Rebel with a cause
EVENTS / THEATRE / MUSIC / FILM / RADIO / PODCAST / TV
Movie star, trailblazer, activist – Elizabeth Taylor was a true Hollywood legend. Ahead of a new documentary, biographer Kate Andersen Brower looks back at her colourful career
Eighty years have passed since Elizabeth Taylor first became a celebrity. Back then, in 1944, at the tender age of 12, her role as the indefatigable Velvet Brown in National Velvet turned her into a star. She was famous for 67 years after that.
But behind the myth she was not as fearless as she seemed, as I discovered when I went through her letters and diary entries for the first ever authorised biography of her life. She struggled first against a relentlessly controlling studio system, then a media primed to attack outspoken women, and finally a society which discriminated against the people she loved most in the world, prompting her to become an HIV and Aids activist.
Now a new three-part BBC documentary series, Rebel Superstar – on which I was a consultant – examines the real Elizabeth, away from the headlines and heartache. Airing on BBC Two next month, it is executive produced by Kim Kardashian, who conducted the last interview with the star before she died aged 79 in 2011.