Elizabeth Taylor at Home: 26 Photos of the Golden Age Star’s Domestic Life
She was an actor, activist, and an eight-time bride, but Elizabeth Taylor may have been happiest relaxing at home
“I don’t like fame. I don’t like the sense of belonging to the public,” Elizabeth Taylor admits in Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes, the 2024 documentary featuring unearthed recordings of the Hollywood legend by journalist Richard Meryman. “The person my family know[s] is real. But the other Elizabeth Taylor, the famous one, really has no depth or meaning to me. It’s a commodity and it makes money. One is flesh and blood, and one is cellophane.” Taylor, who skyrocketed to fame as a child actor and was among the first film stars to receive a $1 million payday for a role, spent much of her life in the spotlight. It’s not surprising, then, that the late icon considered her public image to be completely divorced from her private persona.
The Lost Tapes grants viewers a glimpse into that life through Taylor’s candid reflections on it all—the romances, the tragedies, the opulence, and the scandals. Though her superstar status meant that even her rare private moments sometimes got the on-camera treatment, the below selection reveals an intimate look at the “real” Elizabeth Taylor’s time at home, outside the limelight.
Photo: George Rinhart/Corbis via Getty Images1/26A new life in La-La Land
In 1939, Taylor, her older brother Howard, and her parents—stage actress Sara Sothern and art dealer Francis Lenn Taylor—moved from London to Los Angeles. After a couple of years living in LA’s Pacific Palisades neighborhood, the family moved into a Spanish-style Beverly Hills home. Here, Howard and Elizabeth are seen in the backyard with their pets in 1942, the year in which the 10-year-old began her acting career.
Courtesy Everett Collection2/26Childhood bedroom
A young Taylor poses in her bedroom at her family’s 1929-built home, which was located at 703 North Elm Drive. “Growing up in Hollywood never was the glamorous existence you read about in the magazines,” she recalled in her 1988 book Elizabeth Takes Off. “Appearance meant everything. I was fortunate because I looked good and was comfortable in front of the camera. But what was happening on the screen had no basis in reality…. In reality, I never could kick up my heels like other kids, there were too many restraints. My life was overscheduled and overdisciplined.”
Courtesy Everett Collection3/26Young rider
Taylor, an avid equestrian, poses with her riding equipment at home. In 1944, she starred as 12-year-old jockey Velvet Brown in National Velvet—an achievement that the actor attributes to her “sheer willpower.” In Elizabeth Takes Off, Taylor wrote, “I totally identified with the young heroine who, disguised as a boy, enters the Grand National, but at eleven I was too slight to pull off the male masquerade believably.” However, the actor was determined. “In my own mind, I was Velvet Brown,” she recalled.
Courtesy Everett Collection4/26Becoming Velvet Brown
Though the film’s producer told Taylor that she was too small to play Velvet Brown, that didn’t stop the budding star from angling for the role. “I embarked on a three-month height- and weight-gain program,” she later wrote. “Miraculously, I grew almost three inches and gained nearly ten pounds. Of course, it might just have been Mother Nature, but I have always believed I willed myself to grow into the part.” Pictured in this 1947 snap is Taylor’s own horse, King Charles, who played her equine costar.
Photo: Earl Theisen/Getty Images5/26Life at 703 North Elm Drive
This 1947 shot shows Taylor and her mother prepping hamburgers and hot dogs in the kitchen of their family home. Biographer Alexander Walker wrote that the 1929-built abode sported “pink stucco walls and red roof tiles, a huge round-arched window facing the road and a dusty front ‘yard’ with an olive tree in it.” It would remain the young starlet’s home until her first marriage.
- Earl Theisen Collection/Getty Images6/26
Lonely adolescence
Though you wouldn’t know it by this 1947 snapshot, Taylor considered her teenage years to be lonely. “I never had many girlfriends my own age. I was treated like a freak by my contemporaries and it made me a little paranoid,” she wrote in Elizabeth Takes Off. “If my celebrity status didn’t keep friends away, then my protected upbringing did. My parents wouldn’t let me enjoy any of the normal activities I played on screen, like staying over at a pajama party, or spontaneously going out just to drive around. The result was that I never relied much on relationships outside of my family.”
Photo: Bettmann/Contributor/Getty Images7/26Amy and Amy
Featuring decorative tiles and terra-cotta floors, the Taylor family home had all the classic Spanish-style details that remain beloved throughout Los Angeles today. The Hollywood legend is pictured here in 1949 at age 17, drying off her dog, Amy (named after Taylor’s character in the film Little Women, which hit theaters in March of that year).
