film was a triumph.

A Place in the Sun really showed that she had arrived

as an adult performer in Hollywood.

Now, Liz decided it was time for an adult relationship,

forged not by the studio or her parents, but by herself.

Still only 19, she was filming in Britain

when she became involved with Michael Wilding.

He was separated and 20 years her senior, but he was her choice.

I think Michael Wilding, in large part,

is almost a rebound from the horror of a severely abusive marriage

to Nicky Hilton.

Wilding's divorce came through at the end of the year.

So, they went out to dinner to celebrate this

and he gave her a sort of promise ring.

And Elizabeth took it and put it on her left hand,

on her ring finger, and sort of said, "Well, you know, I think...

"Let's not mess around. I think that's where it belongs,

"Mr Shilly Shally."

In 1951, women just did not propose to men.

It wasn't just unconventional. It was unheard of.

It was one of the many, many rules

that she broke over the next several decades.

Elizabeth's disregard of convention would be a constant theme

of her life.

- ARCHIVE: - Everyone was determined to see,

as well as to film and photograph, the bride and groom.

It was quite a struggle for all concerned.

Two months later, the couple were married in London.

Elizabeth was soon pregnant with the first of two children

she'd have with Wilding.

And with bills to pay, she reluctantly signed her life away

to MGM for another seven years...

..years in which she'd show the grit and determination

of a Hollywood survivor...

She put her hand down Montgomery Clift's throat

and pulled his teeth out, which saved his life.

..and would develop a scandalous reputation.

In the public's eyes, Liz Taylor was the bad woman, the home wrecker.

Elizabeth Taylor had shown her resilience,

surviving a childhood in the studio system

and a violent and abusive first marriage.

Now remarried with two children, Michael and Christopher,

she was set to become one of the world's biggest movie stars.

From the middle of the 1950s,

she started to make more interesting films,

perhaps notably Giant.

Giant is a big film about America, and in particular about Texas,

basically about a dynasty, a family.

She was loaned to Warner Bros for the 1956 film.

It was a role that pushed boundaries.

We're just talking business.

Just business.

Oh, well, please don't mind me.

Do go on.

I'll listen quiet as a little old mouse.

In a world that is super macho, she becomes a very strong woman

who does not give up her ideas and who actually changes the culture

and helps things get better.

Leslie, we're talking about politics.

You married me in Washington. Remember, darling?

I lived next door to politics, brought up with it.

Please do go on talking. I'd love it.

Directors saw in her an emblem of female strength.

She was a kind of protofeminist totem.

And even in her life, the way that she controlled her finances,

supported her parents,

she was formidable.

The film also tackled race relations,

with her character's concern about the conditions of Mexican workers.

The baby is sick.

My milk is not good.

During the making of Giant, she became firm friends

with two more actors who were hiding their sexuality,

Rock Hudson and James Dean.

Many of her most tender and most intimate relationships

were not necessarily with her lovers or her husbands,

but they were with her close gay male friends.

And one traumatic incident would demonstrate

what a gutsy friend Liz could be.

During filming of the Civil War melodrama Raintree County,

for which Liz would get her first Oscar nomination,

Montgomery Clift came over for a dinner party at her home

in the hills of Benedict Canyon.

When he left, the hour was late,

the road down to the valley steep and winding.

And Montgomery Clift pulls out of the driveway

at 2.00 or 3.00 in the morning.

It was foggy and Clift had been drinking.

And on his way home, he was in a terrible, terrible car accident,

very close to the Wildings' house.

BRAKES SCREECH AND GLASS SHATTERS

Liz rushed to the scene.

In this interview, she explains what happened next.

I pulled his head off the dashboard

and the...steering wheel,

and he opened his eyes.

And they were bright red.

And he tried to say something.

And I said, "What is it, my love?

"What is it, baby?"

SHE MUMBLES

Clift was choking.

She climbed inside the car, got in there

and she put her hand down Montgomery Clift's throat

and pulled his teeth out, which saved his life.

And when the cameras and the ambulances came,

she put herself between them and him

as he was being taken into the ambulance.

And she said, "If you take a picture of me and him...

"..you will never get another picture of me again. Ever."

