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Start giftingA Passion for Life
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Learn moreBorn in England to socially ambitious parents, Elizabeth Taylor was catapulted into child stardom and molded by MGM into the great violet-eyed beauty of postwar America. Along the way, without training or counsel, she became an award-winning actress, dazzling audiences everywhere with spectacular performances.
Spoto explores the gripping story of her brutalizing six-month marriage to compulsive gambler and hotel heir Nicky Hilton, her romances with top Hollywood directors, and her marriage to the ailing Michael Wilding. Four years later, she would be swept off her feet by showman Mike Todd into an alternately violent and loving marriage that would end with Todd’s death in a plane crash, leaving Taylor a twice-divorced widow with three children at the age of twenty-six. And here are Taylor’s years with Eddie Fisher, Republican Senator John Warner, and Richard Burton, with whom she would share a hedonistic, brash lifestyle that would virtually define the 1960s’ jet set.
Donald Spoto is the author of more than twenty books, including bestselling biographies of Alfred Hitchcock, Tennessee Williams, Laurence Olivier, Marlene Dietrich, Ingrid Bergman, and Audrey Hepburn. He lives with his husband, Danish artist and school administrator Ole Flemming Larsen, near Copenhagen, Denmark.
C. M. Hébert is an Earphones Award winner and Audie Award nominee. She is the recording studio director for the Talking Books Program at the Library of Congress’ National Library for the Blind and Physically Handicapped. She lives in Silver Spring, Maryland, with her husband, daughter, cat, and assorted fish.
Reviews
“Donald Spoto’s measured, articulate biography...does justice to her histrionic gifts and concocts convincing links between her screen personae and her catastrophic private life.”
“Spoto’s portrait of the star has a certain poignance.”
“Spoto’s exhaustive account of Taylor’s wildly glamorous and troubled life may be the guiltiest pleasure...A Passion for Life unabashedly restores Taylor to the role that has always suited her best: Hollywood legend with the violet eyes to die for.”
“At once scathing and sympathetic…Spoto provides acute commentary on Taylor’s films as well as a filmography in a revelatory portrait of a self-styled femme fatale beset by self-destructive impulses and feelings of emptiness.”
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