Elizabeth Taylor at Home: 31 Photos of the Golden Age Star’s Offscreen Life

As a film icon and a paparazzi obsession, Taylor was rarely outside the spotlight—see how the Oscar winner spent her downtime17-year-old Elizabeth Taylor at home with her dogs, one of which was named Amy after Taylor’s role in Little Women.Photo: Bettmann/Contributor/Getty Images“I don’t like fame. I don’t like the sense of belonging to the public,” Elizabeth Taylor admits in Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes, a 2024 documentary featuring unearthed recordings of the Hollywood legend by journalist Richard Meryman. “The person my family know[s] is real. But the other Elizabeth Taylor, the famous one, really has no depth or meaning to me. It’s a commodity and it makes money. One is flesh and blood, and one is cellophane.” Taylor, who skyrocketed to fame as a child actor and was among the first film stars to receive a $1 million payday for a role, spent much of her life in the spotlight. It’s not surprising, then, that the late icon considered her public image to be completely divorced from her private persona.The Lost Tapes granted viewers a glimpse into that life through Taylor’s candid reflections on it all—the romances, the tragedies, the opulence, and the scandals. Though her superstar status meant that even her rare private moments sometimes got the on-camera treatment, the below selection offers a look at the “real” Elizabeth Taylor’s time at home, outside the limelight.Photo: George Rinhart/Corbis via Getty ImagesA new life in La-La LandIn 1939, Taylor, her older brother Howard, and her parents—stage actress Sara Sothern and art dealer Francis Lenn Taylor—moved from London to Los Angeles. After a couple of years living in LA’s Pacific Palisades neighborhood, the family moved into a Spanish-style Beverly Hills home. Here, Howard and Elizabeth are seen in the backyard with their pets in 1942, the year in which the 10-year-old began her acting career.Photo: Courtesy Everett CollectionChildhood bedroomA young Taylor poses in her bedroom at her family’s 1929-built home, which was located at 703 North Elm Drive. “Growing up in Hollywood never was the glamorous existence you read about in the magazines,” she recalled in her 1988 book Elizabeth Takes Off. “Appearance meant everything. I was fortunate because I looked good and was comfortable in front of the camera. But what was happening on the screen had no basis in reality…. In reality, I never could kick up my heels like other kids, there were too many restraints. My life was overscheduled and overdisciplined.”Courtesy Everett CollectionYoung riderTaylor, an avid equestrian, poses with her riding equipment at home. In 1944, she starred as 12-year-old jockey Velvet Brown in National Velvet—an achievement that the actor attributes to her “sheer willpower.” In Elizabeth Takes Off, Taylor wrote, “I totally identified with the young heroine who, disguised as a boy, enters the Grand National, but at 11 I was too slight to pull off the male masquerade believably.” However, the actor was determined. “In my own mind, I was Velvet Brown,” she recalled.Courtesy Everett CollectionBecoming Velvet BrownThough the film’s producer told Taylor that she was too small to play Velvet Brown, that didn’t stop the budding star from angling for the role. “I embarked on a three-month height- and weight-gain program,” she later wrote. “Miraculously, I grew almost three inches and gained nearly ten pounds. Of course, it might just have been Mother Nature, but I have always believed I willed myself to grow into the part.” Pictured in this 1947 snap is Taylor’s own horse, King Charles, who played her equine costar.Photo: Earl Theisen/Getty ImagesIn the kitchenThis 1947 shot shows Taylor and her mother prepping hamburgers and hot dogs in the kitchen of their family home. Biographer Alexander Walker wrote that the 1929-built abode sported “pink stucco walls and red roof tiles, a huge round-arched window facing the road and a dusty front ‘yard’ with an olive tree in it.” It would remain the young starlet’s home until her first marriage.Earl Theisen Collection/Getty ImagesLonely adolescenceThough you wouldn’t know it by this 1947 snapshot, Taylor considered her teenage years to be lonely. “I never had many girlfriends my own age. I was treated like a freak by my contemporaries and it made me a little paranoid,” she wrote in Elizabeth Takes Off. “If my celebrity status didn’t keep friends away, then my protected upbringing did. My parents wouldn’t let me enjoy any of the normal activities I played onscreen, like staying over at a pajama party, or spontaneously going out just to drive around. The result was that I never relied much on relationships outside of my family.”Photo: Bettmann/Contributor/Getty ImagesAmy and AmyFeaturing decorative tiles and terra-cotta floors, the Taylor family home had all the classic Spanish-style details that remain beloved throughout Los Angeles today. The Hollywood legend is pictured here in 1949 at age 17, drying off her dog, Amy (named after Taylor’s character in the film Little Women, which hit theaters in March of that year).Photo: Bettmann/Contributor/Getty ImagesFirst engagementThe future Oscar winner is seen here with her mother reading sheet music at their piano in 1949. At the time, Taylor was engaged to William Pawley Jr., the son of a US ambassador. “I want our hearts to belong to each other throughout eternity,” the teenage actor wrote in a letter to Pawley. It wasn’t in the cards, however; the engagement ended just a few months later.Photo: Archive Photos/Getty ImagesArt aficionadoPhotographed in her childhood home, the movie star twirls in a velvet dress before an ornately framed painting. Walking in her father’s footsteps, Taylor continued to collect art throughout her life. The very same painting can be seen in photos of Taylor’s final residence, six decades after this 1950 snapshot was taken.“Most of her exposure to the acquisition of art came from her father,” artist Hap Tivey, Taylor’s former son-in-law who helped the star catalogue her art collection in the early 1990s, tells AD via email. “Her interest in late 19th-century painting focused on Impressionists, and her father found her excellent examples that she purchased. He provided one old master, Frans Hals, which she kept with the collection of modern pieces.… Beyond the most expensive and historical pieces, she was also fond of prints that informed the Art Deco movement.”Photo: Bettmann/Contributor/Getty ImagesFirst marriageEager for independence from her sheltered upbringing, Taylor married hotel heir Conrad “Nicky” Hilton Jr. in May 1950 at the age of 18. However, Hilton was “abusive, physically and mentally,” the actor wrote in her 1988 book Elizabeth Takes Off. “The honeymoon and the relationship were both over by the time we returned. I couldn’t bear to reveal that my marriage was a failure, and I kept quiet for months. Around Christmas, I could stand it no longer and moved out of our house.” The residence in question, pictured here, was a Pacific Palisades rental where the pair stayed after a stint at the Bel Air Hotel.Photo: Ed Jackson/NY Daily News Archive via Getty Images…and first divorceThe young couple officially divorced in January 1951 and Taylor moved into New York’s Plaza Hotel, which was owned by Hilton’s father at the time. The exes met in her suite on October 15, 1951, to wrap up some loose ends—including a property settlement, per the New York Daily News, which published this snapshot. The star speaks fondly of her time at the iconic hotel in The Lost Tapes, describing it as “the first kind of free, independent time I’d ever had in my life.”Photo: Ed Jackson/NY Daily News Archive via Getty ImagesLife at The PlazaThe couple discusses the divorce settlement and meets with the press in Taylor’s Plaza suite here. “I was a divorcée, and I was 19. Roddy [McDowall] was there with me, and Monty [Clift]. Just having fun with my chums, doing all kinds of crazy things,” Taylor said of her time living at the famed hotel. “If I wanted to go ice skating at nine at night, we would. Or we’d just have hot dogs all day long. Completely irresponsible sort of behavior. I didn’t have to keep proper hours. I didn’t have to do anything properly. And I had a ball.”Photo: Bettmann/Getty ImagesMrs. WildingIn 1952, Taylor married English actor Michael Wilding and moved into his London apartment, where they are pictured here playing piano. The starlet looked to Wilding, who was two decades her senior, as a source of stability and comfort following her volatile first marriage, she explains in The Lost Tapes.Bettmann/Getty ImagesLondon livingThe newlyweds spin records with a pet pup in their London dwelling in this 1952 snapshot. “Our marriage began with great mutual affection and enormous high hopes,” Taylor wrote. “For a long time the marriage was a very happy one, and best of all, I achieved my dream of becoming a mother.”Photo: Watford/Mirrorpix/Mirrorpix via Getty ImagesBaby makes threeThe couple welcomed their first child, Michael Jr., in 1953. The family of three posed for the press outside their London apartment that September before departing for the airport, according to the original caption of this photo.Photo: WATFORD/Mirrorpix/Mirrorpix via Getty ImagesBack in the USATaylor and Wilding bought a house in Beverly Hills in 1953. “We will have the outside painted yellow, with white shutters, the living room will be in gray with periwinkle blue—my favorite color,” Taylor allegedly said upon buying the home. Pictured in September of that year, the 21-year-old actor reclines on her sofa with her firstborn.Photo: Bettmann/Contributor/Getty ImagesHappy havenBaby Michael’s sweetly decorated nursery, shown here in 1953, had a butter yellow, baby blue, and pink color scheme. Taylor described the storybook Beverly Hills dwelling in her 1965 tome, An Informal Memoir. “One whole wall was built of bark with fern and orchids growing up the bark,” she wrote. “You really couldn’t distinguish between the outside and inside. And all the colors I loved—off-white, white, natural woods, stone, beigey marble. The pool was so beautiful. There were palm trees and rock formations—it looked like a natural pool, with trees growing out of it. It was the most beautiful