Photo: Bettmann/Contributor/Getty Images8/26First engagement
The future Oscar winner is seen here with her mother reading sheet music at their piano in 1949. At the time, Taylor was engaged to William Pawley Jr., the son of a US ambassador. “I want our hearts to belong to each other throughout eternity,” the teenage actor wrote in a letter to Pawley. It wasn’t in the cards, however; the engagement ended just a few months later.
Photo: Archive Photos/Getty Images9/26Art aficionado
Photographed in her childhood home, the movie star twirls in a velvet dress before an ornately framed painting. Walking in her father’s footsteps, Taylor continued to collect art throughout her life. The very same painting can be seen in photos of Taylor’s final residence, six decades after this 1950 snapshot was taken.
Photo: Bettmann/Contributor/Getty Images10/26First marriage
Eager for independence from her sheltered upbringing, Taylor married hotel heir Conrad “Nicky” Hilton Jr. in May 1950 at the age of 18. However, Hilton was “abusive, physically and mentally,” the actor wrote in her 1988 book Elizabeth Takes Off. “The honeymoon and the relationship were both over by the time we returned. I couldn’t bear to reveal that my marriage was a failure, and I kept quiet for months. Around Christmas, I could stand it no longer and moved out of our house.” The residence in question, pictured here, was a Pacific Palisades rental where the pair stayed after a stint at the Bel Air Hotel.
Photo: Ed Jackson/NY Daily News Archive via Getty Images11/26…and first divorce
The young couple officially divorced in January 1951 and Taylor moved into New York’s Plaza Hotel, which was owned by Hilton’s father at the time. The exes met on October 15, 1951, in her suite to wrap up some loose ends—including a property settlement, per the New York Daily News, which published the above snapshot. The star speaks fondly of her time at the iconic hotel in The Lost Tapes, describing it as “the first kind of free, independent time I’d ever had in my life.”
Photo: Ed Jackson/NY Daily News Archive via Getty Images12/26Life at The Plaza
The couple discusses the divorce settlement and meets with the press in Taylor’s Plaza suite here. “I was a divorcée, and I was 19. Roddy [McDowall] was there with me, and Monty [Clift]. Just having fun with my chums, doing all kinds of crazy things,” Taylor said of her time living at the famed hotel. “If I wanted to go ice skating at nine at night, we would. Or we’d just have hot dogs all day long. Completely irresponsible sort of behavior. I didn’t have to keep proper hours. I didn’t have to do anything properly. And I had a ball.”
Photo: Bettmann/Getty Images13/26Mrs. Wilding
In 1952, Taylor married English actor Michael Wilding and moved into his London apartment, where they are pictured here playing piano. The starlet looked to Wilding, who was two decades her senior, as a source of stability and comfort following her volatile first marriage, she explains in The Lost Tapes.
- Bettmann/Getty Images14/26
London living
The newlyweds spin records with a pet pup in their London dwelling in this 1952 snapshot. “Our marriage began with great mutual affection and enormous high hopes,” Taylor wrote. “For a long time the marriage was a very happy one, and best of all, I achieved my dream of becoming a mother.”
Photo: WATFORD/Mirrorpix/Mirrorpix via Getty Images15/26And baby makes three
Taylor and Wilding bought a house in Beverly Hills in 1953, the same year that the Cat on a Hot Tin Roof star gave birth to her first child, Michael Jr. Pictured in September of that year, the 21-year-old actor reclines on her sofa with the infant. “We will have the outside painted yellow, with white shutters, the living room will be in gray with periwinkle blue—my favorite color,” Taylor allegedly said upon buying the home.
Photo: Bettmann/Contributor/Getty Images16/26Happy haven
Baby Michael’s sweetly decorated nursery, shown here in 1953, had a butter yellow, baby blue, and pink color scheme. Taylor described the storybook Beverly Hills dwelling in her 1965 tome, An Informal Memoir. “One whole wall was built of bark with fern and orchids growing up the bark,” she wrote. “You really couldn’t distinguish between the outside and inside. And all the colors I loved—off-white, white, natural woods, stone, beigey marble. The pool was so beautiful. There were palm trees and rock formations—it looked like a natural pool, with trees growing out of it. It was the most beautiful house I’ve ever seen.”