All those cameras went down.

Ever the survivor, in the heat of the moment,

Liz used her star power to protect herself and her injured friend.

Clift gave her a special present

to thank her for saving his life.

And the present was a necklace made out of the teeth

that had been lodged in his throat.

You know, forget those diamonds,

that one is absolutely unique!

While Liz was forming strong friendships during this period,

her second marriage had hit the rocks.

Michael Wilding had been almost a father figure to her for five years,

but now, she wanted excitement.

She creates some stability after the hectic,

dysfunctional marriage she had with Conrad Hilton,

but perhaps he was too stable for her.

Which meant when a loud, brash film producer called Mike Todd

decided she'd be his, she put up little resistance.

Everybody I've ever spoken to that knew him

said he was just mesmerising.

Like a real spellbinder.

I later learned how much Liz was enamoured with him,

er...literally obsessed with him.

In an interview decades later, Liz still sounded besotted.

He had more energy and knowledge and excitement.

A sense of wonder about him.

And he made everything he touched wondrous.

Liz had supported Wilding financially,

now Todd showered her with gifts.

And that association between Elizabeth Taylor and diamonds

really started with Mike Todd.

She liked her men larger than life

and her jewels larger than 30 carats.

Todd's forceful wooing worked.

In 1957, in another show of strength rare for the times,

Elizabeth divorced Wilding.

Days later, dozens of guests converged on Acapulco, Mexico,

to see her walk down the aisle for the third time.

He gave her, I think, a 29.4-carat diamond engagement ring,

which she called the Ice Rink because it was so large and shiny.

It would be Mike Todd who would shape

Liz Taylor's tastes for the rest of her life.

Jet-set, extravagant, excessive and dripping in jewels.

He used to bring her presents every single week

to mark the weekly anniversaries of their meeting.

On one spectacular occasion, a diamond and ruby set

of earrings, necklace and bracelet

that he presented to her while she was swimming in the pool.

Liz and Mike had a daughter, Liza.

It was one of the happiest times of her life.

It was also one of the most successful periods of her career.

She got even more assertive and ballsy.

And she plays these roles like in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

This is a really edgy play, actually.

It deals with issues that, most of the time,

would've been kept under the carpet.

- If you were thinking the same thing I was... - No, Maggie.

- Why not?! - Would you please keep your voice down?

No!

Elizabeth plays Maggie the Cat,

the sexy, feisty, determined heroine

at the heart of the film.

Paul Newman is the gay husband

not interested in his wife or having sex.

But she's...she's pushing to have children

so he can inherit the family money.

I don't mind making a fool of myself over you.

Well, I mind. I feel embarrassed for you.

Feel embarrassed!

But I can't live on this way!

You agreed to accept that condition!

I know I did, but I can't! I can't!

Liz was at the pinnacle of success, both on screen and off.

But in 1958, disaster struck.

- NEWSCASTER: - Twisted wreckage in the Zuni Mountains of New Mexico

marks the site of the fatal crash.

Halfway through filming Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,

Elizabeth Taylor suffered a terrible tragedy.

Her husband was killed in a plane crash.

His private plane had been named after Elizabeth.

Many years later, she was able to reflect how it felt to be widowed

with a seven-month-old baby.

When I got the news that morning, I just started screaming.

How did you survive?

I have no idea.

I really don't know.

Liz travelled to the funeral in Chicago

with Mike's best friend, Eddie Fisher.

While his wife, the actress Debbie Reynolds,

looked after Liz's children.

When Liz got home, she lost herself in drink and drugs.

She was always a pretty heavy drinker

and she, you know, she always took pills for one reason or another,

but was really not, I don't think, an addict

until, er...the death of Mike Todd.

Crutches that she would rely on more heavily as time went by.

It's absolutely impossible to separate

Elizabeth Taylor's behaviour and her life decisions from her addictions.

Because it's not overstating it to say

that every decision that she ever made

was informed by alcohol abuse or drug addiction.

Searching for comfort, she also turns to Eddie,

as his son and Carrie Fisher's brother, recalls.

Liz was just beyond devastated.

