Hers was a life spent under the microscope: a whirlwind arrival on the studio film scene as a child, a series of truncated marriages that filled the pages of gossip rags around the world, plaguing health issues and decades-long friendships with a group of men whose secrets and lives she honored as if they were her own. But most of all, Elizabeth Taylor’s off-and-on relationship with whom many considered her true love, Richard Burton, became the stuff of Hollywood legend as its romantic highs and dramatic lows were followed fanatically by fans around the world. What more is there to know about an icon dissected ten times over? The answer lies within celebrated filmmaker Nanette Burstein’s mesmerizing documentary Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes.

Via audio tapes discovered in the archive of journalist Richard Meryman, we are guided by Taylor’s voice as she walks the audience from the first step of her career through her time with Burton in the 1970s. As she reveals intimacies about her relationships, romantic and otherwise, she peels back the layers of a beloved public figure to reveal a vulnerable, funny and tenacious woman who persevered despite a life led almost entirely under the scrutiny of public opinion.––Liza Domnitz

Nanette Burstein