Elizabeth Taylor believed her first Oscar win in 1961 was a “sympathy” vote after she suffered a severe bout of pneumonia and had to undergo a much-publicized tracheotomy.
Taylor, who died in 2011 at the age of 79, discusses the ordeal in the new HBO documentary Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes , which is based on a series of interviews conducted by Life journalist Richard Meryman.
The frank and intimate tapes were recorded as the basis for both a magazine profile and Taylor’s 1965 memoir and remained unheard by anyone else until Meryman’s death in 2015.
Taylor was nominated for Best Actress at the Academy Awards for four consecutive years from 1958 to 1961. After missing out for her performances in Raintree County , Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Suddenly, Last Summer she eventually won for her role as a model and freelance call girl in BUtterfield 8.
The film had been a commercial success but was largely panned by critics. Taylor can be heard in the new documentary describing it as a “piece of s***.”
She believed she won the Academy’s votes out of sympathy after a near-fatal health scare.
“ BUtterfield 8 was my fourth nomination in a row, and I won the award for my tracheotomy,” she says.
Asked by Meryman whether she really believed that, Taylor replies: “Yes I do. There must have been some kind of sympathy thing because the film is so embarrassing. It’s just dreadful.”
“I hated it so much,” she says in another conversation with fellow actor Roddy McDowall. “I thought: ‘F*** them’. They made me do the film when I didn’t want to. I did it with a pistol to my head.”
“The lines were so diabolical,” she adds. “It was such a piece of s***.”
BUtterfield 8 , directed by Daniel Mann, was based on a 1935 novel by John O’Hara. It takes its title from the telephone exchange that served Manhattan’s Upper East Side, where the letters BU represented the number 28.
In March 1961, while shooting Cleopatra in England, Taylor developed life-threatening pneumonia that required a tracheotomy, a surgical opening of the windpipe to allow air to fill the lungs. The health scare was so severe that one news agency reported that she had died.
“I was on the operating table for 18 hours,” she recalls in the new documentary. “Actually four times I was called dead, and stopped breathing. They had pipes going into my lungs, pulling the gook out and shoving oxygen in. When I came to on the table, the operating table, I tried to scream and no sound came out. The air was coming out of a big hole in my throat where they’d slit it open.”
Taylor went on to win a second Best Actress Oscar in 1967 for her performance in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes is available to stream now on Max.
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