Elizabeth Taylor had seven husbands, two Oscars, and diamonds that made headlines on their own. But she always said her children were the thing she was proudest of in her entire life. Four children, four different fathers, and four stories almost nobody knows in full. A daughter who lost her father before she could speak, a son whose marriage collapsed into one of the most heartbreaking crises of the AIDS era, an adopted child who spent her early years fighting just to walk.
What those four children actually went through, and who they became, is the story we are telling today. The world they were born into. To understand the lives of these four children, you first have to understand what it actually meant to grow up as a child of Elizabeth Taylor. Taylor was born on February 27th, 1932, in London, to American parents.
Her family moved to Los Angeles at the start of World War II, and within a few years, a young Elizabeth was under contract at MGM. She was not slowly built up by Hollywood. She arrived fully formed, impossibly beautiful, and almost immediately famous. By the time she became a mother for the first time in January of 1953, she was already one of the most recognized women on the planet.
The cameras followed her everywhere. The tabloids wrote about her constantly. And the men in her life, her husbands, her co-stars, her rumored lovers, were almost always front-page news. What this meant practically for her children is that they were never truly private people. From the moment they were born, they were photographed, discussed, and defined by their mother’s fame.
They grew up in houses in Los Angeles, in Switzerland, in England, moving between countries and schools and stepfathers with a frequency that most children would find disorienting. And yet, by every account from people who knew the family, Taylor worked hard to create something that felt like a home. William J.
Mann, a biographer who spent years researching Taylor’s life, spoke to her son Christopher at length. Christopher told him that Taylor was protective of her children in ways that didn’t always make the press. She kept them away from the circus as far as she could manage it. She did not parade them at premieres or use them as props for publicity.
When she was home, she was fully present. She created Easter celebrations with small petting zoos in the garden. She made birthday parties that the grandchildren would still talk about decades later. But no amount of intentional mothering could shield four children from the reality of their circumstances. Their father figures changed.
Their schools changed. The countries they lived in changed. And the grief, the particular grief that runs through all four of their stories, started early. And for one of them, it started before she was old enough to understand what loss even was. The story of Elizabeth Taylor’s children is not a single story. It is four separate each one shaped by a different kind of loss.
And the one that begins with the most violence, with a crash over the New Mexico desert, belongs to a little girl named Liza, Liza Todd. The child who lost her father before she could know him. Elizabeth Frances Todd was born on August 6th, 1957. She was known from childhood simply as Liza. Her father was Mike Todd, the third of Elizabeth Taylor’s seven husbands, and by almost every account, the great love of her life up to that point.
Mike Todd was not a quiet man. He was a large-personality Hollywood producer, the man behind the Oscar-winning film Around the World in 80 Days. He was 25 years older than Taylor, brash and extravagant, and utterly devoted to her. Taylor later described their relationship with a kind of aching warmth, writing that under his care, her sense of herself soared.
He did not ask her to marry him. He told her, and she found that irresistible. They married on February 2nd, 1957, in Acapulco. Taylor was already pregnant with Liza. When Liza was born that August, the family seemed, at last, to have found a kind of stability. Todd was at the height of his career. Taylor was shooting films and collecting jewels and traveling the world alongside a man who genuinely adored her.
Liza was their daughter, their only child together, and by all reports, cherished. She was 7 months old when her father died. On March 22nd, 1958, Mike Todd boarded his private plane, a twin-engine Lockheed Lodestar he had named the Lucky Liz, for a flight from California to New York. Taylor had wanted to go with him.
She had asked him repeatedly, but she was ill with a cold, and Todd overruled her, insisting she stay home and rest. Just hours before takeoff, he was on the phone with friends, describing the plane as perfectly safe, and making jokes. The plane went down near Grants, New Mexico. An engine failure, combined with icy conditions at high altitude and an overloaded aircraft, sent it spinning out of control.
