Elizabeth Taylor’s Ex-Double Reflects on Passing of a Star

At the height of Elizabeth Taylor's career in the late 1950s and early '60s, Phyllis Shelton was one of her stand-ins.

By ASHLEY PARKER
NYT

The morning that Elizabeth Taylor died, Phyllis Shelton received nearly half a dozen calls before noon. She took the news last week harder than most.

After all, Ms. Shelton had been on the set with Ms. Taylor in Italy when “Cleopatra” was filmed, ridden a horse for “Reflections in a Golden Eye” and honeymooned at the Mexican Riviera house that Ms. Taylor owned with Richard Burton.

For years she had been Ms. Taylor’s film double — and nearly her spitting image — as a young woman in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and friends were calling to share the news.

“It was beautiful in the fact that this was some girl I’d always admired, mainly because she loved horses and I was some horse freak, and who would ever know I’d grow up looking like her, so that was a real treat,” Ms. Shelton said.

(Continued here.)