And as Carrie likes to say, my father, you know,

immediately ran to Liz's side,

gradually moving his way around to the front.

At her wedding to Mike Todd, Fisher had been best man

and Debbie Reynolds, Elizabeth's matron of honour.

Now, Liz was spending more and more time with Debbie's husband.

The media began to think there may be something untoward about this.

Something that isn't altogether wholesome.

And they were right, of course.

When the affair was discovered, Fisher left Debbie Reynolds for Liz.

Eddie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds were like America's sweetheart.

There were a lovely couple,

they were seen as nice, they were seen as stable.

And in the public's eyes, Liz Taylor was the bad woman. The home-wrecker.

I mean, this was a scandal of scandals.

Worse still for conservative America, she was brazen about it.

A revealing moment came from notorious gossip columnist, Hedda Hopper.

When Hedda Hopper interviewed her,

expecting Elizabeth to offer some kind of explanation,

she said, "What else do you expect me to do - sleep alone?"

Liz was behaving as freely as a man.

Although they married in 1959,

the affair would have a ruinous effect on Fisher's career.

My father was under contract to the Coca-Cola Bottling Company,

and, er...they dropped him on a morals clause.

A lot of his live concerts were cancelled.

People stopped buying his records.

But Elizabeth learned that, unlike Eddie,

she was bigger than any scandal.

Taylor's role as Maggie the Cat was yet another triumph for her.

She received her second Oscar nomination

and the film itself won six Oscar nominations.

She was furious that she didn't actually manage to win,

but she was still well on the way to becoming

the serious heavyweight actress that she had longed to be for years.

It was the third-highest-grossing film of 1958,

despite, or perhaps because, of Liz's complicated personal life.

So, in fact, the scandal didn't cause

any lasting damage to her career.

By this point, Elizabeth had been contracted to MGM

for almost 16 years, and she was sick of the studio.

She knew she was being massively underpaid,

and she wanted to choose her own roles.

But MGM insisted on one last film,

cashing in on her scandalous reputation

by casting her as a woman of loose morals in BUtterfield 8.

Now, look...you have a price.

She hated this film. She hated the script, she hated the character.

But she was forced to do it

because she was still obliged, under her contract to MGM.

In the film, Liz's character chooses her sexual partners.

And to modernise, comes across as fiercely independent.

Last night, you were great company.

I've spent a little time around and about.

I didn't ask for your credits last night, I don't need them now!

Not unlike Liz Taylor herself.

Gloria Wandrous, the central character in BUtterfield 8,

is sympathetic and intelligent and wins over the audience.

Just as they had always done,

MGM cynically used this movie to mirror her life.

In this case, her controversial union with Eddie Fisher.

It would have resonated with the idea that she was a husband-stealer,

and that she was in love with a married man both on and off screen.

This blurring of fact and fiction worked to her advantage.

After being nominated four years in a row,

Elizabeth finally won an Oscar for best actress.

And on leaving MGM, Liz Taylor would soon become the first actress

to be paid $1 million.

It was a sarcastic comment set out of a bathtub

that ended up making her the highest-paid actor in the world.

And she would begin the most volatile

and destructive relationship of her life.

They found every opportunity to make love.

In boats, in studios, wherever they could.

It was a very explosive, intense love affair.

After nearly 16 years in the rigid studio system,

Elizabeth Taylor began the 1960s

finally free from the clutches of MGM.

She was absolutely at the top of the A-list, she was in demand,

and Elizabeth really took advantage of that in a way that very few stars could.

She was being courted for the title role in Cleopatra,

but she wasn't keen.

20th Century Fox was an ailing film studio

and was really gambling with Cleopatra.

So she bargained hard.

The producer, Walter Wanger, was determined to secure her.

He rang her hotel.

In this interview, Elizabeth explains what happened next.

I was in the bathtub and I yelled through the door to my assistant...

They said, "Would you do Cleopatra, Elizabeth?"

And I said, "Yeah, for a million bucks and 10% of the gross".

And they came back and said, "OK".

And I just yelled... Let out a yell

and sort of went under the water screaming.

It was a sarcastic comment said out of a bathtub

that ended up making her the highest-paid actor in the world.