Photo: CBS via Getty Images17/26Married to Mike
Taylor and Wilding split after nearly five years of marriage. One month after the divorce was finalized, the Cleopatra star married film producer Mike Todd in February 1957. The two are pictured here in their penthouse apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Taylor and Todd kept estates on both coasts; in addition to their NYC abode, they maintained a 1920s Spanish-style primary residence near Coldwater Canyon in Beverly Hills. That roughly 4,000-square-foot home didn’t offer the high-profile pair much privacy—its front steps began right at the curb, winding around a turret, and up to an arched wood front door.
Photo: CBS Photo Archive/Getty Images18/26At-home interview
A few months after they married, Todd and Taylor welcomed CBS’s cameras into their NYC home at 715 Park Avenue for a 1957 Person to Person segment, which showed the newlyweds’ duplex filled with art; a Monet painting in a gilded frame hangs behind them in this photo. Taylor gave birth to the couple’s daughter, Liza, before Todd’s tragic 1958 death in a plane crash.
Photo: Bettmann/Contributor/Getty Images19/26Chalet Ariel
After a five-year marriage to singer and actor Eddie Fisher that generated tons of scandalous tabloid fodder (especially since he was married to Taylor BFF and America’s sweetheart, Debbie Reynolds, when the romance began), Taylor married her Cleopatra costar, Richard Burton, in 1964. The couple, whose relationship essentially birthed modern paparazzi culture, is pictured here at their Gstaad, Switzerland, property dubbed Chalet Ariel. Taylor and Fisher purchased the estate early in their marriage, and the Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? star retained ownership of the dwelling for the rest of her life.
Photo: James Andanson/Sygma via Getty Images20/26Marriage with a side of drama
The couple—pictured in 1967 at their Swiss vacation home, with a trio of petite pooches in tow—were known for their passionate yet turbulent marriage. “We enjoy fighting,” Taylor reportedly said. “Having an out-and-out, outrageous, ridiculous fight is one of the greatest exercises in marital togetherness.” It’s fitting that the relationship was filled with drama, seeing as it began with some: The couple started their affair while Taylor was still married to Fisher and Burton was married to Welsh actress Sybil Christopher.
Photo: David Cairns/Getty Images21/26Aboard the Kalizma
The frequent costars also spent a great deal of time on their yacht, Kalizma. They reportedly bought the luxury vessel for $192,000 (roughly $1.8 million adjusted for inflation) in 1967 and invested another $200,000 in refurbishing it to their liking. It was onboard the Kalizma that the Welsh actor gifted Taylor the famous 69.42-carat Cartier diamond now known as the Taylor-Burton diamond.
Photo: David Cairns/Express/Getty Images22/26Oceans of style
The couple looks out from the deck of the Kalizma in this snapshot. They reportedly outfitted the vessel with Chippendale mirrors, Louis XIV chairs, and English tapestries. Taylor’s suite—from the bedroom to the bathroom—was done up in a hot pink color scheme. Grace Kelly, Orson Welles, and Ringo Starr were among the A-list guests that Taylor and Burton entertained on the yacht.
Photo: Disney General Entertainment Content via Getty Images23/26Home on the farm
After divorcing Burton (twice—once in 1974 and again in 1976, after a brief second marriage), Taylor married American politician John Warner in December 1976. They are pictured here in the kitchen of their roughly 7,000-square-foot fieldstone-walled manor in Marshall, Virginia. Taylor reportedly kept horses on the sprawling property, which was known as Atoka Farm.
Photo: Disney General Entertainment Content via Getty Images24/26Conscious uncoupling
Warner and Taylor roam the grounds of the 400-acre plot in this photo. The actor helped her husband with his 1978 senate campaign, though his busy government schedule put a strain on the marriage, and they divorced in 1982. “She was my ‘partner’ in laying the foundation for 30 years of public service in the US Senate,” Warner said later. “We were always friends—to the end.”
Photo: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images25/26700 Nimes Road
Taylor’s primary residence from 1981 until her 2011 death was at 700 Nimes Road in Bel Air. This 1987 photo shows the Hollywood icon smiling on her sofa in the ranch-style home, which was formerly owned by Nancy Sinatra. Taylor worked with AD100 Hall of Fame designer Waldo Fernandez to decorate the dwelling, which was posthumously featured in the July 2011 issue of Architectural Digest. A trophy room, plush pastel carpets, and abundant flower gardens were among the estate’s highlights.
Photo: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images26/26Cozy home life
Taylor sits in a welcoming living room at her Nimes Road dwelling in this shot. “Of course when she had to appear at an important event, she would put on the most beautiful dress and the most amazing jewelry and become Elizabeth Taylor, the star,” famed fashion designer Valentino once said. “But at home she liked a cozy life, friends, good food.”
The Hollywood legend died in 2011 at age 79.
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