# Elizabeth Taylor: The Story Behind Cleopatra
No single film better captures both the glory and the madness of old Hollywood than Cleopatra. It nearly bankrupted 20th Century Fox, changed the economics of movie stardom forever, and gave the world the most famous romance of the twentieth century. And at the center of it all stood Elizabeth Taylor — twenty-nine years old, already a legend, and about to become something Hollywood had never seen before: a million-dollar actress. This is the story of how a joke of a salary demand became the role that defined her.
The $1 Million Bluff That Backfired
The idea began with producer Walter Wanger, who had been dreaming of a Cleopatra film since the late 1950s. In 1958, his production company partnered with 20th Century Fox, and studio head Spyros Skouras saw the project as the studio’s answer to the sword-and-sandal epics then filling theaters. They needed a star big enough to justify a spectacle — and there was only one name on the list.
Elizabeth Taylor did not want to do it. She was exhausted, famously ill, and at the end of a turbulent decade that had made her the most photographed woman on earth. So when Wanger pressed her, she named a price she was certain would end the conversation: one million dollars in salary, plus ten percent of the film’s gross. No actor in history — man or woman — had ever been paid a million dollars for a single picture. It was, by her own calculation, an impossible demand.
Fox said yes.
Just like that, Taylor became the first performer ever to sign a million-dollar contract for one film — and the industry’s pay scale cracked open. Her base salary was only the beginning. Because the production would drag on for years, her contract’s overtime provisions kept the meter running; her total earnings from Cleopatra are estimated at around $7 million. Every leading actor in Hollywood, male or female, owes a quiet debt to that moment: Elizabeth Taylor didn’t just negotiate a salary, she redrew the map of what a star was worth.
London: Ten Minutes of Film for $7 Million
What Fox had agreed to was a film budgeted, at first, at roughly $2 million — Wanger eventually talked that up to $5 million — to be directed by Rouben Mamoulian, shot at Pinewood Studios outside London, with Stephen Boyd cast as Mark Antony. It sounded straightforward. It was anything but.
The English weather was miserable. The enormous sets — built from scratch at staggering expense — deteriorated in the damp. Taylor herself fell ill with what doctors at first misdiagnosed; only later was an abscessed tooth found to be the culprit. Then came the real crisis. In the winter of 1960–61, Taylor developed double pneumonia so severe that by March 1961 she was rushed into emergency surgery: a tracheotomy that saved her life. Newspapers around the world printed premature obituaries. (That same illness, and the public sympathy it generated, would follow her to the Academy Awards a month later, where she won her first Oscar for BUtterfield 8.)
Production was suspended. Mamoulian, struggling with an unfinished script that had already passed through the hands of Nigel Balchin, Dale Wasserman, Lawrence Durrell, and Nunnally Johnson without ever becoming filmable, resigned. When the dust settled, Fox had spent $7 million — and had roughly ten minutes of usable footage to show for it. It was, by any measure, one of the most expensive false starts in cinema history.
Rome: The Director Who Wrote the Movie at Night
Taylor had one condition for returning: she would only work with Joseph L. Mankiewicz, the brilliant writer-director who had guided her through Suddenly, Last Summer in 1959. Mankiewicz didn’t want the job — historical epics were not his world — but Fox, having sunk a fortune into Taylor and the project, made him an offer he couldn’t refuse: a salary reported at over $1.2 million, plus the studio’s outright purchase of his production company. The entire production was scrapped and restarted from zero. The company moved to Cinecittà Studios in Rome. Stephen Boyd was out; Richard Burton — then the most electrifying stage actor in the English-speaking world — was brought in as Mark Antony.
What followed is the stuff of Hollywood legend. Mankiewicz was writing the screenplay at night and shooting the new pages during the day, a grueling routine he kept up for months. The scale was staggering: some 26,000 costumes were created, including Taylor’s famous gold dress, which alone cost a reported $6,500. Her entrance into Rome — a sequence that still takes the breath away, with the queen borne aloft on a giant sphinx past thousands of extras — was one of the most elaborate set pieces ever filmed.
