Inside Elizabeth Taylor’s Many Homes, From London to Beverly Hills

1932-39: Childhood home in Hampstead, London

Elizabeth Taylor was born in 1932, in Hampstead, in the northern part of London. Her father was an art dealer and her mother a stage actor. Both of her parents were Americans and as the United Kingdom at that time provided for automatic citizenship at birth, she was born a dual citizen. She lived in this typically English brick house until 1939 when her family returned to the United States as Europe was descending into World War II. 

1939-50: Family homes in California 

After almost two years living in a bungalow in Pacific Palisades, the Taylor family moved into a house in Beverly Hills in 1941. Biographer Alexander Walker described it as, “A low building in the Spanish style, with pink stucco walls and red roof tiles, it had a huge round-arched window facing the road and a dusty front ‘yard’ with an olive tree in it.” Taylor would live there for almost a decade, until she married Conrad “Nicky” Hilton, Jr., the Hilton Hotels heir in 1950. 

It was during this period that her acting career began. After a small role in There’s One Born Every Moment (1942), she was next cast, at age ten, in Lassie Come Home (1943), before appearing in films such as National Velvet (1944), her first starring role, and Little Women (1949).

1949: Florida home of her fiancé

A year before her first marriage, Taylor was engaged to William D. Pawley Jr., son of the diplomat William Pawley. The couple poses here in the Miami Beach house owned by his father. She was then 17 years old and their engagement was short-lived. Taylor then returned to California and married the Hilton heir.

The 1950s: Dream home in Los Angeles

After a short stay at the Hotel Bel-Air with Conrad Hilton, Taylor separated from him and then split her time between her own apartment in Los Angeles and the London residence of the English actor Michael Wilding (her second husband, from 1952 to 1957). They then moved in together into a beautiful house in Beverly Hills, not far from her parents. She was living there when she gave birth to her first child, Michael Howard, born in 1953. In the 1950s she reached new heights of success, with acclaimed performances in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Suddenly Last Summer, and other films.

In her autobiography, An Informal Memoir, she describes the interior: “One whole wall was built of bark with fern and orchids growing up the bark, and the bar was made of stone,” she recalled. “You really couldn’t distinguish between the outside and inside. And all the colors I loved—off-white, white, natural woods, stone, beigy marble. The pool was so beautiful. There were palm trees and rock formations—it looked like a natural pool, with trees growing out of it. It was the most beautiful house I’ve ever seen.”

The end of the 1950s: A splendid villa in Beverly Hills 

After her separation from Michael Wilding in 1957, Taylor married American producer Mike Todd, who died in a plane crash the following year. During their short marriage, they lived in a white stucco Beverly Hills mansion in a Mediterranean style. After Todd’s death, Taylor moved back to Bel Air. 

The 1960s to ‘80s: Different marriages, different homes

The 1960s saw Taylor’s talent recognized with two Oscars for best actress, for BUtterfield 8 (1960) and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1966). Taylor is seen here in her parents’ home in Bel Air, during an interview with her husband Richard Burton in 1970.

Taylor was married to three different men in the period from the 1960s to the 1980s and lived in a number of different homes. She and Eddie Fisher lived in Gstaad, Switzerland, while she lived in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, with Richard Burton. The couple would later live aboard the yacht Kalizma, which Burton purchased in 1967. She also lived on a farm in Virginia and in a townhouse in Georgetown, in Washington, D.C., during her marriage to John Warner. In 1981 she purchased a California ranch-style home in Bel Air, where the photo above was taken in 1987. 

The 1990s to 2011: A Private Bel Air Retreat

700 Nimes Road in Bel Air was Taylor’s final house. The six-bedroom estate, which was previously the home of Nancy Sinatra, served as Taylor’s primary residence from 1981 until her death in 2011. She worked with friend and interior designer Waldo Fernandez to craft the abode’s opulent interiors, and filled the home with art, including an Andy Warhol portrait of herself on the living room wall. The dwelling featured a trophy room, where Taylor kept the many accolades she accrued over her decades in show business, a lush garden, and a dressing room with “thousands of shoes,” per friend and iconic fashion designer Valentino. 

This story originally appeared on AD France.