She had learned a $1 million lesson about negotiating her worth.

The fee was eight times what she'd been paid for her last film for MGM,

and that was just the start.

She also demanded $3,000 a week living expenses,

plus food and lodging,

first-class flights for herself,

three other adults and her three children,

and extra payments if filming overran.

I think by the end of the production, she'd managed to get

about seven million out of them, which isn't bad going at all.

This marked a change in the relationship

between stars and the studios.

It set the benchmark for any performer to say to a studio,

"No, no, no, I'm the star.

"You follow my terms. I don't follow your terms."

The staggering costs meant Fox was risking everything on the film.

Cleopatra tells the story of the Egyptian queen

who seduced two famous Roman generals.

It was to be a lavish spectacle.

BARRAGE OF QUESTIONS

But when Liz developed pneumonia during filming,

it looked like all that money would go to waste.

There was a point at which she thought she might die.

She had to have an emergency tracheotomy.

- NEWSCASTER: - Liz Taylor, chosen to play Cleopatra,

is seen here after her recovery from pneumonia in London.

No stranger to illness, a canny Liz knew the power of

a spell in hospital to win over the public after a spate of bad press.

- Elizabeth Taylor. - CHEERING

So, when collecting her Oscar for BUtterfield 8,

she made sure her tracheotomy scar was visible for all to see.

- BREATHLESS: - I don't really know...

how to express my gratitude...

..for this and for everything.

I guess all I can do is say thank you.

Thank you with all my heart.

Filming on Cleopatra resumed,

but her illness had caused a massive delay.

Costs went through the roof.

The budget swelled from $5 million

to a staggering $44 million.

The movie that was supposed to save 20th Century Fox

was in danger of sinking it.

It just kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger and more scenes.

The sets were extraordinary.

When they built the Roman forum,

is was actually three times bigger than the actual Roman forum in Rome.

She had 65 costume changes throughout the film.

So just everything about this production was entirely excessive.

There's the entry-into-Rome sequence,

where she arrives on this huge kind of edifice.

CHEERING

And she's being hauled in slowly, slowly, slowly

by two double rows of men sweating in rhythm.

Perfect synchronisation.

Thousands of extras all around her.

And she winks at Caesar,

which is a fantastic nod to her sense of humour

and her awareness of just how queenly

and majestic she was in Hollywood.

And the queen had found her king.

Playing Mark Antony, the Welsh actor, Richard Burton.

When Elizabeth met Richard Burton,

he was just coming off this incredibly-successful run

as King Arthur in Camelot on Broadway,

and he was long married to his Welsh wife, Sybil Burton.

Elizabeth was still married to Eddie Fisher.

But never afraid of scandal, that didn't prevent rule-breaker Liz

from acting on an immediate attraction to Burton,

as she explained later.

We both tried very hard to resist,

but it happened on the first day of our working together.

- Really? - Yeah.

It was just like... Boomph!

- Did you feel it was inevitable? - Yes.

In the film, Cleopatra has been involved with Julius Caesar.

But then, with about as much resistance,

instantly falls for his ally, Mark Antony.

And yet again, it's another instance of Elizabeth's on-screen life

and off-screen life echoing each other

and following the same path.

Cleopatra falls in love with Mark Antony

as Elizabeth falls in love with Richard Burton.

For so long now, you've filled my life.

During one scene, love scene, they're kissing...

And I will never...

..be free of you.

..and Mankiewicz says, "Cut!"

And he looks at his actors and they're still kissing.

And so, he says, "Cut", one more time.

They're still kissing.

And that's when it dawned on him, "This is becoming real".

It soon dawned on Eddie Fisher, too.

His failing career had driven him to drink and gambling,

and Liz began to realise all they had in common was Mike Todd.

One time, Liz and I were talking, she was, like...

"You know, when I met Richard Burton, it was eye-opening.

"And in the sense that I knew I didn't belong with your father at all

"and what a huge mistake that was."

This latest affair with Burton

would cause an international sensation,

with the paparazzi following them wherever they went.

They would go away for what they would think would be

a quiet weekend hiding out,

and they'd open the window and there'd be dozens of photographers

just waiting to take their picture.

