Reel Rundown: 40 hours of taped Elizabeth Taylor conversations pair with archival footage to make ‘The Lost Tapes’ on Max

Among the many myths regarding the late movie star Elizabeth Taylor, maybe the most enduring is that she had “violet eyes.”

As with many of the public-relations items printed over the decades about Taylor, the description is untrue. As she says an interviewer in the documentary “Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes,” her eyes were merely dark blue.

Then again, Taylor wasn’t always the most honest, or self-aware, person, especially when it came to her role as a movie queen. If you doubt that statement, then check out Philip Gefter’s nonfiction book “Cocktails With George and Martha,” which is a day-by-day study of the making of the 1966 film “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.”

That film production, Gefter makes clear, was a salsa dance of competitive egos, from Taylor and her then-husband Richard Burton to director Mike Nichols and producer/screenwriter Ernest Lehman.

In “The Lost Tapes,” which is streaming on Max, documentary filmmaker Nanette Burstein, shows that Taylor could, on occasion, see at least a vestige of her true self. As she admits in the film, the reason she married so many times (eight in all, twice to Burton) was because she was “in love with love.” (By the way, only six of the marriages are mentioned in the documentary, the second one to Burton is merely hinted at, and the final one to Larry Fortensky is conveniently ignored.)

Taken from a series of recordings that the journalist Richard Meryman made beginning in 1964, Taylor reveals herself over the film’s 102-minute run. A writer for Life magazine, Meryman had intended to write a book – or, rather, ghostwrite a memoir that would be presented in Taylor’s own words.

That’s how he amassed some 40 hours of taped conversations. When Meryman died in 2015, the tapes weren’t discovered until his widow found them stored in their attic. That the tapes were made beginning in 1964 is auspicious: That was the year following the release of the ill-fated film “Cleopatra,” a disastrous money-loser and the project that introduced Taylor to Burton.

To Meryman’s credit, he gets Taylor to talk about a lot of touchy topics, from her early years as a child star (she hated going to MGM’s child-actor school) to her suffering in the early 1950s through one bad film project after the next.

She’s particularly frank about her husbands. Her first, Nicky Hilton, was physically abusive. Her second, Michael Wilding, was 20 years her elder and couldn’t “dominate” her, as was her wish. The producer Mike Todd, her third, was also two decades older than she was but was her emotional match – until he was killed in a plane crash.

Which led to her unfortunate bounce-back relationship with the crooner Eddie Fisher, the breakup of Fisher’s marriage to Debbie Reynolds and, when she and Fisher married, a mass of bad publicity (even the Vatican criticized her).

Then came “Cleopatra,” her affair with Burton, a near-death bout with pneumonia, the divorce from Fisher and even more controversy.

In between, of course, Taylor’s career progressed with performances in ever-better films such as “Giant,” “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” and “Suddenly, Last Summer.” (Even though “Butterfield 8” won her a 1961 Best Actress Oscar, she dismisses it with a familiar euphemism for feces.)

A longtime friend of gay men such as Roddy MacDowell, Rock Hudson and Montgomery Clift, especially during the era in which being outed meant career suicide, Taylor spent her final years raising awareness for AIDS.

Supporting Taylor’s taped commentary, Burstein fills her film with a wealth of archival footage and snippets from dozens of the actress’ screen performances. In the end, it stands as a testament that, despite the troubles that she faced – much of which she brought upon herself – Taylor deserves her status as one of the great stars of 20th-century film.

If ever there were to be a vote on that question, the ayes – so to speak – would surely be in her favor.