Elizabeth Taylor Attempted Suicide During ‘Awful’ Eddie Fisher Marriage, New Doc Reveals: ‘Fed Up with Living’

The late Oscar winner gets candid about many of her marriages in the documentary ‘Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes’

Not all of Elizabeth Taylor’s marriages were happy ones.

The late Oscar winner, famously married eight times to seven husbands, doesn’t hold back about them in the newly unearthed interviews featured in the documentary Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes (debuting on HBO Aug. 3).

Of her fourth husband, BUtterfield 8 costar Eddie Fisher, Taylor can be heard saying with characteristic candor, “I never loved Eddie,” she says. “I liked him. I felt sorry for him.”

Director Nanette Burstein’s documentary samples 40 hours of conversations between Taylor (who died at age 79 in 2011 from congestive heart failure) and the late journalist Richard Meryman. The tapes span 1964 and 1965, when she was at perhaps the height of her fame alongside Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? costar Richard Burton, whom she wed and divorced twice between 1964 and 1976.

Related: The Biggest Bombshells from Philip Gefter’s New Book About the Making of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Taylor admits she “liked talking” to Fisher (who died at age 82 in 2010), “but he was not” Mike Todd — her third husband, who wooed Taylor, fathered a child with her, produced the Oscar-winning Around the World in 80 Days and died in a plane crash all in just over a year. Because Fisher was a friend of Todd’s, Taylor explains in The Lost Tapes, she got caught up in their shared grief and agreed to marry him. 

The problem, of course, was Fisher’s buzzy wedded bliss with Debbie Reynolds. Burstein’s film includes footage of Taylor and Fisher signing marriage certificates — only three hours after his and Reynolds’ divorce was finalized — in 1959. A national scandal ensued.

It’s five years later that Taylor calls her marriage to Fisher “one big friggin’ awful mistake” in her interviews with Meryman. “Eddie made sure that I felt lonely,” she recalls, saying it felt like being locked up. “We never went out.”

Related: Carrie Fisher Remembers Elizabeth Taylor – the Family Drama, the Love

Taylor was so depressed, she adds, that she took sleeping pills “deliberately, calmly and in front of Eddie” in a suicide attempt. “I’d rather be dead than face divorce,” she can be heard saying. “I was fed up with living.” 

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She apparently came to see her suicide attempt as “self-indulgent,” saying that the consequences for her children made it “horrific.” Taylor shared sons Michael Howard and Christopher Edward with second husband Michael Wilding, daughter Liza Frances with Todd, and daughter Maria McKeown, who she adopted with Burton.

Following its Cannes Film Festival premiere, Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes will premiere on HBO Aug. 3.

If you or someone you know is considering suicide, please contact the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline by dialing 988, text "STRENGTH" to the Crisis Text Line at 741741 or go to 988lifeline.org.

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