They found every opportunity to make love.

In boats, in studios,

you know, in dressing rooms, wherever they could.

And it was a very explosive, intense love affair.

Once again, Liz had gone after what she wanted,

regardless of public opinion.

The Pope denounced them as, "sexual vagrants",

which is just such a fabulous compliment.

I wish the Pope would say that about me.

She had an appetite for men,

for food, for alcohol,

for drugs, for whatever.

She's not going to follow conventional morality,

she's going to live on her own terms.

She's basically going to live like men have lived all their lives.

The relationship was tempestuous and destructive from the start.

In Richard, she had finally met a man who could match her drinking.

When she thought he might go back to his wife, Liz took an overdose.

But don't forget, you know, these decisions were being made

within the haze of drug and alcohol abuse.

So to say that she really wanted to die,

I guess maybe, you know, you have to put that in the context

of while she was high and she was on drugs and alcohol,

she wanted to die.

The alleged suicide attempt was covered up,

but the affair was impossible to hide.

The producers of Cleopatra were very upset

when news of this affair got out.

They were terrified that this huge investment in this movie

would just come to nothing.

And despite the lavish spending,

the epic was a critical and commercial flop,

taking years to earn back its enormous cost.

Though Liz's Cleopatra became an icon.

It's invigorating to see her performances in this movie

because she's totally in charge.

And the men are kind of weak next to her.

Taylor and Burton were soon controversial

queen and king of Hollywood.

They married in 1964,

as soon as her divorce from Eddie came through.

She was a star, he was a well-known actor,

but together, they were an altogether different entity.

Something that would absolutely command the attention

of everybody in the world.

She was photographed, jewels from head to foot,

attending fabulous parties

with the titled heads of Europe.

Then she's ordering meals to be brought on planes to her

from Los Angeles, from her favourite restaurants.

Like those before him, Richard Burton lavished gems on her, too,

including the giant Krupp Diamond

and the Cartier, renamed the Taylor-Burton diamond.

It was enough to leave actual royals in the shade.

There are many stories about Elizabeth and her jewellery,

but probably my favourite one,

that she retold and cackled with laughter,

is shortly after receiving the Taylor-Burton diamond, she was at a dinner

and there were a lot of people there, including Princess Margaret.

And everyone was passing around this giant ice cube of a diamond

and trying it on and looking at it and oohing and aahing over it.

And Princess Margaret looked at it and said, "It's perfectly vulgar".

And Elizabeth said, "You know, you're right.

"Would you like to try it on?"

And so, she slid it on to the princess' finger

and Princess Margaret began to look at her hand

and look at the ring on her hand and Elizabeth leaned over

and whispered into her ear, "It's not so vulgar now, is it?"

Away from the glitz and glamour,

the world's most-famous romance had a dark, violent side.

They had a very tempestuous relationship.

We know that there were furious arguments

that sometimes spilled out quite openly.

Her stepson, Todd Fisher, saw that for himself

at a party when just a child.

She slaps him and he slaps her back.

Carrie and I are, like, "Whoa! We've never seen anything like this."

And my mother quickly goes over there

and ushers them upstairs, into her bedroom.

20 minutes later, they come out,

they're, like, redressing themselves, you know.

And at the time, we didn't understand what that meant,

but clearly, there had been some make-up sex

and, er...they went right down to the party like nothing had happened.

The violence was fuelled by their mutual dependence on alcohol.

She could drink just about anyone under the table,

and she did.

He would start early in the day

and drink all the way through to bedtime.

Alcohol and pills amplified real tensions in the marriage.

Not least, Burton's professional jealousy.

He wanted the kind of fame that Elizabeth Taylor had.

He wanted to be a movie star.

The problems in their marriage would soon be very public.

"You big fat so-and-so.

"You ate too much last night.

"You've put on too much weight."

And then, within minutes, she would become the goddess on a pedestal.

And would fuel their greatest performance,

in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

In fact, he was sort of a flop!

A great, big, fat...!

I said, stop it!

In the mid '60s, hard drinking and even harder brawling,

Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton were the ultimate celebrity couple.

