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The actress was twice married to and divorced from actor Richard Burton, who paid $305,000 for the Asscher cut stone in 1968. It has now come to light that the diamond was known as the Krupp since Vera Krupp formerly had it. According to reports, Vera Krupp was the former spouse of Nazi war criminal Alfred Krupp.
Ward Landrigan, the head of Sotheby’s jewellery department, in Kate Andersen Brower’s book “Elizabeth Taylor: The Grit and Glamour of an Icon”, says, “After an auction, I always took my staff over to the bar next door from our New York office, and we were sitting there having a drink and it came on the radio that Elizabeth Taylor had bought the diamond. I said, ‘Oh man, that’s so cool!’
He further adds, “About 20 minutes later someone came over from the office and said, ‘Elizabeth wants the diamond now.’ I said, ‘Where is she?’ They said, ‘She’s in London. Her people have booked you on a flight. Go.'”
Taylor also took note of the absurdity of her possession of a former Nazi’s diamond, noting that she had converted to Judaism in 1959. She joked, “When it came up for auction in the late 1960s, I thought how perfect it would be if a nice Jewish girl like me were to own it.”
Dame Elizabeth Rosemond Taylor DBE was a British-American actress who started her career in the early 1940s as a child actor. In the 1950s, she was one of the most well-known figures in classic Hollywood cinema.