Elizabeth Taylor's Oscar Dress
When you're on the brink of death and your personal life has been dragged through the mud, what's the best thing to make you feel better? An Oscar, naturally.
She might've hated the movie (BUtterfield 8, in which she played a high-class call girl, and the last fil in her MGM contract), but I doubt the win hurt her feelings. In her speech she said "I don't really know how to express my gratitude for this and for everything. I guess all I can do is say thank you, thank you with all my heart."
Now, onto the dress! It's a Dior frock that looks absolutely stunning on Liz's enviable figure. What I love most, well, the two things I love most are the silhouette and the yellow bodice. It's such a delightful colour on her, and I love how the rich green belt cuts through the yellow bodice and white skirt. Liz chose a gown from the fashion house's 1961 Spring Haute Couture line for the evening.
Liz's Oscar win is perhaps a little controversial, if only because a lot of contemporary and then-contemporary sources feel that she only won the Oscar because she'd had an emergency tracheotomy weeks before when the voting period was still underway (you can see the scar in this photo). Shirley MacLaine was considered the front runner for The Apartment (which she should've won for!) and later quipped that she'd lost because of a tracheotomy.
Her win was also controversial for her private life (but then, when wasn't Liz's private affairs controversial public fodder?), as this was after the affair and subsequent marriage with Eddie Fisher, who'd left Debbie Reynolds to be with Liz after her husband (and his best friend) Mike Todd was killed in a plane crash.
Liz's life was about to become even more controversial, as she filmed Cleopatra with Richard Burton and fell in love with him on the set. Theirs was a love story for the ages (required reading: Furious Love: Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, and the Marriage of the Century by Nancy Schoenberger and Sam Kashner), and they appeared in many films together in the '60s before divorcing and re-marrying and divorcing again in the '70s. Liz won her second Oscar in 1966 for Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? opposite Richard Burton; they did not attend the ceremony.
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