house I’ve ever seen.”Photo: Courtesy Everett CollectionNew additionThe couple welcomed their second son, Christopher, on February 27, 1955—Taylor’s 23rd birthday. The Cat on a Hot Tin Roof star is pictured showing off the newborn in their home, which evidently featured sparkly drapes. About a year and a half after this photo was taken, Taylor and Wilding announced their separation.Photo: CBS via Getty ImagesAn Upper East Side penthouseOne month after Taylor’s divorce from Wilding was finalized, the Cleopatra star married film producer Mike Todd. The pair tied the knot in Mexico on February 6, 1957, a few weeks before Taylor’s 25th birthday. They are pictured just two weeks later in their penthouse apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.Photo: CBS Photo Archive/Getty ImagesPerson to PersonThat April, Todd and Taylor welcomed CBS’s cameras into their NYC home at 715 Park Avenue for a 1957 Person to Person segment, which showed the duplex filled with art; a Monet painting in a gilded frame hangs behind them in this photo. The artwork was a gift from Todd to Taylor when the latter was stuck in the hospital recovering from a 1956 spinal surgery. “My room really was the typical hospital room—a sort of pale vomit green,” Taylor wrote in her 1964 memoir. “When Mike saw it, he went out and bought me a Renoir, a Pissarro, and a Monet to hang there.”Photo: CBS via Getty ImagesFurry friendsTaylor is pictured here showing off the family’s pet duckling during her Person to Person taping. The film star was a lifelong animal lover. Some of her more unusual pets throughout her life included a chipmunk named Nibbles, a bush baby, and a pair of white doves—a gift from her close friend, Michael Jackson. “I love animals. You can trust them,” she said in a 2004 interview with W Magazine.Photo: CBS via Getty ImagesBicoastal livingTaylor and Todd kept estates on both coasts. In addition to their NYC abode, where they are pictured here, they maintained a 1920s Spanish-style primary residence near Coldwater Canyon in Beverly Hills. That roughly 4,000-square-foot home didn’t offer the high-profile pair much privacy—its front steps began right at the curb, winding around a turret, and up to an arched wood front door. Taylor gave birth to the couple’s daughter, Liza, before tragedy cut their marriage short. In 1958, Todd died in a plane crash, ending what was, according to the actor, one of the happiest periods in her life.Photo: Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty ImagesBecoming CleopatraWhile mourning Todd’s death, Taylor married singer and actor Eddie Fisher. The relationship generated tons of scandalous tabloid fodder because Fisher was still married to Taylor’s close friend and America’s sweetheart, Debbie Reynolds, when the romance began. “I was keeping Mike alive by talking about him because Eddie, he was a great friend of Mike’s,” Taylor explained in The Lost Tapes. “That was the only thing we had in common, was Mike.” The marriage, she added, was an “awful mistake,” and they divorced in 1964.Here, she is pictured in 1962 outside of the $3,000-a-month Rome apartment where she lived during the filming of Cleopatra. According to Vogue, “she brought 300 dresses and 120 pairs of shoes with her to her villa, which she had redecorated from top to bottom every morning.”Photo: Bettmann/Contributor/Getty ImagesChalet ArielFamously, Taylor began another scandalous affair—with her costar, Richard Burton—while filming the historical epic. At the time, Taylor was still married to Fisher, and Burton was married to Welsh actress Sybil Christopher. Tabloids heavily reported on the scandal. Taylor and Burton tied the knot in 1964, shortly after her divorce from Fisher was finalized. The couple, whose relationship essentially birthed modern paparazzi culture, is pictured two years later at their Gstaad, Switzerland, property dubbed Chalet Ariel. The Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? star retained ownership of the dwelling for the rest of her life.Photo: James Andanson/Sygma via Getty ImagesMarriage with a side of dramaThe couple—shown in 1967 at their Swiss vacation home, with a trio of petite pooches in tow—were known for their passionate yet turbulent marriage. “We enjoy fighting,” Taylor reportedly said. “Having an out-and-out, outrageous, ridiculous fight is one of the greatest exercises in marital togetherness.”Photo: David Cairns/Getty ImagesAboard the KalizmaThe frequent costars also spent a great deal of time on their yacht, Kalizma. They reportedly bought the luxury vessel for $192,000 (roughly $1.8 million adjusted for inflation) in 1967 and invested another $200,000 in refurbishing it to their liking. It was aboard the Kalizma that the Welsh actor gifted Taylor the famous 69.42-carat Cartier diamond now known as the Taylor-Burton diamond.Photo: David Cairns/Express/Getty ImagesOceans of styleThe couple looks out from the deck of the Kalizma in this snapshot. They reportedly outfitted the vessel with Chippendale mirrors, Louis XIV chairs, and English tapestries. Taylor’s suite—from the bedroom to the bathroom—was done up in a hot pink color scheme. Grace