Mankiewicz’s original vision was even bigger: he wanted to release the film as two separate three-hour pictures, Caesar and Cleopatra and Antony and Cleopatra. The studio balked, and the film was carved down to its 243-minute release cut — still one of the longest major-studio releases ever made. The director worked himself to exhaustion, reportedly taking injections to keep going; the toll on his health was permanent. At one point during the endless editing, Fox fired Mankiewicz, only to discover that no one else understood the mountains of footage well enough to assemble the film — and quietly rehired him.
Liz and Dick: The Scandal That Stopped the World
Somewhere in the middle of all this chaos, in January 1962, Elizabeth Taylor met her Mark Antony for the first time on the Rome set — and the twentieth century’s great love story began. Taylor was still married to singer Eddie Fisher; Burton was married to Sybil Williams. When paparazzi photographed the two kissing aboard a yacht off the Italian coast at Porto Santo Stefano, the images exploded around the globe.
The condemnation was thunderous. The Vatican’s newspaper weighed in with withering moral censure — one of the most famous phrases attached to the scandal was the charge of “erotic vagrancy” leveled at Taylor. American politicians denounced her; fan magazines feasted. Taylor and Burton, by all accounts, were genuinely, helplessly in love, and they made no secret of it. The scandal made Cleopatra — already the most expensive movie ever made — into the most talked-about movie ever made, long before a single ticket was sold.
Both marriages ended. On March 15, 1964, in Montreal, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton were married — the first of their two weddings to each other. They would go on to make eleven films together, but none of it would have happened without a troubled Roman epic and a casting change.
It is worth remembering the rest of the cast, too often overshadowed by the off-screen drama. Rex Harrison brought a wry, world-weary authority to Julius Caesar — a performance that earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor. Taylor’s lifelong friend Roddy McDowall, her co-star since their childhood days in Lassie Come Home, played the scheming young Octavian, while Martin Landau appeared as Rufio, Antony’s loyal general. They were superb professionals holding a colossal production together while the two stars set the world on fire.
The $44 Million Reckoning
When Cleopatra finally premiered on June 12, 1963, at the Rivoli Theatre in New York, it arrived trailing years of headlines about its cost, its delays, and its stars’ love affair. The final tally was staggering: an estimated $44 million in production and marketing costs — roughly equivalent to $400 million or more in today’s money — making it by far the most expensive film ever made up to that point.
And here is the twist that still surprises people: Cleopatra was the highest-grossing film of 1963. It earned on the order of $57.8 million at the box office and was nominated for nine Academy Awards, winning four — for art direction, cinematography, costume design, and visual effects. But the math was merciless. Against its astronomical costs, the film lost money, and 20th Century Fox — which had bet the studio on it — spent years in the red. Studio chief Spyros Skouras was eventually pushed aside by Darryl F. Zanuck. The era of the bloated, studio-bankrupting roadshow epic was effectively over; Cleopatra is often cited as the film that killed it.
What Cleopatra Made Her
Critics were divided on the film itself, but on one point history is unanimous: Cleopatra made Elizabeth Taylor the most famous woman in the world, and permanently. She emerged from the wreckage of the production as Hollywood’s highest-paid star, a tabloid immortal, and — crucially — an actress whose box-office power no longer depended on anyone’s approval. The “Liz and Dick” phenomenon she and Burton embodied would sell out theaters for the rest of the decade, from The V.I.P.s (1963) to Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), the film that finally silenced every critic who had ever dismissed her as merely beautiful.
There is a final irony worth savoring. Taylor had tried to price herself out of Cleopatra with a demand she thought no studio would meet. Instead, the demand was met, the film was made, and the salary she named as a joke became the foundation of modern star compensation. She had asked for a million dollars to make the movie go away. Instead, the movie — and the million dollars — made Elizabeth Taylor forever.