Elizabeth Taylor

 

“I've been through it all, baby, I'm mother courage.”

During one of her 8 weddings Elizabeth Taylor was asked by a presiding official to enumerate her previous husbands. "What is this," Taylor replied, "a memory test?"

“I've only slept with men I've been married to. How many women can make that claim?”

One of Taylor's later marriages prompted Oscar Levant to quip: "Always a bride, never a bridesmaid!"

“My mother says I didn't open my eyes for eight days after I was born, but when I did, the first thing I saw was an engagement ring. I was hooked.”

Princess Margaret found Elizabeth Taylor's enormous diamond ring rather offensive. "That's a bit vulgar," she once declared point blank. Taylor, unperturbed, persuaded the princess to try the ring on herself. "There," she then declared, "it's not so vulgar now, is it?"

“Big girls need big diamonds.”

One day on the set of National Velvet (1943), Elizabeth Taylor, then just twelve years old, was required to cry on cue (for a scene in which the jockey played by Mickey Rooney announces that her colicky horse will likely die). Shortly before the first take, Rooney gave his costar some veteran's advice: "Honey, you know in this scene you have to cry," he began. "Yes, Mickey, I know," she replied. "Well," he continued, "you should think that your father is dying, and your mother has to wash clothes for a living, and your little brother is out selling newspapers on the street, and he doesn't have shoes, and he's cold and shivering, and your little dog was run over..." Rooney's harrowing tale had a dramatic effect: instead of shedding tears, however, Taylor broke into a giggling fit and it was some time before shooting could resume.

Taylor, who did the scene in a single take, later recalled that she had ignored everything Rooney had told her. Instead, "all I thought about was the horse being very sick and that I was the little girl who owned him."

“I'm a survivor - a living example of what people can go through and survive.” 

One day shortly after starting an affair with Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton answered the phone at her home. It was Taylor's husband, Eddie Fisher, demanding to know what he was doing there. "What do you think I'm doing?" Burton replied. "I'm f---ing your wife."

“When the sun comes up, I have morals again.”