Kelly, Orson Welles, and Ringo Starr were among the A-list guests that Taylor and Burton entertained on the yacht.Also on board: the actor’s exquisite art collection. “One of the most amusing parts [of cataloguing Taylor’s art] was learning that this amazing group of historically important paintings lived for years on the walls of the Kalizma,” Tivey tells AD. “It’s hard to imagine a collection of Impressionist and Postimpressionist paintings including Monet, Van Gogh, Picasso, Pissarro and Renoir—and a masterpiece by Frans Hals—hanging anywhere other than a museum. But she loved having them to live with.”Photo: Disney General Entertainment Content via Getty ImagesHome on the farmAfter divorcing Burton (twice—once in 1974 and again in 1976, after a brief second marriage), Taylor married American politician John Warner in December 1976. They are pictured here in the kitchen of their roughly 7,000-square-foot fieldstone-walled manor in Marshall, Virginia. Taylor reportedly kept horses on the sprawling property, which was known as Atoka Farm.Photo: Disney General Entertainment Content via Getty ImagesFriends to the endWarner and Taylor roam the grounds of the 400-acre plot in this photo. The actor helped her husband with his 1978 senate campaign, though his busy government schedule put a strain on the marriage, and they divorced in 1982. “She was my ‘partner’ in laying the foundation for 30 years of public service in the US Senate,” Warner said later. “We were always friends—to the end.”Photo: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images700 Nimes RoadTaylor’s primary residence from 1981 until her 2011 death was at 700 Nimes Road in Bel Air. This 1987 photo shows the Hollywood icon smiling on her sofa in the ranch-style home, which was formerly owned by Nancy Sinatra. Taylor worked with AD100 Hall of Fame designer Waldo Fernandez to decorate the dwelling, which was posthumously featured in the July 2011 issue of Architectural Digest. A trophy room, plush pastel carpets, and abundant flower gardens were among the estate’s highlights.“She had beautiful saltwater fish swimming around their huge tank with a great view of Impressionism,” Tivey tells AD. “Different rooms shared gifts and collectibles that ranged from trinkets to historical antiques. Many of her choices seemed to be suggestions from friends and family whose taste she trusted or surprised her.”Photo: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesCozy home lifeTaylor sits in the living room at her Nimes Road dwelling in this shot from 1987. “Of course when she had to appear at an important event, she would put on the most beautiful dress and the most amazing jewelry and become Elizabeth Taylor, the star,” famed fashion designer Valentino once said. “But at home she liked a cozy life, friends, good food.” During this period, Taylor devoted much of her time to raising awareness and funds for the AIDS crisis. The Hollywood legend died in 2011 at age 79.Katie Schultz is a Brooklyn-based freelance writer who reports on celebrity real estate news and other pop culture-related content for AD. She has previously written for House Digest and the Minnesota Daily. Hailing from small town Minnesota, Katie has a degree in Cinema and Media Studies from the University of ... Read MoreRead MoreNatalie Wood at Home: The Silver Screen Siren’s Domestic Life in 24 PhotosThe Rebel Without a Cause star, who ran a freelance interior decorating business in the ’70s, took design notes from her movie setsJosephine Baker at Home: 22 Photos of the Legendary Showgirl in Her French ChâteauxThe St. Louis–born Jazz Age star (and spy) built a life in France, where she raised 12 children and collected a panoply of exotic petsIngrid Bergman at Home: 20 Photos of the Swedish Superstar’s Family LifeThe three-time Oscar winner liked things neat: “Housework I was very good at. The scrubbing and cleaning of a house or apartment from top to bottom has always satisfied my Scandinavian soul.”Martha Stewart at Home: 29 Photos of the Legendary Homemaker in Her ElementWhether it’s her farm in Connecticut or her seaside Maine lodge, the tastemaker’s home is always a good thingThe Most Beautiful Airbnbs Across the United StatesIncluding tiny homes, desert cabins, and modern treehousesThe Best Doormats for a Warm WelcomeAll-weather options that look good underfoot, tooThe Prettiest Town in Every US StateFrom Stonington, Maine, to Carmel-by-the-Sea, California, these picturesque locales prove that living large isn’t a requirement for living beautifully27 Real Locations That Inspired Famous PaintingsFrom Vincent van Gogh’s Starry Night Over the Rhône to Edvard Munch’s The ScreamThe 10 Most Important Frank Lloyd Wright Buildings Everyone Should KnowStudy these projects to understand why Wright remains the most famous American architect decades after his deathThe 11 Most Beautiful Places in AmericaFor amber waves of grain…and emerald cliffs, an iconic concrete jungle, gobsmacking gorges, and moreThe 9 Most Beautiful Historical Movie Theaters in the USFrom neoclassical to Egyptian-inspired designs, these stunning structures have equally cinematic histories