Forever Elizabeth (2002)

In 2002, Elizabeth launched her tenth fragrance, Forever Elizabeth. She wanted the box that houses the perfume bottle to match the intensity of the ruby ring Richard Burton had given her for Christmas many years earlier, which she said “glowed with the fire of the most perfect coloured stone I’d ever seen”.

The great Herb Ritts was behind the camera for both the TV and print advertisements for Forever Elizabeth, one of the final projects he worked on before his untimely death at age fifty in December 2002. In the thirty-second commercial, an audience at an outdoor cinema in Italy watches spellbound as Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift fall in love in A Place in the Sun (1951). One of the moviegoers is Elizabeth herself, then seventy, captured in breathtaking close-up.