ELIZABETH "LIZ" TAYLOR - PROGRAM SIGNED CIRCA 1951 CO-SIGNED BY: MICHAEL WILDING - HFSID 101420

ELIZABETH TAYLOR, CO-SIGNED BY: MICHAEL WILDING
Program for the 1951 world premiere of The Lady With a Lamp, signed by Elizabeth Taylor and Michael Wilding. Accompanied by unsigned ticket to this performance. This premiere was less than six months before Wilding, who was male lead in The Lady With a Lamp, married Taylor and became her second husband.
Program signed "Michael Wilding" in blue ink and "Elizabeth/Taylor" in pencil. B/w with color front cover, 36 pages including covers, 8¾x11¼, bound in cardstock covers with two staples. Lightly toned, soiled, stained and creased. Taylor's signature has low contrast but is legible. Tears in cover at top, right and bottom edge. Bottom staple is tearing from spine. Otherwise in fine condition. Accompanied by: Unsigned ticket to the world premiere of The Lady With a Lamp, printed on cardstock with perforated left edge. Lightly toned and creased, otherwise in fine condition. This souvenir program is from a Sept. 22, 1951 world premiere performance of the The Lady With a Lamp, about Florence Nightingale, to benefit the Royal College of Nursing Educational Fund and attended by the Princess Elizabeth and the Duke of Edinburgh. Wilding had the male lead as Sidney Herbert. This premiere was six months after Taylor's divorce from first husband Conrad Hilton, Jr. and less than six months before Wilding's marriage to Taylor on Feb. 21, 1952. Already a striking beauty by age ten, violet-eyed child star TAYLOR (1932-2011),born in Hampstead, London, England,who made her film debut in 1942, grew up to play sizzling adult roles on screen. Married to Nick Hilton, Michael Wilding, Mike Todd, Eddie Fisher, Richard Burton (twice), John Warner and Larry Fortensky, Taylor won Academy Awards for Best Actress for Butterfield 8 (1960) and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966). The first actress to earn $1 million for a motion picture (Cleopatra, 1963), Taylor was also nominated for Best Actress Oscars in 1957 (Raintree County), 1958 (Cat on a Hot Tin Roof) and 1959 (Suddenly, Last Summer). Named a Dame by Queen Elizabeth II on December 31, 1999, Taylor was also a John F. Kennedy Center Honoree in 2002. Despite debilitating health problems, she is also known for her tireless efforts to raise funds for AIDS charities. This loan was obtained at a difficult time in Taylor's life. Although she had been Tony-nominated for her part in The Little Foxes in 1981 and would soon co-star with former husband Richard Burton in a stage revival of Private Lives, she divorced husband and U. S. Senator John Warner in November of 1982. In 1983, she checked herself into the Betty Ford clinic to combat alcohol and painkiller addiction.Stage and screen actor WILDING (1912-1979, born in Westcliff-on-Sea, Essex, England) appeared in a number of feature films, including The Farmer's Wife (1941), In Which We Serve (1942), Piccadilly Incident (1948), The World of Suzie Wong (1960) and Waterloo (1984). He is perhaps best known, however, for being the second husband of actress Elizabeth Taylor (Taylor was Wilding's third wife) from 1952 until their divorce in 1957; the couple had two children. Wilding's fourth wife was actress Margaret Leighton, to whom he was wed from 1964 until her death in 1976.