Everyone on board was killed. Mike Todd was 50 years old. Taylor was 26 and a widow with a 7-month-old baby and two other small children from her previous marriage. She later described the moment she was told as one of uncontrollable physical collapse. She could not process it. She screamed. For weeks afterward, she said, acting was the only way she could function, the only time she could leave the grief behind long enough to get through the day.
Liza, of course, was too young to remember any of this. She would grow up knowing her father only through photographs and other people’s memories. She would be raised primarily by her mother, and later by her stepfather Richard Burton, who adopted her in 1964 when he married Taylor. Burton became the father figure she did not have.
And by all accounts, he took that role seriously. But Liza’s relationship with the life her parents led was complicated. She grew up on film sets and in boarding schools in Switzerland. She spent years watching her mother become one of the most discussed women in the world while also trying to construct some kind of private identity for herself.
She was quiet where her mother was volcanic. She was drawn not to performance, but to form, to objects, to shapes, to the specific silence of the sculptor’s studio. She studied at Hornsey College of Art in London and at the Art Institute in Los Angeles. She became an accomplished sculptor, particularly known for her equine work.
Her recreations of famous horses, including a celebrated piece dedicated to the champion racehorse Secretariat, are exhibited across the United States and Europe. She has lived for many years in upstate New York, largely away from the press, in a life that looks nothing like the one she was born into. In 1984, Liza married the painter Hap Tivey.
They had two sons together, Quinn, born in 1986, and Rhys, born in 1990. The marriage lasted nearly two decades before they divorced in 2003. Quinn has become one of the more public-facing members of the Taylor family in recent years. He is a trustee of the Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation, and has spoken movingly about his grandmother’s legacy and the values she passed down through the family.
Liza’s story is one of quiet survival. She lost her father before she could know him, grew up in the eye of a media storm she never asked for, and built a life in art that has nothing to do with fame. She endured. She created. And she has done it almost entirely outside of the spotlight that consumed her mother. But if Liza’s story is one of quiet loss, the story of the two boys who came before her is something else entirely.
And it begins with a marriage that was over almost before it started. Michael Wilding Jr., the eldest son, and the life he built outside Hollywood. Michael Howard Wilding Jr. was born on January 6th, 1953, in Santa Monica, California. He was the first child Elizabeth Taylor ever held. His father was Michael Wilding, a British actor, charming and gentle, whom Taylor married in February 1952 when she was 19 years old.
The marriage was never an equal partnership. Taylor later described what she wanted from it as the calm and quiet of friendship, a retreat from the relentlessness of Hollywood. Wilding, for his part, hoped the marriage would help his own stalling career. He was 16 years older than Taylor, and the age gap became more noticeable as she grew more confident and he grew more uncertain.
By the time Michael Jr. was old enough to walk, his parents were already drifting. When Taylor left for Texas in 1955 to film Giant, the sprawling George Stevens epic that also starred James Dean and Rock Hudson, the marriage was effectively over in everything but paperwork. A gossip magazine ran a story claiming that Wilding had entertained women at the family home in her absence.
Taylor and Wilding announced their separation in July 1956. The divorce was finalized in January 1957. Michael Jr. was 4 years old. He spent his childhood the way all four of Taylor’s children did, moving. Europe, California, Switzerland, England. Schools with different languages and different rules. A father who was present but diminished, and a mother who was present but surrounded by an increasingly famous life.
He was not pushed toward acting. Taylor kept the children away from the press as much as she could manage, and for much of his boyhood, Michael Jr. lived a life that was quieter than the name he carried would suggest. He did eventually find his way into the industry, following his mother’s footsteps almost inevitably.
Both Michael Jr. and his younger brother Christopher made their first screen appearances in their mother’s 1967 film The Taming of the Shrew alongside her then husband Richard Burton. It was a minor thing, cameos, really. But it was the beginning. In the 1980s, Michael Jr. had a modest but real acting career.
He appeared in the long-running American soap opera Guiding Light from 1985 to 1988, playing the character Jackson Fremont. He had a role on Dallas in 1989, and in the same year, he shared screen credits with his mother in the television film Sweet Bird of Youth. These were not the kinds of roles that get you on the cover of a magazine, but they were genuine work, and Michael seemed to take them seriously.
