Lunch Break Video: Elizabeth Taylor was at her very best in these scenes from “Suddenly Last Summer”

Elizabeth Taylor earned a well-deserved Oscar nomination for her extraordinary performance as Catherine Holly a young woman whose cousin’s death on a trip to Europe under sordid circumstances results in an emotional disturbance so severe she is institutionalized.

The cousin, Sebastian, was using her to attract boys in order to proposition them to prostitute themselves. That’s the reason for the iconic white bathing suit Taylor, in her late 20s and completely ravishing, wears in some of the flashback scenes.

She starred with Katharine Hepburn and Montgomery Clift in this 1959 film written by Gore Vidal based on the Tennessee Williams play. It was directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz.

This is the final 15 minutes or so of the film when Catherine – who Hepburn’s character wants lobotomized – grows increasingly anguished as she recounts, in excruciating detail, her cousin’s brutal murder.