Trivia for
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966) More at IMDbPro »

• Robert Redford turned down the role of Nick.
  
  
• Sandy Dennis, who was pregnant at the time of filming, suffered a miscarriage on the set.
  
  
• Every credited member of the cast received an Academy Award nomination.
  
  
• The first film to use the word "Bugger" in its dialogue.
  
  
• The Bette Davis film that Martha's character refers to at the film's beginning is Beyond the Forest (1949).
  
  
• Early candidates for the role of Martha included Bette Davis, Ingrid Bergman, Rosalind Russell and Patricia Neal. Early candidates for the role of George included James Mason, Cary Grant, Henry Fonda, Arthur Hill, Jack Lemmon and Peter O'Toole.
  
  
• Connie Stevens, who was under contract to Warner Bros. at the time of the film's casting, pleaded with studio head Jack L. Warner for the part of Honey.
  
  
• Elizabeth Taylor gained nearly 30 pounds to play the role of a middle-aged wife just for this film.
  
  
• When Martha opens the door to find George with the snapdragons, he says "Flores... Flores para los muertos." This is a direct quote from "A Streetcar Named Desire", when a peddlar woman comes to the door and offers these "flowers for the dead" to Blanche.
  
  
• Academy Award-winning cinematographer Harry Stradling Sr. was replaced by Haskell Wexler just after filming began for attempting to "beautify" Elizabeth Taylor.
  
  
• The first movie to successfully challenge the Production Code Office and eventually force the Motion Picture Association of America to overhaul the Production Code Seal with the eventual classification system (G-GP-M-X) in 1968.
  
  
• The MPAA insisted on the removal of the term "screw you" from the film where it was replaced with the term "God damn you" but allowed the terms "screw" and "hump the hostess" to remain in the film.
  
  
• Frank Flanagan, who appears uncredited as the motel/café innkeeper, was the film's gaffer. The woman who plays his wife is actually his real-life wife Agnes who was Elizabeth Taylor's hairdresser on the film.
  
  
• During shooting, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton used identical red bicycles, lettered in gold, to get around the huge Warner Bros. studio lot.
  
  
• Richard Burton celebrated his 40th birthday on the set of the film where spouse Elizabeth Taylor presented him with a white 1966 Oldsmobile Toronado.
  
  
• According a 2005 interview with Edward Albee, the original writer of the play which the film is based, producer Ernest Lehman hired himself to write the screenplay for $250,000. Also, Albee says that when director Mike Nichols and stars Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor read the script, they hated it so much that, unknown to Lehman, they changed all of the dialog back to Albee's play save two lines: "Hey, let's go to the roadhouse!" and "Hey, let's come back from the roadhouse!" Albee said, "Two lines for $250,000, $125,000 a piece. That's pretty good."
  
  
• The first movie to be given the MPAA tag: "No one under 18 will be admitted unless accompanied by his parent."
  
  
• Director-choreographer Herbert Ross staged the dance sequence between Elizabeth Taylor and George Segal at the roadside café.
  
  
• According to Edward Albee, the only thing he doesn't like about the film is the over-use of over-head shots.
  
  
• In 2007, the American Film Institute ranked this as the #67 Greatest Movie of All Time. It was the first inclusion of this film on the list.
  
  
• Jack Lemmon actually accepted the role of George but changed his mind a few days later with no explanation given to Ernest Lehman.
  
  
• Willard Maas and Marie Menken and their relationship were the basis for the characters of Martha and George.
  
  
• The original Broadway stage production of "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" by Edward Albee opened at the Billy Rose Theater on October 13, 1962 starring Arthur Hill and Uta Hagen and ran for 664 performances.
  
  
• When the film was shown on network television for the first time, some local television affiliates bumped the broadcast from 9:00 P.M. to 11:30 P.M., because a film with such adult language had never been shown on network TV.
  
  
• On the back of the movie tie-in paperback of the play, it reads: "A Warner Bros. Technicolor film - even though the film was shot in black & white".
  
  
• Costing $7.5 million, it was the most expensive black & white movie yet made in the U.S. Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton and Edward Albee's combined salaries/fees were (not including percentages): $2,350,000 - $1,100,000 for Taylor, $750,000 for Burton and $500,000 for Albee.
  
  
• In this film, Elizabeth Taylor does an exaggerated impression of Bette Davis saying a line from Beyond the Forest (1949): "What a dump!" In an interview with Barbara Walters, Bette Davis said that in the film, she really did not deliver the line in such an exaggerated manner. She said it in a more subtle, low-key manner, but it has passed into legend that she said it the way Elizabeth Taylor's delivered it in this film. During the Barbara Walters interview, the clip of Bette Davis delivering the line from Beyond the Forest (1949) was shown to prove that Davis was correct. However, since people expected Bette Davis to deliver the line the way Elizabeth Taylor had, she always opened her in-person, one woman show by saying the line in a campy, exaggerated manner: "WHAT ... A... DUMP!!!". It always brought down the house. "I imitated the imitators", Davis said.
  
  
• Jack Lemmon was the only actor to be offered the role of George in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966) before Richard Burton was cast. He accepted the role but quickly changed his mind the next day without offering any explanation.
  
  
• Mercedes McCambridge had portrayed "Martha" onstage and sought after the film role.
  
  
• The fourth of eleven films that Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton starred in together.
  
  
• The film's opening shot of the moon was taken from the 1940 Bette Davis Warner Bros. film The Letter (1940).
  
  
• According to director Mike Nichols, actress Marlene Dietrich visited the set and completely ignored Elizabeth Taylor, only speaking with Richard Burton and Nichols. Elizabeth later commented "It's a very strange thing to be ignored on your own movie set."
  
  
• The only Best Picture Academy Award nominee to be nominated for every award category in which it was eligible.
  
  
• 18th July 1966: Police seized this film, and arrested the manager of a local Nashville cinema, for contravening a municipal order that banned films, as this, for contents of an obscene nature.
  
  

• SPOILER: According to director Mike Nichols, producer/screenwriter Ernest Lehman had written a different ending for the film where George and Martha's son had hung himself in the closet years before. Nichols refused to shoot it.
  
  

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