When Sid Avery Photographed Elizabeth Taylor on the Set of “Giant”
Images: Sid Avery / MPTV
For decades, a movie star’s portrait was made under studio lights, with every detail controlled. Then readers of magazines like LIFE, Look, and The Saturday Evening Post began asking to see the stars as they really were: off the soundstage, out of costume, at home and at ease. Sid Avery was the photographer the magazine editors called to get them. As Vanity Fair’s Michael Callahan wrote in 2014, “Sid shot almost every cinema giant of the mid-20th century and pulled off a feat surpassing even that: he captured them unguarded, stripping away the studio and P.R. artifice to find the people hiding underneath.” His candid images of Rock Hudson washing his car, Marlon Brando taking out the trash, and Audrey Hepburn cycling across the Paramount lot with her Yorkshire terrier in the basket helped define a new kind of celebrity portrait — and in the summer of 1955, he turned that same eye on Elizabeth Taylor, who appeared on the cover of LIFE magazine a record 14 times.
In June 1955, the cast and crew of George Stevens’ Giant stepped off the train in Marfa, Texas, and for the next six weeks, they filmed on the Worth Evans Ranch, seventeen miles west of town. Elizabeth, then 23, played Leslie Benedict, a bright woman who marries into a Texas ranching dynasty, with Rock Hudson as her husband, Bick, and James Dean as ranch hand turned rival Jett Rink. The character of Leslie was a woman well ahead of her time: outspoken, independent, and unwilling to accept the prejudices of the world she married into. Her compassionate nature and steadfast insistence on equality — qualities that Elizabeth herself also possessed — slowly changes the people around her for the better.
Sid Avery was also in Marfa at this time, on assignment to cover the production, snapping shots of the stars on set. One of the images he produced, one that Elizabeth herself always loved, came about almost by accident. As Sid wrote in his book, “The Art of the Hollywood Snapshot”:
“The cast had a table (lunch was catered) and we were sitting there eating. I sat across the table from Elizabeth Taylor. I had put my Hasselblad camera down next to my plate. Next to her was Rock Hudson and the assistant director and next to me was James Dean and the director George Stevens. After finishing lunch, Liz pulled her chair back to get a little sun and when I saw her face up in the sun, with the light on it – it was just exquisite and I couldn't resist making a shot. It has become one of her favorite shots and is one of my favorite shots - it was just so candid and she looked so terrific. It's so odd because her violet eyes are such an important part of her beauty and yet her eyes were closed in this photo - but still her face is incredible.”
When television drew audiences away from the picture magazines in the 1960s, Avery moved into advertising photography and later directed television commercials — but he never stopped championing the images of Hollywood’s golden age. In the 1980s, he founded the nonprofit Hollywood Photographers Archive, which grew to some 150,000 photographs before it was donated to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1987. He then started over, founding the Motion Picture and Television Photo Archive, known today as MPTV Images. Today, Sid's son Ron Avery runs the archive, which currently represents over 70 photographers.
Sid Avery’s work is still represented by the archive he founded — for licensing and print inquiries, please visit their website.
