Description

In June 1959, 25-year-old Elizabeth Taylor started work on Suddenly Last Summer with Katharine Hepburn & Montgomery Clift. Taylor became a star at 12 after “National Velvet” and boarded the Hollywood merry-go-round. By 1959, she was among Hollywood’s most highly paid & most criticized actress: famous not only for her 20+ films & her beauty but for her four marriages. Within months of third husband Mike Todd’s death in a 1958 plane crash, Taylor married Eddie Fisher and found her self the center of a scandal a place that would become familiar, though never comfortable, in the next 30 years. In April 1990, Taylor was hospitalized for pneumonia, providing fuel for a new round of rumor and scandal.

 

I think that what you've got to do is discover the essential truth of the situation, and have a point of view about it.

Burt Glinn
© Burt Glinn | Magnum Photos

Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Burt Glinn served in the United States Army between 1943 and 1946, before studying literature at Harvard University, where he edited and photographed for the Harvard Crimson college newspaper. From 1949 to 1950, Glinn worked for LIFE magazine before becoming a freelancer. He became an associate member of Magnum in 1951, along with Eve Arnold and Dennis Stock – the first Americans to join the young photo agency – and a full member in 1954.

Glinn made his mark with spectacular color series on the South Seas, Japan, Russia, Mexico and California. His reportages have appeared in Esquire, Geo, Travel and Leisure, Fortune, Life and Paris-Match. He has covered such monumental news events as the Sinai War, the US Marine invasion of Lebanon, and Fidel Castro’s takeover of Cuba.

© Burt Glinn | Magnum Photos

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