His personal life during this period was complicated. He had married Beth Clutter in 1970, and together they had a daughter, Laela, in 1971. But the marriage did not hold as a traditional unit. He had a second daughter, Naomi, in 1975 with a different partner, Johanna Lykke Don, and the three of them, Michael, [clears throat] Beth, and Johanna, lived together for a time in a commune arrangement.
It was unconventional by any measure, and it was the kind of detail that made the tabloids squint in his direction. Though Michael largely managed to stay out of the headlines during this period. He married his third partner, Brooke Palance, daughter of the Oscar-winning actor Jack Palance, in August 1982. They had a son together, Tarquin Wilding, born in 1989.
Tarquin has gone on to work in film and has been one of the more vocal members of the family in celebrating his grandmother’s legacy. He told Town & Country magazine in 2017 that he thought about how lucky he was to be born into the family he was. Wacky, as he put it, but caring and sensitive in equal measure.
Michael Jr. eventually left acting for sculpture. He maintains a gallery with work that reflects his interest in the natural world, land, wind, water, and the shapes they leave behind. He settled in Santa Fe, New Mexico, a long way from the Hollywood that made his mother’s name, and a long way from the British reserve of his father.
His daughter Naomi spoke to The Today Show in 2021 about the grandmother she remembered. She described Elizabeth Taylor as a woman who felt a real responsibility toward the younger generations of the family, someone who wanted to pass her values down, not just her diamonds. Michael Jr.
‘s story is gentler than some of the ones that follow. He experienced upheaval and instability, the kind that comes with being born into a family in constant motion, but he found his footing. The story of his brother Christopher, 2 years younger and born on Taylor’s own birthday, is the one that carries the most weight and the most heartbreak of all the children’s stories.
Christopher Wilding, the son who married into a crisis. Christopher Edward Wilding was born on February 27th, 1955, the same date as his mother. Elizabeth Taylor turned 23 the day Christopher arrived. He was her third child in under 3 years, and by the time he was born, the cracks in her marriage to Michael Wilding were already visible.
Like his brother, Christopher spent his early years in the care of nannies while Taylor navigated the demands of a film career that was accelerating fast. He was quieter than his brother, less drawn to performance, more suited to the technical and the precise. He found his career not in front of the camera, but behind it, in the sound department, working on major Hollywood productions.
His credits include the films Tombstone, Overboard, and The Shadow. It was steady, skilled work away from the glamour, which seemed to suit him perfectly. He appeared, like Michael Jr., in The Taming of the Shrew as a child, and he made a brief handful of other acting appearances. But the industry never claimed him the way it claimed the Taylor name.
He moved into the technical work and stayed there, eventually settling in Calabasas, California, where he has lived with his second wife, Margaret Carlton, who is a supervising sound editor in her own right. But between that quiet adult life and the boyhood of moving between countries, lies a marriage that became one of the most dramatic stories in a family that was never short of them.
In 1981, Christopher Wilding married Aileen Getty. Aileen Getty was not simply a wealthy young woman. She was the granddaughter of J. Paul Getty, the oil tycoon described in the 1960s as the richest man in the world. She was the daughter of John Paul Getty Jr. and the younger sister of John Paul Getty III, who had famously been kidnapped in Rome in 1973 at the age of 16 and held for 5 months until part of his ear was sent to a newspaper as proof that the kidnappers were serious.
The Getty family carried extraordinary wealth and extraordinary damage in equal measure. Aileen and Christopher eloped to a wedding chapel on the Sunset Strip in August 1981. Their parents knew. Both Elizabeth Taylor and the Getty family were informed. But the ceremony was deliberately small, a private thing between two young people who wanted to belong to each other without the circus.
