Elizabeth Taylor’s eight marriages are legendary, a dramatic saga that captivated the world. From a tumultuous first union to two passionate marriages with Richard Burton and a final, quiet chapter, we break down why each relationship mattered and how they shaped the icon’s life and legacy.
Elizabeth Taylor’s career spanned more than six decades and included more than 40 films, but by the numbers, the Hollywood legend is perhaps most famously remembered for how many times she married: eight.
From age 18, Taylor exchanged vows with seven different men (she married actor Richard Burton twice). Of those marriages, two resulted in children, seven ended in divorce and one ended tragically when her husband died in a plane crash.
“When I have fallen in love, it’s always ended up being a marrying kind of love,” Taylor told Barbara Walters in 1997. “That’s just part of me—I suppose part of the way I was brought up. You have to legalize everything.”
Keep reading for a complete guide to the legendary actress’s legendary marriages.
Elizabeth Taylor’s 7 Husbands
Conrad “Nicky” Hilton Jr. (1950–1951)
Taylor was just 18 when she married Conrad “Nicky” Hilton Jr., heir to the Hilton Hotels fortune. She met him a year earlier at Los Angeles’ famed Mocambo nightclub, and MGM Studios orchestrated their lavish ceremony to help promote her movie Father of the Bride. (Her image was so tightly controlled by MGM that she wore a wedding gown designed by the studio’s in-house costume designer, Helen Rose.)
Unfortunately, the marriage collapsed quickly. During their 14-week European honeymoon, Hilton became “sullen, angry and abusive, physically and mentally,” Taylor later revealed in her 1988 autobiography, Elizabeth Takes Off.
“I was a bit of a punching bag,” she later told Walters. “I had no idea that he drank, because we were engaged for nine months and he was on the wagon that whole time. So two weeks after our marriage, when he started drinking, I had no idea that that person existed.”
The marriage was over in less than a year; they divorced in January 1951.
Michael Wilding (1952–1957)
Taylor’s second husband was British actor Michael Wilding, who was 20 years her senior. They met in England around 1952 while she was filming Ivanhoe and married in a low-key ceremony on Feb. 21, 1952, when Taylor was just 19. Although Wilding’s laid-back personality was said to be a welcome balm following her turbulent first marriage, he was apparently threatened by her massive success.
While she was away shooting Giant in 1955, gossip columns reported that he hosted stripper parties at their home. Whether or not the rumors were true, the marriage was already showing signs of strain. After five years together and the birth of two sons—Michael Howard Wilding Jr. (born 1953) and Christopher Edward Wilding (born 1955)—the couple divorced in 1957.
Despite the split, they remained on friendly terms. When Wilding died in 1979 at age 66, a spokesman for Taylor told The New York Times that she was “very upset” by her ex-husband’s passing.
Mike Todd (1957–1958)
Husband number three was Mike Todd, the larger-than-life Hollywood producer behind the Oscar-winning movie Around the World in 80 Days (1956). Twenty-five years older than Taylor and at the height of his own career when they got together, he had a swagger that Taylor found irresistible. “He didn’t ask me, he told me,” Taylor wrote of his proposal in her memoir, Elizabeth Takes Off. They married on Feb. 2, 1957—two days after her divorce from Wilding was finalized—in Acapulco, Mexico, when Taylor was already pregnant with their child.
“God, I loved him,” Taylor wrote in her memoir. “My self-esteem, my image, everything soared under his exuberant, loving care.”
The couple welcomed their daughter, Elizabeth “Liza” Todd, in August 1957. But tragically, their love story was cut short: On March 22, 1958, Todd died in a private plane crash (on a plane nicknamed “The Lucky Liz”).
“He came up to say goodbye to me five times,” Taylor recalled in an interview with Walters. “It’s like we both knew. It’s like we both had a premonition. We’d never been apart before— never, a night, ever.”
When Taylor got the news of his death, she said, “I just started screaming.”
At 26, the Rhapsody star was a widow with a baby, mourning the man she considered the love of her life at that time. “I have no idea [how I survived],” she said. “I really don’t know.”
Eddie Fisher (1959–1964)
In the wake of Todd’s death, a grief-stricken Taylor found comfort in his close friend, singer Eddie Fisher, who accompanied her to Chicago for Todd’s funeral. Fisher’s wife—actress Debbie Reynolds—stayed behind with Taylor’s three small children. Within five months, Fisher and Taylor were married.
The backlash was swift and unforgiving, with headlines branding Taylor a “homewrecker.” Although she maintained that Fisher’s marriage to Reynolds was broken long before their affair, she also seemed to know that she and Fisher were not a good match, at least in hindsight.
“I was keeping Mike alive by talking about him because Eddie, he was a great friend of Mike’s. That was the only thing we had in common, was Mike,” Taylor said in the 2024 HBO documentary Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes, which drew on a trove of never-before-released interviews with Taylor. “I never loved Eddie. I liked him. I felt sorry for him. And I liked talking [to him]. But he was not Mike.”