They are here tonight, Mr and Mrs Richard Burton

caught by our Hollywood backstage camera.

But the quality of the 11 films they'd make together

did not always measure up to their high public profile.

At last, they found a script that matched their joint star power.

In Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

yet again, Liz played a role that echoed her real life.

In fact, he was sort of a flop!

A great, big, fat flop!

I said, stop it!

I hope that was an empty bottle, George.

You can't afford to waste good liquor, not on your salary!

It's about this...

ageing couple, um...

George and Martha,

who have a very, very volatile relationship.

BLOOD-CURDLING SCREAM

And they play games. Very cruel and malicious games.

Did you really think I was going to kill you, Martha?

You kill me? That's a laugh!

No, no, I might some day.

Audiences were thrilled to think they were seeing

the couple's real home life reflected on screen.

The film was a critical success,

with both of them nominated for Oscars.

But when the Academy Awards came up,

Burton announced he wasn't going.

There was this sort of scuttlebutt in town

the Oscar race was shaking up that Elizabeth was going to win

and Richard Burton probably wasn't.

It was the fifth time he'd been nominated,

and he couldn't face losing in public again.

Elizabeth fully intended to go.

She already had her Dior gown designed for it,

and she was getting to ready to leave for Los Angeles.

But then, he started drinking and he really, really got drunk

and he got...and he was really acting out.

And she just felt like she couldn't go.

Which meant Elizabeth was absent for this...

And the winner is...

- ..her second Oscar win... - Miss Elizabeth Taylor.

APPLAUSE AND CHEERING

I think, with Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Elizabeth Taylor finally got respect.

She had everything else. She had beauty, fame, money, power,

scandal, beautiful objects.

And with that one film, they finally said,

"Oh, my God, she has real talent".

I think that was an added pressure to their marriage,

that no matter how great an actor he was,

she was the one getting the accolades.

And I think he felt that that Oscar was, by rights, his,

and it was just another strain on the marriage.

Miss Taylor regrets very much that she can't be here tonight.

In total, Richard Burton would receive seven Oscar nods

during his career, but never win.

But there was one area where he overshadowed his wife - education.

While Elizabeth was self-conscious about her lack of it,

he'd studied briefly at Oxford

and built his reputation as a Shakespearean actor.

When Liz agreed to appear on the Oxford stage,

his stronghold, in Doctor Faustus,

her husband put her up for a nonspeaking role.

The first time I've been on stage,

so it's a marvellous opportunity for me.

I don't have to learn any lines.

Elizabeth played Helen of Troy,

In the play, Dr Faustus sells his soul

in order to see her in the flesh and kiss her.

As an undergraduate, Maria Aitken acted in the play.

I have one abiding image of Elizabeth Taylor,

and it was sitting on a trunk at Oxford Station

with a whole bunch of undergraduates.

And she was quite hungover and she looked so incomparably beautiful,

with no make-up, extraordinary skin and those legendary eyes.

Richard Burton, as Doctor Faustus.

Elizabeth Taylor, as the beautiful Helen of Troy.

Response to the play was lukewarm,

but Burton funded a film version, shot in Rome,

where Liz would suffer another devastating loss.

After years of drug and alcohol abuse,

her best friend suffered a fatal heart attack at the age of 45.

When we used to gather in Richard's dressing room in the evenings,

which he very often invited us to do,

he said that she was absolutely grief stricken by this event.

It was the end of one of the most important relationships of her life.

And the end of another was in sight.

The last of the 11 films Elizabeth made with Richard

was for television - Divorce His, Divorce Hers.

You're not the man I thought I'd married.

Well, I'm the man I am!

You seem to want to remember some fantasy figure.

I'm the man I always have been and I don't have to justify myself!

I do remember!

Isn't that what makes you angry?

Am I the only one that remembers?!

The on-screen rows mirrored their own marriage.

Director Waris Hussein saw first-hand

the problems in the stars' relationship.

I was filming a week with Richard and he had stopped drinking

and everything was going swimmingly until the night she arrived

unannounced a week early.

She was surrounded by flashing lights and paparazzi and cars.

And we were filming at night,

and suddenly, the whole place was lit up by lights

and flashing cameras.

