Elizabeth Taylor attempted suicide during her ‘awful’ marriage to Eddie Fisher: new doc
Elizabeth Taylor tried to kill herself when she was married to her fourth husband, Eddie Fisher.
The new HBO documentary “Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes” which premiered Aug. 3, features interviews that the late movie star had with journalist Richard Meryman from 1964 to 1965.
Taylor called her marriage to Fisher “one big friggin’ awful mistake” in one of the interview tapes.
“Eddie made sure that I felt lonely. We never went out,” she said.
The “Cleopatra” actress had an affair with Fisher while he was still married to Debbie Reynolds.
The pair are said to have wed only three hours after Fisher’s divorce from Reynolds was finalized in 1959, and the relationship lasted four years.
In the doc, Taylor told Meryman that she was so depressed while married to Fisher that she attempted suicide by taking sleeping pills “deliberately, calmly and in front of Eddie.”
“I’d rather be dead than face divorce,” she said in an audio tape. “I was fed up with living.”
But Taylor survived the attempt, later seeing it as “self-indulgent” because of the “horrific” consequences for her children.
Taylor had three children by the time she married Fisher. She shared sons Michael Wilding Jr. and Christopher Wilding with her second husband, Michael Wilding, and daughter Liza Frances Todd with her third husband, Mike Todd.
The Hollywood icon and Fisher divorced in 1964, two years after Taylor began an affair with her “Cleopatra” co-star and two-time husband, Richard Burton.
In the doc, Taylor said that during her affair with Burton, Fisher would sit at her bedside and wake her up by pointing a gun at her and saying, “I wouldn’t kill you. I wouldn’t shoot you.”
Despite marrying Fisher, Taylor said that she “never loved” her fourth husband.
“I 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,” she said about Fisher, who is the father of late “Star Wars” icon Carrie Fisher.
Director Nanette Burstein also weighed in on Taylor and Fisher’s turbulent relationship.
“She wasn’t in love with Eddie, and all of a sudden, she’s having an affair with him, and he’s married to Debbie Reynolds, America’s sweetheart, and it’s this huge scandal, and suddenly, she’s engaged to be married to him,” said Burstein, 54, in an interview with Entertainment Weekly.
“She knew going into it [that] it was a huge mistake, but she didn’t know how to get out of it because it was so public at that point. So, she just went ahead with it. And then, of course, the marriage did not endure as a result of her lack of interest in being wedded to him.”
Last year, Reynolds and Fisher’s son, Todd Fisher, discussed Taylor’s affair with his father in an interview with Fox News.
“My father left my mother for Elizabeth Taylor,” said Todd, 66. “A lot of people were mad about that.”
“A lot of people were like, ‘So your dad left the good girl for the bad girl’… Liz made no bones about being the bad girl. She came a long way from ‘National Velvet,’” he also said, adding that Reynolds “never talked my father down” in front of her kids, despite the scandalous affair.
Taylor was married to seven men. She retreated from public life after splitting from her final husband, Larry Fortensky, in 1996.
The actress died in 2011 of heart failure at 79.
“Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes” is streaming on Max.
