Keith Girard
Elizabeth Taylor was stunningly shy, except for this one time.
Elizabeth Taylor’s only known nude photo, taken for her then-fiancée Michael Todd, decades before sexting became envogue, has been released by a private collector. The striking black and white photo shows her topless.
Taylor was 24 at the time and considered one of the most beautiful women in the world.
Life-long friend Roddy McDowall, an actor and amateur photographer, convinced her to sit for the photo in 1956.
He promised it would be tasteful, like a work of art, and it has been treated as such ever since.
Elizabeth Taylor In Repose (Click Photo to Enlarge!)
Todd, whom she later married and became her third husband, was killed in plane crash 13 months after they wed.
Afterward, Taylor was said to have given the photo to her assistant and make-up artist Penny Taylor.
Collector Jim Shaudis bought the photo in 1980 and it has not been shown in public since.
But Shaudis decided to make the photo public after Taylor’s death, at 79, from congestive heart failure on March 23.
The photo isn’t the only surprise about her life that has come to light since she passed, according to London’s Daily Mail.
Her father, the art dealer Francis Taylor, and his actress wife Sara regularly attended swingers parties and that Elizabeth was reportedly conceived at one of the parties.
Other reports claim her father was a millionaire Conservative Member of Parliament, Victor Cazalet, who became her godfather.
In any event she became one of the most photographed women in the world. But there is only one photo like this. Or at least only one is known to exist.