The star, who had a lifelong “love affair with jewelry,” dazzles in a rare candid
Before celebrities flooded our Instagram feeds with selfies, before paparazzi was a household word, there was Elio Sorci, widely considered the world’s first paparazzo. The Italian lensman snapped this glamorous pic of Elizabeth Taylor at the David di Donatello Awards in Rome in 1962. Cigarette holder in hand and flanked by two unidentified gentlemen, Taylor had every reason to smile. She was at the top of her career—in the midst of filming Cleopatra—and knee-deep in an affair with costar Richard Burton (as Sorci would famously reveal to the world). She was also dripping in a Bulgari platinum, emerald, and diamond parure: a bracelet with 13 Colombian emeralds, pendant earrings (with two Colombian pear-shape emeralds weighing 20.64 cts.), and a tremblant brooch, which she’d later wear as a headpiece in the 1963 movie The V.I.P.s. As we’d say today: #jewelrygoals.
(Elio Sorci/Camera Press/Redux Pictures)