Director Nanette Burstein’s Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes is set to premiere on HBO August 3, 2024 following its festival run. The HBO Original documentary debuted at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival and sits at 80% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes.
In addition to Hollywood icon Elizabeth Taylor, the documentary features the voices of actors Roddy McDowall, Debbie Reynolds, Richard Burton, and George Hamilton. Producer Sam Marx, agents Marion Rosenberg and John Heyman, longtime assistant and co-Trustee Tim Mendelson, and friends Liz Smith and Doris Brynner are also included in The Lost Tapes recordings.
HBO offered this lengthy synopsis of the documentary:
“Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes allows Elizabeth Taylor’s own voice to narrate her story, inviting audiences to rediscover not just a megastar of Hollywood’s Golden Age but a complex woman who navigated lifelong fame, personal identity, and public scrutiny on a global stage from early childhood. Through newly recovered interviews with Taylor and unprecedented access to the movie star’s personal archive, the film reveals the complex inner life and vulnerability of the Hollywood legend while also challenging audiences to recontextualize her achievements and her legacy.
In 1964, at the height of her fame, Elizabeth Taylor sat down with journalist Richard Meryman for a candid, extensive interview. Drawing from 40 hours of the newly unearthed audio interviews and extraordinary access to personal photos, home movies, archival interviews, and news footage, illustrated with clips from the iconic roles that mirror her real-life challenges and triumphs, Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes provides the most intimate portrait of the actress to date. Modest, bawdy, charming, honest, at times frustrated, Taylor comes to life as she discusses her film debut in 1943’s Lassie Come Home, her struggle to free herself from the limitations of ingénue roles, her benchmark roles in Giant, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and Butterfield 8, for which she won her first of two Academy Awards, and the excesses of shooting the troubled epic 1963 film Cleopatra.
Taylor also speaks unguardedly about her marriages and children, her close friendships with Rock Hudson, Montgomery Clift, and Roddy McDowall, and her fifth marriage to Richard Burton, with whom she would star in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, winning her second Academy Award. Peeling back the layers of one of cinema’s most enduring icons, the conversations reveal a woman at odds with her screen image, yearning for respect and agency, while forever under the microscope of scrutinizing press and the public.”
J.J. Abrams, Sean Stuart, Glen Zipper, Bill Gerber, and Rachel Rusch Rich serve as producers. Executive producers include Burstein, Barbara Berkowitz, Tim Mendelson, Quinn Tivey, and HBO’s Nancy Abraham, Lisa Heller, and Sara Rodriguez.
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