What followed was 7 years that became increasingly difficult to navigate. They had two sons together, Caleb, born in 1983, and Andrew, born in 1985. After struggling to conceive, the couple had adopted Caleb, and Aileen became pregnant with Andrew shortly after. The family seemed to be finding its shape. Then, in 1985, Aileen received a diagnosis that changed everything.
She had tested positive for HIV. This was 1985. The epidemic was still new enough that very few people understood what the diagnosis meant for a young woman’s future, and the stigma attached to it was nearly total. Aileen later described the period immediately after as one of complete collapse. She confessed to Elizabeth Taylor, her mother-in-law, before she told almost anyone else.
Taylor was traveling to Paris in her role as president of the American Foundation for AIDS Research, and she had brought Aileen along. It was during that trip that Aileen first raised the possibility that she might be infected. Taylor arranged for her to be tested. The results were positive. Aileen later said, with striking honesty, that she initially concealed from Christopher how she had contracted the virus.
She first claimed it had come through a blood transfusion. It was only later that she disclosed it had come through an extramarital affair. That disclosure ended the marriage. Christopher filed for divorce, and by 1987, the marriage was formally over. He gained primary custody of their sons. Aileen’s years after the marriage were extraordinarily difficult.
She struggled with addiction, cocaine and alcohol, and she was hospitalized multiple times. She later said that she had made seven attempts at institutionalization, undergone 12 sessions of electroconvulsive therapy, and experienced seven miscarriages across her life. She described this period as a lifetime of trying to die in order to be loved.
Her children were, for a period, removed from her custody while she sought treatment. She lost them, then fought to get them back. What is remarkable, genuinely remarkable, is what Elizabeth Taylor did during all of this. Most mothers-in-law, when a marriage ends badly under those circumstances, step back. Taylor did not.
She remained close to Aileen. She supported her publicly and privately. Aileen continued to call her mom even after the divorce. In 2014, Aileen accepted the Elizabeth Taylor Leadership Award at an AIDS fundraiser, and members of both the Getty and Wilding families were in the audience together. Taylor’s work as an AIDS activist, co-founding amfAR, the American Foundation for AIDS Research, in 1985, and establishing the Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation in 1991, was directly shaped by what she witnessed in her own daughter-in-law.
The personal and the political became the same thing because the illness had come through her front door first. Christopher, for his part, rebuilt quietly. His sons, Caleb and Andrew, grew up knowing what their mother had been through, and they have spoken carefully and with evident complexity about those years.
Caleb has been photographed alongside his mother at HIV/AIDS fundraisers and galas. Andrew went into filmmaking. Christopher himself eventually found the stability he had been looking for with his second wife, Margaret Carlton. Their son, Lowell, was born in 1992. He has spoken about preserving his grandmother’s archive and carrying her legacy forward, telling the Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation that he was always in awe of the good she managed to accomplish.
Christopher gave one of the more revealing interviews about his mother after her death in 2011. He told The Hollywood Reporter that Taylor used to let the children play with her Golden Globes when they were young, but not her Oscars. The Oscars were protected. After she died, Christopher took possession of her first Oscar, the one she won for Butterfield 8.
He said he keeps it on a bookshelf in his living room, proudly. He added that people sometimes overlooked Taylor’s genuine talent as an actress because of the way she looked, and that she deserved to be remembered for the work. All of this, the marriage to Aileen, the crisis that followed, the divorce, the sons, the rebuilding, happened around the same time that the youngest member of the family was going through something entirely different.
A child who had come into the family with almost nothing and had to fight physically just to stand up straight, Maria Burton, the daughter. Nobody expected and the battle she fought to walk. Maria Burton Carson is the youngest of Elizabeth Taylor’s four children. She was not born into the family. She was found by it.
Or perhaps it is more accurate to say that Taylor found her in the particular way that Taylor did most things in her life, driven by instinct and absolutely certain she was doing the right thing. Maria was born on August 1st, 1961, in Munich, Germany. Her given name was Maria Helene Elizabeth. Her biological mother, Gertrude, struggled with her mental health, and her biological father, Walter, faced serious financial difficulties.
