Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton are ideal as malevolent married couple Martha and George in first-time-director Mike Nichols’ searing film adaption of Edward Albee’s groundbreaking play, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Taylor won her second Best Actress Academy Award (and New York Film Critics, National Board of Review and British Film Academy Best Actress Awards). Burton matches her as her emotionally spent spouse. And George Segal and Best Supporting Actress Oscar winner Sandy Dennis score as a younger couple straying into their destructive path. Martha and George are people chained to their own mediocrity in the halls of academia. When they invite an unwitting new professor (Segal) and his naïve wife (Dennis) over for cocktails one night, the sordid game of verbal invective and elaborate emotional contortions begins, fueled by lust, anger and booze. The movie won a total of five Academy Awards and remains, after more than five decades, a taboo-toppling landmark in cinema. (Dir. by Mike Nichols, 1966, USA, 131 mins., Not Rated)