Month: October 2025

The second track on Taylor Swift’s 12th studio album The Life of a Showgirl is named after Elizabeth Taylor.

It’s no surprise that one of the most glamorous pop stars would reference one of Hollywood’s most glamorous actors. And it’s not the first time she has referenced the movie star either. Entertainment Weekly points out that her hit “Ready for It?” has a lyric “Burton to this Taylor,” which refers to one of the movie star’s great loves, Richard Burton.

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Swift invokes Taylor again in “Elizabeth Taylor,” which appears to be dedicated to her fiancé Travis Kelce, as she sings, “Do you think it’s forever?”

“That view of Portofino was on my mind when you called me at the Plaza Athénée,” Swift sings. Portofino held a special place in Taylor’s heart—Burton first proposed to her there.

Taylor lives throughout the song. Swift sings that if her love story should end, “I’d cry my eyes violet,” which is how the actress’s eyes were famously described. Later, Swift cements her love with a reference to Taylor’s perfume, White Diamonds.

“All my white diamonds and lovers are forever,” Swift sings. “Don’t you ever end up anything but mine.”

Elizabeth Taylor, who began her career as a child star, won a 1961 Academy Award for best actress in a leading role for Butterfield 8 and one in 1967 for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

“She usually played a woman of common sense and uncommon passion,” TIME’s former film critic Richard Corliss wrote in her 2011 obituary. “In each role, she found the starting point for a creative journey at the crossroads of modern femininity, or proto-feminism, and ageless star quality.”

She appeared on the cover of TIME magazine in 1949, back when she was MGM studio’s biggest star. In the profile, she revealed that she wanted a break from playing glamorous characters: “When Elizabeth talks about her future in the movies, her eyes flash sapphire sparks. ‘What I’d really like to play,’ she gasps excitedly, ‘is a monster — a hellion.’”

Off-screen, she had a tumultuous personal life with eight weddings and seven divorces. As a philanthropist, she helped found the American Foundation for AIDS Research and raised about $100 million for patients with other illnesses. Throughout it all, she maintained her allure. As Corliss wrote in her obituary, “She remained a tireless champion through many illnesses: skin cancer, a (benign) brain tumor, injuries to her hips and back. ‘I get around now in a wheelchair,’ she said in 2005, ‘but I get around.’ The grand lady was also a game gal.”

Taylor Swift’s 12th studio album The Life of a Showgirl dropped Oct. 3, and William Shakespeare buffs will relish in the title of the first track “The Fate of Ophelia” and accompanying music video, inspired by the tragic play Hamlet (circa 1599-1601).

In the song, Swift sings of her heart being saved “from the fate of Ophelia,” an apparent reference to her fiancé, Travis Kelce.

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“And if you’d never come for me,” goes the song. “I might’ve drowned in the melancholy.”

The titular Ophelia is known in Shakespeare’s Hamlet for tragically drowning after enduring rejection by Hamlet and his murder of her father. The line in Swift’s song and The Life of a Showgirl‘s cover art appears to be inspired by a Victorian-era painting that depicts the scene in Hamlet when Ophelia goes crazy and falls into a stream and drowns after learning Hamlet killed her father.

Back then, it was trendy to paint scenes from William Shakespeare plays, and Ophelia was a popular subject. John Everett Millais depicts “Ophelia” floating in a stream, her head and chest above water and the rest of her body submerged.

According to the Tate collection in the UK, artist Elizabeth Siddal posed for Millais over a four month period in a bath full of water kept warm by lamps underneath. Millais covered her body with flowers that signify love, pain, innocence, and faithfulness.

The painting also inspired Hamlet adaptations by Laurence Olivier (1948) and Kenneth Branagh (1996), as well as a 1995 music video for “Where The Wild Roses Grow” by Kylie Minogue and Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds. The art news website ArtNet even pointed out that the scene in season 3 of White Lotus in which Walton Goggins and Aimee Lou Woods are floating dead in the water appears to invoke the Millais painting. Arguably the most famous depiction of Ophelia in pop culture in recent years is the 2019 film Ophelia, which reimagined Hamlet from Ophelia’s point of view, with Daisy Ridley starring as Ophelia.

Swift acknowledged the Hamlet reference when she was previewing the album during an interview on her Kelce’s podcast, joking, “He may not have read Hamlet, but I explained it to him, so he knows what happened.”