Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes, review: they don’t make Hollywood stars like this anymore

Sky’s documentary takes us through the actress’s life from child stardom to her many famous marriages, using wonderful archive audio

Do we have real movie stars any more? Sure, there are some holdovers from the 1980s and 1990s, such as Tom Cruise and Julia Roberts. But we’re not minting new ones. In the latest issue of Vogue, a fawning piece hails Blake Lively as a great Hollywood star in the mould of Grace Kelly and Audrey Hepburn. Blake Lively? Most of us would struggle to name a single film she’s been in. 
This is one of many reasons why watching Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes (Sky Documentaries) is such a treat. Taylor was the real deal. The prospect of merely listening to Elizabeth Taylor seems to miss the point of her. We want to see her smouldering on film, or gaze into those eyes (they are dark blue, she tells us, her “violet” eyes being “some romantic journalist’s idea”). 
Luckily, the film-makers know this. So the tapes – recordings of her 1964 interview sessions with her biographer, Richard Meryman – play out while we’re lavished with clips from Taylor’s films and newsreel of her looking fabulous. The tapes do lend an intimacy. 
Her voice may be sweetly girlish, but the documentary opens with her offering Meryman a drink and is sometimes accompanied by the sound of her dragging on a cigarette. She speaks candidly about her marriages and her image (in 1964 she had just married Richard Burton for the first time, and was viewed by many as a homewrecker). “Maybe because of my personal life, I suggest something illicit. But I am not illicit and I am not immoral. I make mistakes and I have paid for them,” she says at the outset. 
The film takes us through Taylor’s life, from child stardom in Lassie Come Home to her fundraising for Aids research. There is wonderful home-movie footage of her larking around with friends Roddy McDowall and Montgomery Clift, and newsreels of her various personal dramas. She discusses her career, her struggle to be taken seriously as an actress, and her frustrations with fame: “I’m sorry I became a public utility.” 
And she talks about her marriages, to Nicky Hilton (abusive), Michael Wilding (kind but henpecked), Mike Todd (the man she adored), Eddie Fisher (“one big frigging awful mistake” which led her to overdose), and Burton.
“Richard came on the set [of Cleopatra] and I’ve never seen a gentleman so hungover in my whole life,” she recalls of their first meeting. Their rows were “like an atom bomb going off” but, she says: “Our marriage will be here 50 years from now.” In a way, she was right about that: they may have divorced twice over, but our fascination with their love affair endures.