She also insists that her acting is faulty (“It’s not technique—it’s instinct”) and admits that she needs to be dominated by the men with whom she is romantically involved. This is why, we are told, she had such a failed match with actor Michael Wilding, and such a happy marriage with the fiery showman Mike Todd. (“I always thought something was going to happen,” she says. “It was too good to be true.” Todd died in a 1958 plane crash, a year after they were married.) In one of the film’s many vintage interview segments, she and Burton each claim to be dominated by the other.
Documentarian Nanette Burstein has a wealth of photographic material at her disposal, much of it breathtakingly lovely, and she uses it gracefully and in the noble cause of forward motion. We very willingly follow Taylor from her child roles in such films as “Jane Eyre,” through some of the studio-imposed projects that she dismisses with a vulgarity, to the highlights of her career as an actress—“Giant,” for instance, and “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” (for which she should have won an Oscar) and “Butterfield 8” (for which she did win an Oscar) and on through the likes of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf,” in which she played the dreadful Martha at the unripe age of 32. And won another Oscar.