After Vogue World: Hollywood’s Cleopatra Cameo, a Look at Elizabeth Taylor’s Many Onscreen Bulgari Moments
When the lights went down on Vogue World: Hollywood, the Paramount lot flickered like old film stock. Models moved through a dream sequence of cinema history, and among them—draped in emerald-eyed serpents—strode a modern incarnation of Elizabeth Taylor’s Cleopatra. She wore Bulgari’s Serpenti Dragoni jewels: a choker, necklace, bracelet, ring, and earrings in yellow and white gold, coiling with more than 18 carats of marquise and pavé-set diamonds and flashes of green emeralds. It was a vision of the screen goddess reborn, an homage to the woman who first made Bulgari’s serpents slither into popular imagination more than half a century ago. And it was only the beginning—Taylor’s long, glittering history with the Roman jeweler would play out across the silver screen for decades. Here, we look back at the films that made her Bulgari’s most dazzling muse.
Cleopatra
The story began in 1962, when Taylor arrived in Rome to film Cleopatra—the most expensive movie ever attempted and the one that would change both her life and Bulgari’s forever. Between scenes at Cinecittà Studios, she slipped into the maison’s Via Condotti boutique. “Undeniably one of the biggest advantages to filming Cleopatra in Rome was Bulgari’s shop,” she later wrote.
There, her then husband Eddie Fisher presented her with a lavish en tremblant brooch of emeralds and diamonds and a pair of pendant earrings—his extravagant, if futile, attempt to hold her attention. Around the same period, she acquired a Serpenti Tubogas watch, likely from Fisher, whose coiled bracelet wrapped the wrist like an asp. It was photographed off-set, gleaming against her violet eyes and Cleopatra eyeliner.
Now cue here Cleopatra costar Richard Burton. Their affair began in Rome and would become one of the century’s great tabloid epics. When he sought to declare his adoration to Taylor, Burton turned—as Fisher had—to Bulgari. Gianni Bulgari himself reportedly arrived at the studio with a tray of emeralds. Taylor chose an emerald brooch surrounded by diamonds, which later became the detachable pendant of an emerald-and-diamond necklace Burton commissioned as a wedding gift. The jewels, bold and architectural, mirrored Taylor’s new Roman life—larger, freer, and unashamedly opulent.
20th Century Fox even commissioned a Bulgari mirror for the film—a golden hand mirror studded with turquoise and shaped like an eagle—now part of the brand’s Heritage Collection. Though none of Taylor’s actual Bulgari pieces appeared onscreen—the production relied on costume jewels—Cleopatra became the offscreen origin myth of Bulgari’s modern legend. “The only word Elizabeth knows in Italian is Bulgari,” Burton once famously quipped. Her love affair with jewelry was just beginning.
The V.I.P.s
Only months after Cleopatra wrapped, Taylor reunited with Burton for The V.I.P.s (1963), a lavish Heathrow Airport–based farce that mirrored the couple’s jet-set life. Here she wore her own emerald-and-diamond brooch—the very piece Eddie Fisher had given her in 1962. Pinned into her dark hair, the jewel shimmered beneath the airport floodlights, vibrating with motion thanks to its tremblant setting.
Behind the scenes, Taylor’s marriage to Fisher was ending, and her public romance with Burton was taking flight. The brooch became more than a bauble; it was a bridge between husbands, the jewel that witnessed her transformation from movie star to myth. Decades later, Bulgari reacquired the piece at the 2011 Christie’s auction of her estate, ensuring it would live not in gossip columns, but in the Heritage Collection.
Boom!
By 1968, Taylor and Burton were newlywed global royalty—their yacht Kalizma stocked with champagne and emeralds. When she signed on for Joseph Losey’s Boom!—a Tennessee Williams adaptation set on a windswept Sardinian cliff—she demanded Bulgari jewels for practically every costume.
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