At the sight of the press circus,

Richard disappeared in a jealous rage.

They found him,

I think it took about 45 minutes since he'd disappeared,

totally drunk.

And by the time we were filming and she was now on set,

he was almost unable to sit up straight.

The couple were now in freefall,

with Elizabeth drinking more heavily than ever.

So it was a breakfast scene where she's supposed to be pouring coffee

and I noticed that the prop coffee didn't have any steam in it.

And I said, "Why isn't there any hot coffee for her to pour into this?"

And the prop man came to me and said,

"It's not coffee, it's...it's...it's whiskey".

Don't you children have to go to school?

She was using whiskey as a prop for coffee on the set.

As so often for Liz, art was imitating life.

The film charted the end of a roller-coaster relationship.

He called her things in front of us, which we were horrified by.

"You big, fat, so-and-so.

"You ate too much last night.

"You've put on too much weight."

And then, it was in minutes,

she would become the goddess on a pedestal.

- Do you have a second? - Can we ask you a few questions?

- Just one second, sir. - Just a few questions.

Is it true that you are separated from Liz Taylor?

- Yes. - Will you getting a divorce?

After ten years of marriage, it was over.

Liz Taylor and Richard Burton divorced in 1974.

But, ever hopeful, remarried in 1975.

We are together.

And, er...it seems quite natural.

Only to divorce again a few months later.

When she left that marriage, she went through a very rough patch.

Her problems with alcohol and eating too much

were having a devastating effect on her.

At a low point now, Liz was about to embark on a new chapter,

more remarkable than any before - getting clean.

For a star of her magnitude to come out, essentially, as an addict,

as someone who needed help, was a major, major moment.

Miss Elizabeth Taylor.

And completely reinventing herself as a philanthropist.

She would sit on patients' beds and read to them.

She would treat them with respect and dignity,

and they were floored.

By the mid '70s, a now heavy-drinking Liz Taylor

had finally ended her tumultuous relationship with Richard Burton

and divorced him, twice.

But now she was stuck in a rut.

She was suffering from that syndrome of actresses after 40.

There weren't as many roles for her.

And she didn't like being alone and single.

APPLAUSE

In 1976, she married John Warner, a Republican politician.

It was not a good relationship, even though it lasted six years.

She was stuck in this farm estate in Virginia,

bored out of her mind,

And as her boredom increased, her lifestyle worsened.

What she mostly did was eat.

She mostly had a lot of, you know, bourbon and fried chicken.

John Warner used to call her, "my little heifer",

which tells you something about that marriage.

As does this interview from the time,

where Liz is uncharacteristically silent.

What's Elizabeth Taylor's greatest virtue and greatest fault?

Her greatest virtue is that she's made me terribly happy.

And fault?

She just burns up a lot of food now and then.

LIZ LAUGHS

And it was not just overeating that was the problem.

She was using pain pills all day,

she was then taking sleeping pills to sleep at night.

She was, of course, drinking heavily in between.

She became, you know, dependent on chemical substances

to keep her going, to an extent that really did threaten her life

and certainly her health as time went on.

In 1982, she divorced Warner.

Liz was at her lowest ebb.

But throughout her life, tragedy

and setbacks had only made her stronger,

and this would be no exception.

An intervention by her friends and family

would give her the impetus to fight back.

They tell you things you've done, things they've seen,

some of your behaviour.

And they preface it by saying,

"I love you very much, but I have to tell you..."

This, that, that, that, that.

"And the reason I'm telling you this is because I don't want you to die

and at the rate you're going, you will.

She checked into rehab, at the Betty Ford clinic.

For a star of her magnitude to come out, essentially, as an addict,

as someone who needed help, was a major, major moment.

For the first time in her life, she was treated not as a star,

but as an ordinary human being, as she explains here.

My peers had to pretend that it was just sort of Jane Schmo,

and they were very awkward at first,

and I didn't quite know what to do.

Er...but within a day or two days,

I realised we were all in the same boat.

We were there for one reason, to save our lives.

Her determination to get clean brought Liz Taylor back from the brink.

