Inside the Unique, Unexpected Friendship of Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift
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It is said that when Montgomery Clift discovered who his love interest in A Place in the Sun would be, he exclaimed, “Who the hell is Elizabeth Taylor?” The comment was more likely a putdown of the notion of a “Hollywood star” than a real question. It is unlikely he didn’t know who the lovely 17-year-old actress was. Everybody in the country, if not the world, did. Still, in spite of her glamour and fame, a personality like Elizabeth represented everything that he despised about Hollywood. In Monty’s view, she was a commodity rather than a serious actress.
The director George Stevens knew what she represented. Her image was the reason he chose her for the role. Elizabeth Taylor was “the girl on a candy box cover”—that’s how the director envisioned the character Angela Vickers. Tempting. Sweet. But with an allure that was capable of corrupting. The kind of woman men dream about but who always seems to remain slightly out of reach. The director even briefly considered naming the movie The Prize, because a girl like Elizabeth, in a young man’s mind, would be just that, the grandest reward of all. He felt that if Elizabeth played Angela opposite Monty’s character, George Eastman, it would make sense that the thought of winning such a girl would be “staggering as far as his equilibrium is concerned.”
Elizabeth was more visible than the publicity-shy Monty. You couldn’t help but come across her photo in any magazine or newspaper. Always, she came across as being poised, beautiful, and somewhat vacuous. She was perfectly posed and perfectly guarded and, it seemed, always camera ready. Monty was the enigmatic one. He equaled Elizabeth in term of beauty, but he also had mystery. Monty would get star billing.
On hearing that she would be starring opposite Montgomery in a George Stevens movie, Elizabeth felt somewhat intimidated. There were a lot of stories about Monty going around show-business circles. The articles she had read about him in movie magazines stated that he was a “misfit,” even a freak. Mixed in with his good looks, this made him seem exotic. But more than anything, he was considered a serious actor from the New York stage. Suddenly being a Hollywood film star seemed small in comparison.
After she was cast in the film, Stevens invited Elizabeth to his office to meet Monty for the first time. Elizabeth had been terrified to meet Stevens—she was in awe of the intellectual director. And she was just as intimidated about meeting Monty. “I was so scared,” she said. “I thought, Oh God, here’s this accomplished New York stage actor, and I’m just a Hollywood nothing.”
She had already heard that Monty intended to spend the night in an actual state prison to see what it felt like to be on death row. Elizabeth had never considered the importance of researching a character. She acted on a completely instinctive level.
In Stevens’s office, when Elizabeth first saw Monty, she was dumbstruck. “He was the most gorgeous thing I’d ever seen,” she said. “I remember my heart stopped when I looked into those green eyes, and that smile, that smile, that roguish, boyish smile.”
The director slyly remained silent after the initial introduction, letting an uncomfortable moment pass when no one said a word. Elizabeth would recall Stevens acting like a “puppeteer,” playing one off the other and see how they reacted to each other. He observed Monty and Elizabeth check each other out.
Monty was also impressed with Elizabeth, at least physically. He could see the value of such a woman in the role of Angela. She gave his character, George, something to obsess over. He would tell Mira that he had never before seen anyone who was so petite, so delicate. Her skin was like porcelain, and she had big blue eyes framed by pronounced, perfectly shaped eyebrows. She stood only five feet two, but her posture was at once regal and sensual.
“How did you ever get into movies with a face like that?” Monty finally joked.
Later, Elizabeth would say, “Monty was so funny, and he just put me at ease. That’s when I discovered we had a similar sense of humor, which was also slightly perverse. We liked each other!”
Elizabeth was transfixed when she was acting with Monty. In front of the cameras, he seemed to split open, allowing all his longings and fears to spill out. She forgot about the cold air during their initial scene at Loon Lake shooting A Place in the Sun. She realized Monty was sweating. Elizabeth was awestruck as he trembled and sweated—not Montgomery Clift, the actor, but George Eastman, the sensitive but driven social climber. Observing him, she thought, Wait a minute, what’s he doing? What’s he up to? she recalled years later.
Elizabeth wanted to know how he managed to shiver and sweat from real emotion, and Monty explained that when the body was really feeling something, it didn’t know you were acting. It responded to the feelings. “It sweats and makes adrenaline, just as though your emotions are real.” That’s an indication of how deeply Monty delved into his characters, how much he became his character when in front of the cameras. He admitted that he was baffled by his inability to bring reality to a situation he did not feel in his heart. “I simply go dead,” he explained.
“I thought, My God, it isn’t all about just having fun,” Elizabeth later commented. “I think that’s when I first looked at him and saw how involved he was, his whole being. When I saw how involved he was, I thought, I’ve just been playing with toys.” Up until this moment, acting in a movie for Elizabeth had been little more than memorizing the script and following the director’s blocking.
The idea of actually creating a character was fascinating to her. At MGM she had been treated like a beautiful prop. Elizabeth would always acknowledge that working with Monty made her a better actress.
Adapted from Elizabeth and Monty: The Untold Story of their Intimate Friendship by Charles Casillo. Reprinted with permission from Kensington Books. Copyright 2021
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