Taylor's violet eyes hid a double-lash mutation
Elizabeth Taylor's famous violet-looking eyes sat inside dark double lashes from a genetic mutation—one reason casting agents stared. From National Velvet at twelve to Cleopatra's record budget, she became 1960s Hollywood's highest-paid star and AFI's seventh-greatest female classic legend.
Born in London on 27 February 1932 to American art-dealer parents, she held dual citizenship. The family left for California in 1939 amid war fears after a tip from U.S. ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy. A Universal deal in 1941 yielded There's One Born Every Minute before the studio dropped her—a casting director claiming she had nothing and eyes too old for a child.
MGM made her a teen star with National Velvet (1944), a Christmas box-office success with two Oscar nominations; Taylor later called it her career's most exciting film. Mature 1950s work included Giant (1956), then the Tennessee Williams hit Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and—a year later—Suddenly, Last Summer, which brought a Golden Globe. Cleopatra (1963) drew multiple Oscar nominations (winning four) and notoriously lavish spending; she married co-star Richard Burton in 1964 and made eleven films with him, including Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, while the press dubbed the on-off pairing "Liz and Dick."
Private life—especially marriages to Eddie Fisher and the on-off Burton pairing dubbed Liz and Dick—drew intense press. Acting slowed after the late 1960s though she worked into the mid-1970s. She died on 23 March 2011. Her early career fused a singular look with studio manufacture: MGM scheduled school, filming, dancing, and singing until childhood, she said, ended when stardom began. Gossip magazines compared the teenage Taylor to Ava Gardner and Lana Turner as Life branded her Hollywood's most beautiful youngster.
Source: Elizabeth Taylor
