She won two Academy Awards. She played Cleopatra in the most expensive movie Hollywood had ever attempted. She starred opposite Richard Burton, Montgomery Clift, and Paul Newman in some of the biggest dramas of postwar American cinema. But when Elizabeth Taylor looked back on more than five decades of acting, the film she kept coming back to wasn’t one of those big adult roles. It was a horse movie she made when she was twelve.
‘National Velvet,’ the 1944 MGM classic that turned Taylor from a working child actor into a real star, always sat at the top of her personal list. She said it plainly, calling it still the most exciting film she had ever made.
Why ‘National Velvet’ Meant So Much to Elizabeth Taylor
It is surprising mostly because of what it isn’t. It isn’t ‘A Place in the Sun,’ the George Stevens drama that first showed she could actually act and not just look good on camera. It isn’t ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,’ the intense Edward Albee adaptation that got her a second Oscar and maybe her best performance ever. It’s a family movie about a girl who wins a horse in a raffle and trains him to run the Grand National.
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But the reasons she loved it weren’t really about acting skill. They were about feeling. She said playing Velvet Brown didn’t feel like acting at all. It’s because the character was so close to who she already was that there was barely a line between the role and her real life. She’d been riding horses since she was three. By the time filming started, she’d already picked the horse for the movie herself, a seven-year-old thoroughbred named King Charles that she knew from her family’s country club.
That bond didn’t stop when the cameras stopped rolling. By most accounts of the production, MGM producer Louis B. Mayer gave her the horse as a gift for her thirteenth birthday, and she took care of him for the rest of his life. That detail probably explains why the film stuck with her more than anything that happened on screen.
‘National Velvet’ and the End of Elizabeth Taylor’s Childhood
Timing mattered too. ‘National Velvet‘ came right at the turning point of her life, just before the MGM studio system took over completely. She said later that her childhood basically ended once she became a star, describing how the studio controlled almost every hour of her day: school in the morning, filming on the lot, dance and singing lessons in the evening, then rehearsing scenes at night.
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‘National Velvet‘ was the film that started that whole machine moving, but she made it before she really understood what she was giving up. There’s a kind of nostalgia that only makes sense looking back, and hers may have come from exactly that, one last bit of an ordinary childhood before fame took over everything.
Critics at the time picked up on something special, too. The New York Times called her strikingly graceful on screen, and one critic at the time admitted he could barely tell if she could act at all, because her presence in the role was so natural and captivating.
‘National Velvet’s’ Legacy More Than 80 Years Later
More than eighty years later, ‘National Velvet‘ still shows up regularly on classic movie channels and streaming services, usually introduced to new audiences as a sweet underdog story.
Most of those younger viewers probably have no idea that the woman at the center of it, who would later become one of the most famous women on the planet, considered this the peak of everything she did afterward.
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