Shortly after Maria’s birth, she was placed for adoption. What made her situation more urgent, what made it, in Taylor’s eyes, impossible to look away from, was that Maria was born with a severe congenital hip condition. Her hip joints had not formed correctly, and without significant medical intervention, she would not walk normally.
Some sources put the number of surgeries she eventually required at over 20. Taylor had begun the adoption process while she was still married to her fourth husband, the singer Eddie Fisher. Fisher’s role in Taylor’s life is a story in itself. He had been the best friend of Mike Todd, the husband Taylor lost in the plane crash, and Taylor later acknowledged that grief had driven her into Fisher’s arms in a way that was not entirely rational.
They married in May 1959, and while the marriage produced no biological children, Taylor was already in the process of bringing Maria into the family. When Taylor and Fisher divorced in March 1964, the adoption was still legally incomplete. Then, Richard Burton entered the picture, and everything changed. Taylor had fallen in love with Burton on the set of Cleopatra in 1962, a love affair so explosive and so public that the Vatican issued a statement condemning them for what it called erotic vagrancy, and members of the United States
Congress raised questions about whether the two should be allowed back into the country. None of that stopped them. They married in March 1964, 10 days after Taylor’s divorce from Fisher was finalized, in a private ceremony in Montreal. Burton adopted both Liza Todd and Maria Burton as part of that new family, and it was Burton who helped Taylor complete the process that brought Maria home to them.
Maria was approximately 3 years old when the adoption was formalized. Taylor’s response to learning about Maria’s medical condition before the adoption was completed has been widely quoted. When she was told about the severity of the hip problem, she said that she wanted the child all the more because of it, that she felt she could do something to help.
It is the kind of statement that could sound sentimental, but the years that followed backed it up. Taylor and Burton arranged for Maria to receive the best medical care available, following her through surgery after surgery, staying beside her through recoveries that would have broken many adults. Taylor was present.
She was hands-on. She made sure that Maria’s childhood, despite the hospitals and the procedures, had as much warmth and stability in it as she could provide. Maria grew up as part of a family that was in constant motion between their home in California, a house in Switzerland, and wherever Burton and Taylor happened to be filming.
Despite the glamour that surrounded the family, she was kept out of the press as much as possible. She attended private schools. She was not pushed toward acting or modeling, though she did try both briefly as a young woman. In her teens and 20s, Maria explored fashion design and modeling, and she later started a talent agency with her first husband, Steve Carson, whom she married in the early 1980s.
Together, they had a daughter, Elizabeth Carson, known as Eliza, born in 1982. Eliza has spoken warmly about her grandmother in interviews, describing summers spent at Taylor’s home and the impression that Taylor left on her in the years before her death. The marriage to Steve Carson lasted into the late 1990s, but ended before 2000.
By the early 2000s, Maria had married again to a man named Tom McKeown, with whom she had a son, Richard, born around 2001. The second marriage also ended in difficulty. In 2004, Maria filed a legal restraining order against McKeown and left with her young son to stay at Taylor’s home in Bel Air. Taylor’s biographer, William J.
Mann, described Taylor’s response as characteristic. She became the protective presence for her daughter, took Maria’s side, and bore the criticism that came with it, including public statements from Carson that Taylor had used her fame to interfere in the marriage. Taylor did not publicly defend herself. She simply stood by her daughter.
Maria has lived in Idaho for many years. She is, by every account, a private person, a clothing designer, a philanthropist, someone who supports the Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation, but does not seek attention for it. Her life is as far from the red carpet as a life can get while still being connected to one of Hollywood’s most mythologized families.
She is also the child whose early story is, in some ways, the most quietly remarkable. She arrived in the world with a broken body, no family, and no certainty about her future. She was found by a woman who was not looking for another child, but took her in anyway. She endured more than 20 operations before she was fully grown, and she built a life that is hers, private, purposeful, and on her own terms.
