It’s just been revealed that the late great Hollywood star Elizabeth Taylor attempted suicide amidst her “awful” marriage to Eddie Fisher.

Shockingly, this episode in Taylor’s life came at the height of her fame and powers in Hollywood.

Taylor’s Marriage To Fisher

Taylor was married to Fisher from 1959 until 1964. She famously married eight times to seven husbands during her life, which lasted from 1932 until she died in 2011.

Fisher was Taylor’s fourth husband, and she married him one year after her third husband Mike Todd was killed in a plane crash in 1958. Fisher and Todd had been best friends. After Todd’s shocking death, she and Fisher bonded over their mutual grief.

“I never loved Eddie, I liked him. I felt sorry for him,” she said in HBO’s Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes, which premiered on Saturday night.

Taylor went on to admit that while she liked “talking” to Fisher, who died at age 82 in 2010, “he was not” Todd.

Fisher and Taylor married in 1959 just three hours after his divorce from the Singin’ In The Rain star Debbie Reynolds was finalized. This made them tabloid fodder from the start, as Reynolds and Taylor had been close friends during their respective marriages to Fisher and Todd.

It was during this time in her life that Taylor was a mega star. She had just completed Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and was just a few years from Cleopatra.

Taylor ultimately described her marriage to Fisher as being “one big friggin’ awful mistake.” During their time together, she felt as if he kept her locked away from the world.

 “Eddie made sure that I felt lonely,” she recalled. “We never went out.” 

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Taylor’s Suicide Attempt

This culminated in Taylor attempting suicide by taking sleeping pills “deliberately, calmly and in front of Eddie” in a suicide attempt.

“I’d rather be dead than face divorce,” she said on the tapes. “I was fed up with living.” 

Taylor quickly regretted this suicide attempt, seeing it as self-indulgent. She was a mother of three children at the time, and she believes that the consequences for them of her being successful in killing herself made the attempt “horrific.”

Taylor would later adopt daughter Maria McKeown with the Hollywood star Richard Burton. She would marry and divorce him twice, first from 1964-1974 and then again from 1974-1975.

Taylor and Burton began an affair while filming the 1963 epic Cleopatra. During this affair with Burton, Taylor alleged that Fisher would sit at her bedside and wake her up by pointing a gun at her. He would then ominously tell her, “I wouldn’t kill you. I wouldn’t shoot you.”

In summing up her marriage to Fisher, Taylor said that she “liked him and liked talking about Mike with him. I don’t remember much about my marriage, except it was one big, giant mistake, and I knew it before the wedding.”

Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes previously premiered at the Cannes Film Festival.

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Taylor’s History

Taylor is widely considered to be one of the best Hollywood actresses of all time. She won two Oscars during her career, the first for 1960’s Butterfield 8 during her marriage to Fisher. She later won again for the 1966 classic Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf?, which she starred in with Burton.

Taylor retreated from public life in 1996 after her divorce from Larry Fortensky, a construction worker who was 20 years her junior.

Taylor later died of heart failure in 2011.

If you missed Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes, it’s currently available to stream on Max. Be sure to check it out if you want to learn more about the Hollywood legend that was Elizabeth Taylor!

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