Mavis on 4

Writer and broadcaster Mavis Nicholson sat down with Elizabeth for her daytime interview show, Mavis on 4, which aired three days a week on the UK’s Channel 4. The interview, which was to promote Elizabeth’s new book, Elizabeth Takes Off, took place at London’s Dorchester Hotel, Elizabeth’s home away from home in the city of her birth. The reason she wrote the book, she says, is because “so many people came up to me and said, ‘Oh god, how did you do it? I’ve been trying for years.’ So I thought, well, I’ve tried fat farms, I’ve tried fad diets, it’s never worked, so I’ll write down how I did it, and I hope that it will help a few people out there.”

The two discuss the circumstances that led to Elizabeth’s weight gain—“I think, perhaps, in a way, in my subconscious, I was really seeking obscurity,” she explains—as well as her alcohol and pill addiction, which isn’t the focus of the book. “This book is about diet, and weight gain, and weight control,” she says. “The other is a very serious topic and maybe one day I’ll write about that. It’s too serious to slough over and I’m not trying to in this book.” Elizabeth says she doesn’t feel a strain to maintain her weight and admits that she’s currently dieting to lose the ten pounds she gained for her most recent film role (Young Toscanini).

Nicholson, who was born in Wales, asks why, aside from its association with Richard Burton, she loves Wales so much. Elizabeth says that “I know Pontrhydyfen the best, of course, mainly because of Richard’s family, and I love the way it’s sort of nestled in the mountains, and the people. The people are so wonderful.” Nicholson wonders whether they could treat her as “Elizabeth [the person], rather than Elizabeth Taylor the movie star.” “Oh, they do,” she says. “When I come down there they sing ‘Welcome home to the valleys’ to me and it makes me just weep. I feel—they have made me feel—Welsh.” She says that she plans to be buried in Wales in one of two plots that Richard had purchased in Pontrhydyfen a quarter of a century earlier. Elizabeth says that “since he’s buried in Switzerland, I thought a part of him could be buried there, and that part of him, that’s in me, can still be buried in Wales.” (After her death, in 2011, Elizabeth was interred in Forest Lawn Memorial Park, in Glendale, California.)

But Elizabeth still had plenty of living to do. “Now I find life so exciting,” she said earlier in the conversation. “It’s [...] so adventurous. There’s so many things to do. There’s so many things to learn, and I’m doing that now. If I want to go some place, I go. If there’s something I want to study, I’ll study it now. I have the time. I’m not under any obligation to anyone but myself. ‘Unto thine own self be true.’ That’s all I have to do.”