But the weight of what it means to be Elizabeth Taylor’s child does not end with any of these four people individually. It lives in what they carry forward and in what they had to carry alone in the years when Taylor was gone and the world kept asking what her legacy meant. What they carried, the weight of being Elizabeth Taylor’s children.
There is a particular kind of pressure that comes with being the child of someone iconic. It is not simply about fame or wealth or the expectation that you will follow in a famous parent’s footsteps. It is about identity, about the question of who you are when the world already has a very strong idea of what you should be.
All four of Taylor’s children faced this in different ways and all four of them found answers to it that their mother, for all her love, could not provide for them. They had to find those answers themselves. For Michael Jr., the answer was eventually sculpture. He had spent years inside the industry, years on soaps, years on sets, and at some point he stepped back from it and towards something quieter, the language of form rather than performance.
He has described his work in terms that are almost meditative, the shapes that emerge when earth and wind and water have their way with the environment over time. It is the opposite of the world he was born into. For Christopher, the answer was the sound department, the technical, precise work of constructing the audio landscape of a film rather than being seen in it.
He worked on major Hollywood productions for decades without being profiled in a single entertainment magazine. He raised his sons. He rebuilt after the crisis of his first marriage. He kept moving. For Liza, the answer was horses and bronze and upstate New York. She has said in interviews that she loved growing up on her mother’s film sets, but she never wanted to be on them as a principal subject.
She found the actor’s life, the exposure, the judgment, the constant surveillance incompatible with the kind of person she was. Sculpture gave her a form of expression that was hers alone, not inherited, not comparative. For Maria, the answer was simply to disappear from the public narrative entirely, to live in Idaho and raise her children and do her work without needing the world to see it.
What all four of them share is a relationship with their mother that was, by every available account, genuine and close. This is not always the case with famous parents. There are plenty of children of legends who have spent decades in therapy unpacking the damage of being seen as accessories to a celebrity. Taylor’s children, by contrast, speak about her with a warmth that is consistent and specific.
They remember particular moments. They remember her laughter. They remember the way she made holidays feel like events, not obligations. Michael Jr.’s daughter Naomi said her grandmother felt a deep responsibility toward the younger generations, not just affection, but an active commitment to passing something real down.
Christopher kept her Oscar on his bookshelf and called it something he was thrilled to have. Liza’s son Quinn carries her activism into a new generation working with the Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation. Maria’s daughter Eliza described spending whole summers with her grandmother and being shaped by her belief that standing up for what was right was not optional.
Taylor’s lawyer and long-time co-trustee Barbara Berkowitz has said that in the more than 20 years she worked with Taylor, there was never a holiday without the family present. Taylor was the glue. She insisted on it. She wanted her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren in the same room sharing meals, sharing time.
Given how scattered the family was geographically and temperamentally, that took real effort on her part. Elizabeth Taylor died on March 23rd, 2011 in Los Angeles from congestive heart failure. She was 79 years old. She had been ill for years. Her health had been a recurring crisis throughout her adult life, beginning with a near-fatal bout of pneumonia in 1961 that required a tracheotomy and drew reports from news agencies that she had already died.
She had survived hip surgeries, back surgeries, a brain tumor in 1997, and decades of dependence on medication that had begun with the physical injuries that accumulated during her decades of filmmaking. By the time she died, her body had been through more than most people could imagine, but her mind, by all accounts, stayed sharp and loving to the end.
All four of her children were informed. They had all, at various points in the preceding years, gathered around her. They had said what needed to be said. The family that she had held together across seven marriages, four different fathers, a dozen different countries, an AIDS crisis, divorces, surgeries, and one plane crash over New Mexico was still standing.
The legacy they inherited and the one they built. After Taylor died, the question of her estate and her legacy became very public very quickly. She was widely reported to be worth somewhere in the region of half a billion dollars accumulated over a lifetime of film contracts, jewelry acquisitions, and perfume sales.
