C hris Wilding is a shy man approaching 70. As a little boy, he was also shy. He used to get embarrassed when his mother turned up at school for parents’ day.
Everybody made such a hoo-ha about it. There she would be, in her furs and finery, done up to the nines. She was so famous and infamous, sexy and scandalous, and he would never hear the end of it.
And yet to him she was just Mom. Elizabeth Taylor was the world’s best-known actress, becoming a global celebrity at 12 after starring in National Velvet. By the age of 35, she had won two Oscars, first for playing sex worker Gloria Wandrous in the 1960 film BUtterfield 8, which she described as “a piece of shit”, and then six years later for her brilliantly visceral performance as Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? She was married to one of the world’s best-known actors, Richard Burton .
Together, they were the world’s best-known couple. When she wasn’t married to Burton (twice), she was married to an assortment of heirs, tycoons, actors and a man she met in rehab. There were seven husbands in all, and eight marriages.
Profiles of her were inevitably superlative-heavy. She was called the most beautiful woman in the world, commanded the highest salaries, demanded the greatest attention, and, by the time of her death in 2011, had become Tinseltown’s greatest campaigner. And she was a mother to four children.
Even in the era of Taylor Swift and Beyoncé, it’s hard to imagine just how huge Taylor was. .