The rebound marriage was short-lived: While in Rome filming Cleopatra, Taylor fell madly in love with co-star Richard Burton, and she and Fisher divorced in March 1964.
“I don’t remember too much about my marriage to [Fisher], except it was one big, friggin’ awful mistake,” she would later reveal. “I knew it before we were married and didn’t know how to get out of it.”
Richard Burton: First Marriage (1964–1974)
When Taylor and Burton arrived on the set of Cleopatra, they were both married (she to Fisher, he to Sybil Williams), but that did little to keep them from acting on their attraction. Their illicit romance, dubbed “Liz and Dick,” quickly became one of the biggest Hollywood scandals of the day.
“I couldn’t help loving him,” Taylor said in The Lost Tapes. “It was a fact.”
That fact came with consequences. “The Vatican newspaper had come out with an item saying that I was such a despicable woman that my own children should be taken away from me,” Taylor recalled. “[It’s] an attack that really—well, it made me vomit.”
Despite the media firestorm, Taylor and Burton each divorced their spouses and married each other on March 15, 1964. Whatever the world thought of them, it didn’t stop the couple from enjoying the finer things in life, from mansions and yachts to art and jewels (Burton famously bought Taylor a 69-carat diamond). They also made 11 films together during this period—including Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and The Taming of the Shrew—becoming one of Hollywood’s most bankable on-screen duos, and they expanded their family by adopting a daughter, Maria.
Unfortunately, the pair picked up another nickname along the way—”The Battling Burtons”—as their relationship became known for its explosive fights. “Elizabeth and I lived on the edge of an exciting volcano,” Burton once said. “I’m not easy to be married to or live with. I exploded violently about twice a year with Elizabeth. She would also explode. It was marvelous. But it could be murder.”
After a decade of dramatic ups and downs, the couple eventually divorced in 1974.
Richard Burton: Second Marriage (1975–1976)
In October 1975, just 16 months after their divorce, Taylor and Burton reconciled and decided to remarry. Their second wedding was held on Oct. 10, 1975, in a private ceremony in Botswana, Africa. But the reunion lasted less than a year: They separated again in the summer of 1976 and divorced (for the second and final time) that same year.
Still, Burton is widely considered to be the love of Taylor’s life. “In my heart, I will always believe we would have been married a third and final time,” Taylor has said. “From those first moments in Rome, we were always madly and powerfully in love.”
John Warner (1976–1982)
In 1976, Taylor was set up on a blind date with John Warner—a former U.S. Secretary of the Navy and Virginia businessman—and the pair married later that year. Warner had political ambitions and when he ran for the U.S. Senate in 1978, Taylor hit the campaign trail at his side, quickly learning that Washington, D.C. was nothing like Hollywood.
“I was told to wear tweeds. I couldn’t wear purple or Halston pantsuits,” she said.
Ultimately, Warner won his Senate seat and Taylor—unaccustomed to such a stiff and structured lifestyle—grew lonely and used pills and alcohol to cope.
“We got along wonderfully until he decided to be a politician. And then he married the Senate,” she said.
After years of growing apart, Taylor divorced Warner in 1982. Still, the exes stayed friendly over the years. “We always used to sign off, ‘Hey man, till we talk again,’” Warner recalled of their chats. “She was always very informal.”
Larry Fortensky (1991–1996)
For her eighth and final marriage, Taylor exchanged vows with Larry Fortensky, a construction worker from California 20 years her junior. They met in the late 1980s while both undergoing treatment at the Betty Ford Clinic for substance abuse.
“I knew who she was, of course, but I can’t tell you that I remember watching any of her films,” Fortensky said.
“She was funny and sweet, and the more I got to know her, the sweeter she became. Of course, she was very pretty and I wasn’t too bad looking in those days, either. We had an instant physical attraction.”
The pair headed for the altar on Oct. 6, 1991 in a ceremony held at her friend Michael Jackson’s Neverland Ranch and attended by 160 guests. (They sold exclusive photos of the wedding to People magazine for a whopping $1 million, which Taylor then donated to her AIDS Foundation.)
Alas, the marriage was quickly strained. For Larry, the glare of the spotlight was overwhelming. “Those cameras everywhere,” he said. “Elizabeth was used to it. I never got used to it.” Meanwhile, Elizabeth was turned off by the fact that Fortensky became “Mr. Taylor.”
“He stopped working,” she said. “You can’t have love without respect.”
After about five years, they mutually decided to part ways. By October 1996, Taylor’s final marriage had come to an end.
When asked by Larry King in 2001 whether she’d ever marry again, Taylor gave a firm no. “I’d live with someone if he were cute, intelligent, compassionate, adorable [and] had a good sense of humor,” she added.
On March 23, 2011, Taylor passed away from congestive heart failure. The beloved actress was 79 years old.
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