“I hated it so much”: the Oscar-winning movie Elizabeth Taylor dismissed as “a piece of shit”
Actors can often be their own harshest and most outspoken critics, and as a ‘Golden Age’ icon who wasn’t afraid to shoot from the hip, Elizabeth Taylor didn’t have a problem burning one of her films at the stake.
She was one of the biggest stars of her era, and as a result, she spent the pinnacle of her onscreen career appearing in pictures that were usually competing for the biggest awards in the business. Many of her performances came in productions that won Academy Awards, and she found one of them completely and utterly deserving of the honour.
A Place in the Sun, Giant, Cleopatra, The VIPs, and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? are just some of her films that were awarded at least one Oscar, and the latter was the only one where she claimed a prize for herself after winning her second ‘Best Actress’ statue. Clearly, she knew a prestige project when she saw one, and her four consecutive nominations between 1958 and 1961 proved it.
Then again, there was an outlier. While the Academy evidently disagreed, Taylor grew increasingly indignant over the years that her turn in Daniel Mann’s BUtterfield 8 was the movie that gave her her first taste of Oscars glory, with the star adamant that it was nothing more than a sympathy vote handed to her on a silver platter.
“BUtterfield 8 was my fourth nomination in a row, and I won the award for my tracheotomy,” she told Richard Meryman, per HBO’s Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes. She’s gone under the knife in early 1961 after a battle with pneumonia so severe that reports started claiming she’d died, several months before the literary adaptation was released.
“There must have been some kind of sympathy thing because the film is so embarrassing. It’s just dreadful,” she raged. Taylor never wanted to make it in the first place, but she was left with no other option and only agreed to play the female lead because it would fulfil her contractual obligation to MGM, which gave her the freedom to head across town and make Cleopatra with 20th Century Fox.
“I hated it so much,” she told Roddy McDowall. “I thought, ‘Fuck them’. They made me do the film when I didn’t want to. I did it with a pistol to my head. The lines were so diabolical. It was such a piece of shit.” She was entitled to feel like that, and few were better qualified to call BUtterfield 8 shit than the person who was listed first in the credits, but it goes without saying that the Academy felt differently.
Admittedly, there’s a hint of cruel irony to Taylor running the risk of becoming a perennial Oscars bridesmaid after earning three ‘Best Actress’ nods in a row and coming out on the losing side every time, only to secure victory at the fourth time of asking in a movie she hated with every bone in her body. She was happy to add it to her trophy collection, though, even if she wasn’t thrilled with how it got there.
