The Businesswoman

Among her many accomplishments, Elizabeth Taylor, the businesswoman, has often been overlooked and overshadowed. 

“She’s an incredible businessperson,” marvelled her friend and business partner, Kathy Ireland, in 2006. “I have watched her go through every detail of her business contracts, and I learn from her every day.”

At the heart of her impressive business acumen was an inherent understanding of her own value and worth. “Elizabeth Taylor is my commodity,” she said. “I was always able to sell Elizabeth Taylor terribly well.” But it was something she was fiercely protective of. “She could make fun of herself,” her dear friend and assistant Tim Mendelson told her authorized biographer, Kate Andersen Brower. “But the commodity of Elizabeth Taylor she fought tooth and nail for.”

That was rarely more evident than when she shrewdly negotiated her record-breaking Cleopatra contract. “I was always good at negotiating,” Elizabeth admitted in 1994. She became the highest-paid actor, male or female, when she received one million dollars plus 10% of the absolute box office gross (along with other perks) to play the fabled Queen of the Nile, helping to usher in an era of star power where the star called the shots, not the studio. Forever free from the shackles of the studio system, Elizabeth could ensure a paycheck commensurate with her value as an actress and celebrity.

Elizabeth developed an inherent understanding of her value early in her career, while still a child star at MGM. After she reproached studio head Louis B. Mayer for disrespecting her mother, she was asked to return to his office to apologize. She refused. When she wasn’t fired, she realized that she “must have some kind of intrinsic, monetary value” to Mayer and the studio. It was a lesson she never forgot.

She may have been the highest-paid movie star of her day, but Elizabeth’s fragrance empire—at the centre of which was White Diamonds, the top-selling celebrity fragrance of all time—would earn her far more than her prolific and highly lucrative film career ever did. She also took her love affair with jewelry to the next level when she teamed up with Avon for the incredibly successful Elizabeth Taylor Fashion Jewelry Collection.

Learn more about Elizabeth Taylor, the businesswoman. Explore her iconic fragrance empire and fashion jewelry collection.