On March 23, 2011, he died at the Cedars Sinai Hospital from Los Angeles (California) one of the last great celluloid stars: the actress Elizabeth Taylor. She was 79 years old. After seven decades in the world of cinema and more than 50 shootings behind her, Taylor was not only the leading actress in unforgettable films such as little women, Cleopatra, cat on a tin roof, Giant either Suddenly last summer, but that she achieved a status of royalty within Hollywood where, persecuted by the press, everyone seemed to be aware of her private life: of her seven husbands and eight marriages (with Richard Burton she repeated), of her four children and 11 grandchildren, his life on board ships in European waters to avoid paying taxes or his addiction to alcohol. A life so visible to all that she herself resigned herself to it, as she stated in an interview in 2002 with The New York Times: “I am in the public domain. I have been in the public domain since I was nine years old. You get used to it”.
Eleven years after her death, Kate Andersen Brower proves that, despite countless paparazzi photos and the chronicles of social life published on paper couched, the life of Elizabeth Taylor still hid mysteries. Those that the journalist reveals in the first authorized biography of the actress, entitled Elizabeth Taylor: The Grit & Glamor of an Icon (HarperCollins), for which she has had access to 7,358 personal letters from the artist: “Being able to go through her life, read her inner thoughts and discover how she was working psychologically on the things that happened to her all the time. And also how empathic she was with other people, how she fought to be a working mother of four children, she fought for love… I think there was much more to her than we could see,” Kate Andersen Brower told in an interview for Magazine People.
The writer has also interviewed more than 250 people, including such notable names as Demi Moore, Carol Burnett or Colin Farrell, as well as the four children of the actress and some of her former loves, such as actors George Hamilton. and Robert Wagner, and to her late husband, Senator John Warner, who died in May 2021.
Published in the US on December 6, some of the most shocking revelations in his biography have already come to light through different media. One of them is related, how could it be otherwise, with her love life: she had a late romance with the Irish actor Colin Farrell, 44 years her junior. Now, the book reveals more details about that relationship. They met by chance when Elizabeth Taylor, then 77, was admitted to Cedars-Sinai hospital in 2009 for a heart procedure and Farrell (33) was at the same hospital for the birth of their son. After a brief meeting, the actor spoke to Taylor’s agent to request a private visit with the interpreter at his home: “Elizabeth was intrigued,” writes Kate Andersen Brewer in the new biography, “his Irish accent and his reputation as a nonconformist. reminded her of her beloved Richard [Burton]”.
Their first meeting was at Taylor’s Bel Air mansion, where Farrell brought a copy of Yeats’s poetry as a gift. “She told him that if she ever wanted him to come back and read her poetry, he would be happy to oblige,” according to the biographer. After that meeting, Taylor wrote to the actor: “What a pleasure it was to meet you. And thank God… you are a true Celt. You remind me of so many good things… of so many happy things. Thank you for being so real.” “He went over and over again, reading to her,” Brewer says. “He would sit in an armchair next to her bed and she would occasionally put on recordings of Richard reading poetry.” A decade later, in 2013, Colin Farell revealed some details of this relationship during an interview on The Ellen Degeneres Show: “And that was the beginning of a year and a half or two years of what was a great relationship. It was kind of like the last romantic relationship I had, which was never consummated.” In that same interview, Farrell revealed that she would have liked to be her number nine husband.
The book also reveals a flirtation with the director David Lynch, which happened at the party after the Oscars in 1987, where they shared a kiss: “I leaned in slowly, getting closer to his lips, but mesmerized by these violet eyes,” recalls the director, “and I got closer and closer and pretty soon my lips were touching hers and sinking deeper and deeper into these pillowy lips… I saw those eyes close as we kissed and then mine close. We enter a dream. I will never forget”.
“You’re too pretty to kill yourself”
His addictions are another of the great revelations of the biography, since Taylor opened up in numerous letters with various people about his struggle to overcome his addiction to drugs. It is one of her children, Chris Wilding, fruit of her marriage to English actor Michael Wilding, who has spoken of some of the most dramatic episodes during the 1970s, when her mother was addicted to an opioid called Demerol, which was administered intravenously: “Her son told that Elizabeth had a completely empty look while she handed him a syringe so that he could administer the dose”, explains the journalist in the interview in People, “and it’s like ‘God, you think she has everything.’ But really, there was always a void that she was trying to fill.”
“Elizabeth said her whole life was like a fight,” Brower reveals, “her resilience was refusing to be a victim.” The journalist reveals the abuse suffered by Elizabeth Taylor during her childhood, when her father physically abused her because she was jealous that her daughter earned more money than he did. Later, Kate Andersen Brower also refers to episodes of abuse that she suffered from her partners; One of her most violent was her during her marriage to actor Eddie Fisher, her fourth husband, who pointed a gun at her temple and after she said: “Don’t worry, you’re too pretty to kill you.” “Elizabeth told how being married to him was like slow suicide,” Brower explains, “so she needed to go. He got out of these abusive situations throughout her entire life, but I think the thing about her is that he always thought she was better off when she was married.”
According to the journalist, the actress’s children have thanked her for her work, although they have acknowledged that they have found episodes difficult to digest, “but they have also learned things from their mother by reading it, because her life spanned so much that no one was there to see it. all”.
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