Elizabeth Taylor was once the most famous woman on the planet, and this episode traces how she turned that suffocating attention into a new blueprint for celebrity activism. It begins with her London birth to American parents, the genetic mutation that gave her a double row of eyelashes, and the Universal contract terminated after a year because executives thought her eyes looked too old. MGM then made her a star in a steeplechase film at the cost of forced dental braces, pulled baby teeth, and a permanent spinal injury she was made to work through, while she refused studio demands to change her name, dye her hair and pluck her eyebrows.

The conversation follows her escape into an abusive first marriage at 18, the financial pressures that pushed her back into a seven-year MGM contract, the grief she poured into performances after the deaths ...