Elizabeth Taylor documentary director ‘surprised’ by how much the movie star was ‘slut-shamed’

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The director behind a new documentary about Elizabeth Taylor was shocked by how horribly the movie star was treated after news broke of her scandalous affair with Richard Burton in 1962.

“Just how much she was slut-shamed and the just the level of being the first modern celebrity,” Nanette Burstein tells Page Six. “I don’t think I quite understood the paparazzi insanity of her life.”

The new HBO doc, “Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes,” which was screened Tuesday at Tribeca Film Festival, includes 40 hours of newly unearthed audio interviews with the late actress.

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“I [was] met with such opposition from everyone,” Taylor said in one of the interviews of her decision to wed Burton after their affair began on the set of “Cleopatra” in Rome.

She admitted that her family was opposed to the marriage and her father called her a “whore.”

The affair was even condemned by the Pope at the time, with The Vatican newspaper denouncing the relationship in an open letter and calling it an example of “erotic vagrancy.”

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Taylor said the pair attempted to end their relationship, but revealed they’d signed on to co-star in 1963’s “The V.I.P.s” so they could see each other again.

“I couldn’t help loving him,” the former MGM star recalled. “It was a fact.”

At the time, Taylor was married to her fourth husband Eddie Fisher and Burton was married to Sybil Williams, with whom he shared two daughters.

Even before the Burton Scandal, Taylor — whose third husband Mike Todd died in a tragic plane crash in 1958 — was ripped apart by the media for beginning a relationship with Fisher when he was still married to actress Debbie Reynolds.

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Burstein tells us while making the documentary she was surprised that the legendary star was had so much “insecurity” and felt like she was never respected as an actress and seen only as a sex symbol.

“And certainly everyone made her feel that way,” she adds, noting that journalists would constantly mention it.

“They brought it up, like, even more times than I could bring up in the film,” the director explains, “because it was ridiculous and she was so annoyed by it. She’s like, ‘Why are we talking about this? I’m an actress. Like, why don’t what does that even mean?'”

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The documentary also includes audio of Taylor discussing her attraction to men who dominated her.

“I made sure to put that in the film a few times,” Burstein tells us. “It really was important to her, her level of attraction to the man. Even though she was such a dominating personality, in her private life, her sex life, she wanted to be dominated.”

Taylor and Burton were married from 1964 to 1974. They reconciled and remarried the following year but the second nuptials lasted less than a year.

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The actress, who morphed into a leading AIDS activist, married two more times before she died in 2011 at age 79.

Burton, who suffered from alcoholism for most of his life, died in 1984 at the age of 58.

“Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes,” premieres Aug. 3 on HBO.