Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Not long after Elizabeth Taylor moved with her family to California, her parents took her on a day out to Paramount Studios. After visiting movie sets depicting everything from the wild west to ancient Rome, Taylor knew she wanted to act. She didn’t have to wait long: at the age of 10 she appeared in There’s One Born Every Minute and then in Lassie Come Home the following year. The latter’s producer, Sam Marx, described her arrival at MGM as “truly like the eclipse of the sun. It blotted out everybody that was in the office.”Directed by Nanette Burstein (The Kid Stays in the Picture), Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes uses the actress’s own voice to tell her story from child star to movie icon to tabloid sensation who married eight times (twice to Richard Burton). This previously unheard audio, which is blended with archive footage, is culled from 40 hours of interviews with the late journalist Richard Meryman. Their conversations took place throughout 1964, one year after Taylor’s critically drubbed blockbuster Cleopatra, for which she was paid more than $1mn, and two years before she and Burton co-starred in the awards-laden Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?.Burstein’s film promises to “recontextualise [Taylor’s] achievements and her legacy” — a bold claim given hers is a story that has been told over and over from every conceivable angle. Nonetheless the documentary has an intimate feel as Taylor talks frankly about her husbands, her career and public image. It’s with clear exasperation that she dismisses her sex-symbol status — “I’m a woman and I really don’t think it’s unique” — and expresses her desire to be seen not as a movie star but an actress. Asked how she thinks she is viewed by outsiders, she replies, “An untrustworthy lady, completely superficial, not too pretty — I mean inside . . . Maybe because of my personal life, I suggest something illicit.”Burstein draws attention to Taylor’s misogynistic treatment by the media: we see her and fourth husband Eddie Fisher as newlyweds posing for journalists on the steps of an aeroplane when Fisher is asked: “Can she cook?” But the film swerves Taylor and Burton’s irascible behaviour and their fabled excess that led them to splash out ostentatiously on champagne, jewellery, hotels, a vast staff and a yacht on which to house their dogs. The Lost Tapes paints a vivid and unsettling picture of life in the spotlight, but it’s by no means the whole story.★★★☆☆On Sky Documentaries on August 10 at 9pm in the UK and on Max in the US now