It allowed her to survive the problems that consumed contemporaries

like Marilyn Monroe and Judy Garland,

and meant the rest of her life was shaped by her character,

not her addictions.

Elizabeth was able to discard

the persona that had been invented for her

and invent a new one.

Inspired by her lifelong friendships with gay men

and with an instinctive empathy for the underdog,

Liz would devote the rest of her days to one cause.

I have committed my life to fight for AIDS

for the rest of my life, until a cure is found.

It was a disease that affected her former daughter-in-law,

her personal assistant and her close friend, Rock Hudson.

Liz was furious about government inaction and public fear of AIDS.

Used to fighting for what she wanted,

she would use her celebrity to change those attitudes.

In speeches, it was clear how strongly she felt.

What would you do if you were fired...

..evicted, ridiculed?

Would you fight?

Would you have the strength?

Would you have the courage?

She did an enormous amount to remove the stigma of AIDS

and to remove the stigma, even, of helping people with AIDS.

This would help fund her AIDS work with successful perfumes,

Passion and White Diamonds.

Using everything she'd learned negotiating her film contracts

to make another fortune.

It's the '80s, it's the time of big hair and big capitalism.

And Elizabeth Taylor took to that very naturally.

When they came to her and suggested that she launch a perfume,

she negotiated one of the first,

and still most-lucrative celebrity tie-ins ever to happen.

I get the feeling people walked into meetings with her thinking they

were going to find some empty-headed, gorgeous Hollywood star.

And instead, they found a really tough lady.

While all this was going on,

Elizabeth still found time to follow her heart,

just as she always had.

After falling off the wagon in the late '80s,

she returned to rehab, where she met builder, Larry Fortensky.

He was a much younger, athletic man,

and that must have been a draw for her.

The fact he was 20 years younger probably helped, as well.

Liz still had appetites

and didn't care what people thought of her toy boy.

I think she began to appreciate being treated like a regular person.

Probably one of the appeals of Larry Fortensky

was that he was a regular person.

Her eighth, and final marriage, lasted only five years.

They parted on good terms.

By now, Elizabeth, the ultimate survivor,

had set up her own charity.

By the time she died, I think that she'd raised

nearly $300 million for AIDS research.

True to her promise, she spent the last 20 years of her life

committed to the AIDS cause.

Echoing Princess Diana's secret visits away from the press,

Joseph Panetta helped arrange unannounced visits to hospices.

She would sit on patients' beds and read to them.

She would sign anything they asked her to sign.

She would treat them with respect and dignity,

and they were floored.

And we would get faxes in the office from the management of the hospice

sharing with us that the patients needed less pain medication

for days after Elizabeth's visit

because they were working off the halo of her having been there.

A dignified finale to a dramatic life.

In her later decades, Liz had taken all she'd learned

about fighting for what she wanted

and blazing her own trail, despite public opinion,

and used it to leave a lasting legacy for others.

Some years earlier, she had reflected on how she had made it

through such a tumultuous life.

I think perhaps it's because I am a survivor.

I've had the lowest valleys, the highest highs.

Um...I've had a lot of tragedy in my life,

I've had addictions, I've had weight problems.

- Yeah. - I've almost died a couple of times.

- Yeah. - And I've been pronounced dead. So, you know, it's like...

That's true. You were in London, were you not?

I've read my own obituary.

- They were the best reviews I ever had! - Wow!

On March 23rd, 2011,

the queen of Hollywood died.

The world mourned the loss of its most glittering,

controversial and trailblazing star, Elizabeth Taylor.

I think Elizabeth Taylor is pretty much the definition of Hollywood royalty.

I mean, really rewrote the book on what stardom looked like.

I think she'll be remembered primarily

for her extraordinary performances,

especially in a movie like Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Elizabeth Taylor's great professional achievement

is knowing her words and demanding to be paid

as much as her male co-stars, or more.

But the other thing that she left us with is this incredible second act of her life,

where she raised hundreds of millions of dollars personally

for good causes.

Everyone can take away something special from her.

Her beauty, her outrageousness.

And then, at the end of her life, her conscientiousness

and her dedication.

She was an unbreakable, solid gold

A-list Hollywood movie star.

They don't make them like that any more.

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