The South Bank Show

Elizabeth sat down with Melvyn Bragg, host of the arts program, The South Bank Show, in London, for an interview that aired a week after her latest film, The Mirror Crack’d (1980), opened in the city of her birth. In his introduction to their conversation, Bragg explains his approach to the interview: “What we’ve done is to look at several staging posts across the long span of her career to talk about particular roles which have showed her qualities as an actress within a feudal, almost tsarist mould of Hollywood stardom. We refer to her personal life where it effects these roles, that’s to say twice, in terms of her third husband, Mike Todd, tragically killed at a time when he was reshaping her career, and later, Richard Burton, who worked with her most memorably in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”

The two discuss how her tenacity won her the role of Velvet Brown in National Velvet (1944); A Place in the Sun (1951); Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958); Suddenly, Last Summer (1959); and “the most taxing, the most convoluted, complicated role that I’ve ever played,” Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966). Of her latest role, that of Marina Gregg in The Mirror Crack’d, Elizabeth says: “I play a Hollywood actress who has many facets. It’s like she plays games. She plays roles within roles.” Elizabeth mentions the inside jokes in the film, things like fat jokes and film titles—“we really had a good time with it,” she says.

‍The South Bank Show ran on ITV from 1978 until 2010, and was later revived for Sky Arts (2012-2023). Bragg would go on to write the biography Rich: The Life of Richard Burton, published in 1988.