One of the funniest things about Hollywood is when an actor hates a movie, and it ends up winning them an award. For Elizabeth Taylor, that irony was hard to swallow. The film that finally got her a Best Actress Oscar was one she called “a piece of s—.” She never wanted to make it. It was just a contract job she did with a “pistol to my head,” and she talked badly about it for the rest of her life.
The movie was ‘BUtterfield 8‘, a 1960 MGM drama based on a John O’Hara novel. By the time she was forced into it, Taylor had already lost three Oscar races for ‘Raintree County‘, ‘Cat on a Hot Tin Roof‘, and ‘Suddenly, Last Summer‘. Her career was stuck. She had been offered a record $1 million to star in ‘Cleopatra‘ for 20th Century Fox, but there was a big problem. She still owed MGM one more movie. To get out of her contract and go to Rome to play the Egyptian queen, she had to finish this last film for the studio that made her famous. That film was ‘BUtterfield 8′.
Tension on Set Fueled Elizabeth Taylor’s Performance
Taylor hated everything about it. She did not like the story and thought her character, Gloria Wandrous, was just “a glorified prostitute.” The plot was about a model who sleeps around and has an affair with a married man. She thought it was beneath her. Taylor reportedly did not like the dialogue and refused to talk to the director the whole time they were shooting. She was angry and resentful, and the set was famously tense.
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But that anger might have helped her performance. “Out of the anger, it gave me an incentive,” she later said in audio from the documentary ‘Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes‘. You can see that defiance on screen. It gives the character a raw, frustrated energy, but still, the win felt empty. Taylor herself believed the Oscar she won on April 17, 1961, was not for her work in ‘BUtterfield 8‘. She thought it was for something else entirely, the dramatic story happening in her real life: her fight to survive.
Elizabeth Taylor’s Near-Death Experience and Oscar Sympathy Win
Months before the ceremony, Taylor got very sick with pneumonia. The news was bad, and she had to have an emergency tracheotomy. People thought she might die, and some papers even reported she was dead. Her appearance at the 1961 Oscars was her first time out in public since she got ill. She looked frail, and her scar was still visible. It was a Hollywood story as powerful as any movie.
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The Academy seemed to give in to public sympathy. “There must have been some kind of sympathy thing because the film is so embarrassing,” she said angrily. She famously dismissed the win by saying, “I only won it because I almost died.” In her speech, she tried to say thank you, but she truly believed the award was a nice but undeserved gift.
Her hatred for ‘BUtterfield 8‘ became legendary. At an early screening, she was so frustrated with what she saw that she took out a lipstick and wrote “Piece of s—” on the wall of the screening room. It was a blunt review from a woman who knew good work. A few years later, she would finally get a role she could be proud of.
‘Virginia Woolf’ Gave Elizabeth Taylor the Oscar She Truly Earned
Taylor won her second Oscar in 1966 for ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?‘ That was a different story. As the bitter, sharp-tongued Martha, she gave what many call her best performance. She did not resent that movie. She was proud of it and the risks she took. ‘Virginia Woolf‘ was the Oscar she actually earned. It proved her talent was not just a sympathy vote.
The irony is still there. The movie she saw as a humiliating chore, a “piece of s—” she was forced to make, became the one that broke her losing streak and got her first Academy Award. The statue from ‘BUtterfield 8‘ looked like any other, but to Elizabeth Taylor, it was always different. It was not a symbol of artistic success, but a reminder of a contract she hated and an illness that almost killed her. It was an Oscar she would always see as a bullet dodged, both in her career and in her life.
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