She had become the second celebrity in history to launch her own perfume brand after Sophia Loren, and her White Diamonds fragrance alone generated hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. Her estate was distributed primarily among her four children and the foundations she had established. The Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation, which she had created in 1991 to provide direct services to people living with HIV, became one of the primary vehicles through which her descendants continued her work.
What is striking, looking across all four of the children’s lives, is how differently they each chose to carry that forward. Michael Jr.’s three children, Laela, Naomi, and Tarquin, are all involved with the foundation. Tarquin has spoken in interviews about the family’s sense of shared responsibility toward the cause, describing the grandmother they all admired for what he called her boundless generosity.
He is also a filmmaker and a motorcycle enthusiast, someone who inherited her appetite for living fully and translated it into a different key. Christopher’s son Lowell has spoken about creating an archive, a physical, permanent repository of Elizabeth Taylor’s life and work, something that would outlast the generation that knew her personally.
He told the Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation that he wanted to honor not just her fame, but the specific good she did, the fights she picked when it was dangerous to pick them. Liza’s son Quinn is arguably the most publicly active of the grandchildren in AIDS advocacy. He was listed as an executive producer on the HBO documentary Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes, which aired in 2024 and drew on hours of previously unheard audio recordings Taylor had made in the early 1960s, recordings in which she spoke candidly
about her marriages, her fears, her children, and her sense of herself. The documentary gave the public a version of Taylor they had not quite heard before, introspective, funny, uncertain about things that had always appeared certain from the outside. Maria’s daughter Eliza works in social work in Manhattan with the Department of Child Protection.
She has told interviewers that her grandmother always stood up for what was right and that she tries to do the same in her own way. It is a quietly extraordinary thing that the granddaughter of the most photographed woman of the 20th century spends her days protecting vulnerable children in New York, largely unknown and unbothered, carrying something forward that has nothing to do with glamour.
These are the people that Elizabeth Taylor’s children became and the people that her grandchildren are becoming. They are sculptors and sound editors and filmmakers and social workers and activists. They are people who were born into extraordinary circumstances and, for the most part, built ordinary lives without apology.
The four children themselves are aging now. Michael Jr. was born in 1953, making him in his early 70s. Christopher was born in 1955. Liza in 1957. Maria, in 1961. They have outlived the marriages that made them. They have outlived the tabloid scandals and the gossip columns and the magazine covers. Some of them have outlived their own hardest years.
And they all carry, in different ways, the mark of what it was to be raised by someone who was, whatever else she was, fiercely committed to her children. Taylor had her failures. She was not always present. She was sometimes overwhelmed by her own life. But she kept showing up. She kept the family together. She kept her door open.
When you look at the photograph from 2007 again, Taylor at the center, her four children around her, it does not look quite the same as it did at the beginning of this video. You can see now what each of those faces contains. You know that the eldest son spent years building a life outside the spotlight. That the second son married into a family crisis that eventually helped shape one of the most important medical advocacy campaigns in American history.
That the eldest daughter grew up without a father before she could know him and found her voice not in performance but in bronze and stone. That the youngest daughter fought her way through over 20 surgeries as a small child and eventually disappeared into a quiet life of her own making in Idaho. And you can see, perhaps, what Taylor meant when she said that her children were the thing she was proudest of.
Not the Oscars. Not the diamonds. Not the marriages. Not the million-dollar contracts or the jewels that Burton gave her or the films that made her immortal. The children. Always the children. They did not have easy lives, any of them. They were handed extraordinary advantages and extraordinary complications in the same breath.
And they had to figure out which was which and what to do with both. They are still figuring it out. All four of them still living, still carrying the name in different ways, still connected to the woman who made it famous and to each other, the way that only people who grew up in the same extraordinary household can be connected by something that is almost impossible to explain to anyone who wasn’t there.
Elizabeth Taylor’s story has been told many times. The marriages, the diamonds, the films, the scandals. But the story of what happened to her four children, what they went through, what they found on the other side, and who they became, that is the one worth sitting with. If you enjoyed this video, please like and subscribe to our channel so you never miss out on more fascinating stories.
