Elizabeth Taylor’s Suicide Attempt, the True Loves of Her Life and Other Bombshells from the New Documentary “The Lost Tapes”

‘Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes,’ featuring newly unearthed interviews from 1964, premieres on HBO Aug. 3

Elizabeth Taylor wasn’t one to mince words. But even the late Cleopatra star’s most ardent fans will be surprised by her frankness in the recently unearthed interviews at the center of the new documentary Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes.

Director Nanette Burstein’s documentary (which made its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in May and debuts on HBO Aug. 3) samples 40 hours of conversations between Taylor and the late journalist Richard Meryman in 1964 and 1965 — a time when the Oscar winner’s relationship with new husband Richard Burton (her fifth of seven total) demanded so much attention that the paparazzi were invented in order to cover it.

“So much had been written about her and scandalized about her,” says Tim Mendelson, cotrustee of Taylor’s estate and her executive assistant from 1990 — around the time she launched the revolutionary perfume White Diamonds — until her death from congestive heart failure at age 79 in 2011. The Lost Tapes, he tells PEOPLE, “sets the record straight.”

The film covers Taylor’s career and celebrity, but also reveals who she was as a wife, mother, activist and friend. “If everybody could go through life with someone like Elizabeth Taylor over their shoulder supporting them,” says Barbara Berkowitz, Taylor’s lawyer and cotrustee, “we’d have a much nicer world.” Read on for some of the upcoming documentary’s key revelations.

Related: Elizabeth Taylor’s Lawyer and Executive Assistant Recall Fondest Memories of the ‘Fabulous’ Late Star (Exclusive)

Taylor remembered herself as a “terrified little girl”

The London-born actress needed no encouragement from her art dealer father, Francis Taylor, or stage actress mother, Sara Sothern, to give Hollywood a try when the family relocated to Los Angeles when Taylor was 7. But the joys of acting gave way to irritation over her “grim” school on the MGM studio lot, nonstop chaperones and, in her teenage years, being “stuck as an ingenue” opposite much older actors.

In The Lost Tapes, the National Velvet star speaks candidly about having to grow up fast: Her first kiss was a week before her first on-camera one. “The film kiss was better,” she quips.

In 1950 Taylor married her first husband, hotel heir Conrad “Nicky” Hilton Jr. In one of the conversations with Meryman, she recalls that she suffered a miscarriage during their eight-month marriage after a drunken Hilton kicked her in the stomach.

She drove with James Dean earlier on the day he died

Taylor became close with many of her costars, including on a project she particularly enjoyed: George Stevens’ hit 1956 Western Giant, costarring Rock Hudson and James Dean. In the tapes, she recalls Dean “would tell me about some of the grief and unhappiness in his life and some of his loves and tragedies. And the next day on the set I’d say, ‘Hi Jimmy!’ And it was almost as if he didn’t want to sort of recognize that he had revealed so much of himself the night before.”

She also recalls learning the news of Dean’s death by car accident on Sept. 30, 1955, when Giant was in post-production. Taylor added that she had “just been with him that day, driving around the studio in his Porsche. He was so alive, he was so vital. I couldn’t believe that he was dead.”

Related: Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton Lived Like ‘Members of the Royal Family,’ Author Says (Exclusive)

Mike Todd was the love of her life — until Richard Burton

Few would argue that Hilton, Michael Wilding, Eddie Fisher, John Warner or Larry Fortensky (husbands number one, two, four, six and seven, respectively) were the true loves of Taylor’s life. At least not compared to Mike Todd, the Oscar-winning Around the World in 80 Days producer who swept her off her feet, fathered her first daughter, Liza, in 1957 and died in a plane crash 13 months into their wedded bliss.

“Their love affair is very touching,” Burstein tells PEOPLE, admitting they “had a complicated relationship too.” Taylor’s need “to be dominated,” as the actress confesses, led to her tempestuous relationship with Burton, their 11 films together and their two marriages and two divorces between 1964 and 1976.

She attempted suicide during her marriage to Eddie Fisher

While mourning the loss of Todd, Taylor tied the knot with his friend Fisher in 1959 — three hours after his divorce from Debbie Reynolds was finalized. “I never loved Eddie,” Taylor says in the new tapes. “I liked him. I felt sorry for him. And I liked talking [to him]. But he was not Mike.”

She also reveals that while married to Fisher, she was so miserable that she attempted suicide by taking sleeping pills. “I was fed up with living,” she recalls.

Related: Elizabeth Taylor Regretted Marrying Eddie Fisher, Stealing Him from Debbie Reynolds: 'Friggin', Awful Mistake'

Taylor believed her first Oscar win was a sympathy vote

Before her heralded turn in 1966’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? earned her a second Academy Award, Taylor won her first for 1960’s Butterfield 8. She despised both the movie, which in The Lost Tapes she calls “a piece of s---,” and her performance in it.

A severe bout with pneumonia while filming Cleopatra resulted in a highly publicized tracheotomy, during which Taylor later claimed she was pronounced dead four times. She laments in the documentary that she “won the Oscar for my tracheotomy.”

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In the end, family life and activism were more important than acting

The final scenes in The Lost Tapes show Taylor founding the American Foundation for AIDS Research (amfAR) in 1985 and the Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation (ETAF) in 1991. “No one wanted to talk about” the disease, she’s seen saying in a press conference. “It so angered me that I finally thought to myself, ‘Bitch! Do something yourself!’”

Friendships with gay men like Hudson, who died from AIDS in 1985, awoke Taylor’s activist spirit, but it was her “love and compassion” that made her frame the disease as a medical rather than moral issue, says Mendelson. “Everybody wanted to judge the people who had AIDS and how they got AIDS. She understood that because she was so judged, [including] for who she slept with.”

Related: Elizabeth Taylor Regretted Marrying Eddie Fisher, Stealing Him from Debbie Reynolds: 'Friggin', Awful Mistake'

Berkowitz says Taylor visited hospitals’ AIDS wards and “made it all about the patient” — without cameras and prying eyes, for the first time in her very public life.

Most of all, Taylor thought of herself as a “big family person,” says Berkowitz. “In the 20-plus years that I worked with her, she always had her family there for holidays. It was very important to her to be the glue that kept all of her children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren together.”

Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes will premiere on HBO Aug. 3.

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