Elizabeth Taylor’s Wedding Dress Is Up for Auction
The wedding dress worn by film star Elizabeth Taylor for her first marriage to hotel heir Conrad Hilton in 1950 will go up for sale next month, auction house Christie’s said on Friday.
The simple, but elegant garment created by Hollywood costume designer Helen Rose for the then 18-year-old Taylor is an oyster shell-coloured, floor-length satin gown with a fine silk gauze off-the-shoulder illusion neckline.
The dress, which was a gift from MGM film studios, has a top estimate of 50,000 pounds ($75,300). Rose also designed Grace Kelly’s wedding dress for her marriage to the Prince of Monaco.
By the time Taylor married Hilton she was already a veteran actress and was just a year away from her Oscar-nominated performance in Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s “A Place in the Sun”.
The A-list of old Hollywood – Greer Garson, Gene Kelly, Ginger Rogers, Fred Astaire, Esther Williams, and Van Johnson – were among the many stars who came to congratulate the bride.
The star of “Cleopatra” surpassed Michael Jackson as the highest-earning deceased celebrity in a survey released by Forbes in October 2012, with her estate pulling in $210 million, much of it from a 2011 auction of jewels, costumes and art work.
The auction of Taylor’s jewels took in $116 million, more than double the record for a single collection, and set new marks for pearls, colourless diamonds and Indian jewels.
Taylor, who died in 2011 at the age of 79, was married eight times, twice to actor Richard Burton, and had a career spanning seven decades.
She first gained fame in 1944’s “National Velvet” at age 12, and was nominated for five Oscars, winnning best actress for “BUtterfield 8” (1960) and “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” (1966), which also starred Burton.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO