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"Elizabeth Taylor's Memorable Film Sets\nAD goes behind the scenes to tour the most stylish interiors featured in the actress's legendary movies\nSet designers Henry W. Grace and Robert Priestley gathered a polished brass bed, curlicue wicker chairs, and a slow-moving ceiling fan to evoke the \"Victorian with a touch of the Far East\" Mississippi plantation-house decor specified by Tennessee Williams in this gutsy adaptation of his hit play. Williams explains in his notes for the play that a photograph of writer Robert Louis Stevenson's veranda in Samoa inspired the atmosphere he was after.\n\nCast change: MGM bought the rights to Williams's play in 1955 and announced that Grace Kelly would play its sexually frustrated heroine, Maggie Pollitt. By the time filming rolled around, however, Kelly had abandoned the tinsel of Hollywood for the glitter of Monaco. Taylor got the part instead.\nThe subject of a forthcoming book from Rizzoli, British set designer, architect, and royal in-law Oliver Messel\u2014Princess Margaret married his nephew Lord Snowdon\u2014produced the creepy sets for this Southern Gothic vehicle about a family scandal being hushed up by a New Orleans matriarch (Katharine Hepburn) who is trying to convince a doctor (Montgomery Clift) to lobotomize her highly strung niece (Taylor). Messel's combination of creaking rattan, lacy ironwork, and a garden packed with lethal-looking plants are marvelously claustrophobic\u2014and resulted in an Academy Award nomination.\n\nMake a reservation: During filming, Taylor and her third husband, Eddie Fisher, stayed at the fanciful Oliver Messel Suite in London's Dorchester Hotel. The suite was designed by Messel himself\u2014and can be yours from $4,900 to $6,534/night (excluding VAT).\nBased on the novel by John O'Hara, this Daniel Mann film won Taylor her first Oscar for her performance as a sulky Manhattan model of easy virtue. The actress always maintained she received the award for surviving a near-fatal bout with pneumonia. It was an observation with which Shirley MacLaine, nominated for The Apartment, fully concurred, saying, \"I lost to a tracheotomy.\" Butterfield 8's sets are a stream of stylish hotels and apartments decorated by Gene Callahan and J. C. Delaney, one of which is a plush flat where Taylor beds a wealthy married man (Laurence Harvey) and then primps in his marble-look bath (it's probably Formica). The exterior of Harvey's 20-story apartment building is 1050 Fifth Avenue, then a brand-new structure by developer Bernard Spitzer, whose son would become governor of New York.\nPharaonic pomp and circumstance\u2014and lots of eyeliner\u2014distinguish this spectacle about the Egyptian queen (Taylor) and her romances with Julius Caesar (Rex Harrison) and Marc Antony (Richard Burton). The luxurious Oscar-winning sets were decorated by Paul S. Fox, Ray Moyer, and Walter M. Scott, who assembled a mesmerizing amalgam of North African flamboyance and 1960s abstraction. Splashed with hieroglyphics, Cleopatra's palace, for example, is exceptionally glamorous, its vast, white-floored rooms scattered with sculptural furniture, gold-painted statues of Egyptian gods, and flowing fabrics.\n\nFun fact: The shimmering robes Taylor wears on Cleopatra's triumphant entry into Rome\u2014she's dressed as the goddess Isis\u2014were made of real gold threads.\nHundreds of books and an endless array of liquor bottles give the film's college-campus home its cluttered, bohemian air\u2014and won production designer Richard Sylbert an Academy Award. Burton portrays a henpecked assistant history professor, while Taylor gained 20 pounds for the role of his hectoring spouse, a college president's daughter who never lets her husband forget that she married one major rung down. (The performance was an Oscar-winner, too.) Sylbert called the scruffy decors he and set decorator George Hopkins created \"sabbatical-alcoholic style, a careless hodgepodge collected by two alcoholic slobs who read books and liked art.\" He even filled the refrigerator with a chaotic array of sloppy leftovers.\nBased on the Tennessee Williams play The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore, Boom! headlines Taylor as a Georgia-born widow dying atop a Sardinian cliff and Burton as a gigolo nicknamed the Angel of Death. The costumes (caftans and such by Tiziani and Valentino, supernova coiffures by Alexandre de Paris, and masses of Bulgari bling) are fully the equal of the baroque setting in this psychedelic fantasia. The setting is a curving, blinding-white villa\u2014erected by artist and production designer Richard MacDonald\u2014with sprawling terraces, where modern furniture meets ornate carvings and snarling guard dogs. The New York Times called it \"a St. Louis shoe clerk's vision of a Divina Costiera villa.\"\n\nPay attention: The bearded pilot of the boat that brings the gigolo to Taylor's lair is the actress's oceanographer brother, Howard Taylor.\nDescribed as a \"diaphanous romantic comedy\" by Life magazine, The Only Game in Town featured Taylor as an aging Las Vegas showgirl patiently waiting for her lover to get a divorce. Warren Beatty, fresh from his triumph in Bonnie and Clyde, costarred as a young gambler who turns her head. Surprisingly the movie was largely filmed on a sound stage in Paris, since the Burtons, as British citizens, could only spend so many days in the U.S. for tax reasons. The primary location, created by set designer Jerry Wunderlich, was a modest two-room apartment for Taylor's character. Decorated in green, black, and white, the space was outfitted with boldly patterned curtains and a Saarinen-style cocktail table. The Las Vegas Strip panorama beyond the window is a backdrop.\n\nFun fact: Taylor, delighted with the costumes designed by Vicky Tiel and Mia Fonssagrives, invested $50,000 in their fashion business. Today Tiel is an American couturier with a popular boutique in Paris, while Fonssagrives\u2014daughter of supermodel Lisa Fonssagrives and stepdaughter of photographer Irving Penn\u2014is a sculptor and jewelry designer."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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