Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

The sparks fly in Mike Nichols’s electrifying adaptation of Edward Albee’s Tony-winning play about the word and mind games waged between a history professor (Richard Burton) and his embittered wife (Taylor), and against the younger couple (George Segal and Sandy Dennis) who become their unwitting pawns. A landmark in American cinema, the profanity-laced, sexually explicit Virginia Woolf? signaled a sea-change from Old Hollywood morality to New Hollywood permissiveness, and silenced once and for all those who thought Taylor was just a pretty face. Merely 34 at the time, she gained 30 pounds to play the abrasive yet fragile, fifty-something Martha, and won a second Best Actress Oscar for her performance.

“Here, with a director who knows how to get an actor’s confidence and knows what to do with it after he gets it, [Taylor] does the best work of her career, sustained and urgent.”
—Stanley Kauffmann, The New York Times

“Elizabeth Taylor earns every penny of her reported $1 million plus. Her characterization is at once sensual, spiteful, cynical, pitiable, loathsome, lustful and tender.”
—Variety