Edward Albee, who put together the stage play, was at first skeptical about the movie. How can a 30-something Elizabeth Taylor play a 50 year old woman? How can a director who never made a film before, and only put together Broadway farces, direct such a serious tale of a marriage gone sour? Of course doubts, albeit of a different kind, dogged his Broadway production as well: the coarse language and adult subjects turned off some and intense others. It took no small amount of effort to get the movie approved.

On this day, June 22, in  1966, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, premiered, to an even greater success than the stage play. It was nominated for a staggering 19 Academy Awards, in just about every category possible, winning five.

Critics read into the story what they wanted. Many thought the play was allegorically about four gay people disguised as straight. A Newsweek reviewer insisted it must be so, and when Albee wrote him a letter correcting him, the writer replied that everyone knows that critics are much better judges of a work’s meaning than authors are, and, anyway, that interpretation was the only one that he could live with.