On February 27, the mythical Elizabeth Taylor would have turned 90 years old. The British actress, one of the great names in the history of cinema, visited Spain on many occasions starring in well-remembered anecdotes. In 1992, she received the Prince of Asturias Award for Concord in Oviedo for her work in favor of AIDS patients at a time when much of society stigmatized them.
Until seven years ago, most of the tourists who walked past number 8 Wildwood Road in Hampstead Heath (London) did not notice that Elizabeth Rosemond Taylor, one of the brightest stars of Hollywood from the golden age. For this reason, in 2015 a plaque was placed to praise the figure of the protagonist of Cleopatra (1962), certifying that she was born and lived there until 1939. The rise of World War II led the Taylors to move to California.
The only actress with violet eyes in history would have turned 90 on February 27. After becoming a child prodigy with Lassie the dog, playing at MGM with her friends Mickey Rooney and Roddy MacDowall, and marrying Nicky Hilton, heir to the hotel chain and family member from Paris, for the first time at the age of 18, Taylor began to make history.
The star had a very special bond with Spain, a country that she adored and that she visited on many occasions in very good company. The first time was with Michael Wilding, her second husband and father of her two sons, Michael and Christopher, in September 1953 when she received the press at the Castellana Hilton, which had become a kind of Hollywood branch after its glorious opening. , with Gary Cooper among the guests. In one of her gastronomic escapades, the actress tasted a succulent paella, a moment immortalized by the ineffable photographer Vicente Ibáñez, baptized at that time as the photographer of the stars.
Gloria Swanson, Ava Gardner, and even Hitchcock passed through Ibañez's studio, located on Gran Vía, whom she convinced to take his portrait in a cemetery. She is unique in the world. He sold the negatives to the National Library, but the polyhedral artist Enrique del Pozo keeps some fifty images printed and signed by Ibáñez himself, among which is that of Taylor herself, absorbed by that typical dish of Spanish gastronomy.
Filming in Catalonia with Elizabeth Taylor
Taylor revisited the Spanish capital in 1958 with her third husband, producer Michael Todd, since he wanted to supervise part of the macro-production Around the World in 80 Days "because they had to shoot some scenes with Cantinflas," recalls the veteran publicist. Enrique Herreros Jr., at the age of 95 remembers the moment his gaze met that of the actress on the first day.
He wanted to interview them and chased them to the Castellana Hilton, “but when Todd saw me, he pointed his finger at me, yelling at me to get out of there. Many years later he told Elizabeth about it and she was hilarious. We became very friends ”, alleges the son of the immeasurable Enrique Herreros, poster designer, representative, and cartoonist, who bequeathed 807 covers of La Codorniz to posterity and of whom Berlanga said that he had invented film promotion.
The following year, Todd died unexpectedly when his private plane crashed, plunging Elizabeth into a deep depression who took advantage of that pain to incorporate him into the character of Maggie in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. A few months later, Joseph Leo Mankiewicz filmed some scenes of Suddenly Last Summer (1959) on the Costa Brava, where the three main performers went, Elizabeth Taylor, her close friend Montgomery Clift and Katharine Hepburn. The inhabitants of Begur were ecstatic to see this concentration of talent. They also wore palm hearts in the coves of S'Agaró, Sant Feliu de Guíxols, Pals, and Sant Antoni de Calonge.
Elizabeth Taylor stayed at the exclusive La Gavina de S'Agaró, one of only two five-star hotels in the area. Her fourth husband, singer Eddie Fisher, was with her. The locals gathered to see them, especially the actress showing off her beautiful body in a bikini, but they ended up so overwhelmed that they returned to her rooms. The graphic testimony of that moment is the work of Josep Carreras, a photographer from the town of Begur.
In less than a breath, she also traveled to Malaga to shoot a brief sequence for Essence of Mystery, the first film with a scent in the history of cinema thanks to a system patented by her late husband and her son. She Mike of her.
