Nostalgia is a dangerous thing, but sometimes it's clear that the olden days were just better. Where last year's Oscars' dinner was a sea of mini-burgers and four-cheese pizzas, where the food mattered little because contemporary stars aren't encouraged to eat, and nominees creaked their brittle bones down the red carpet in gowns that weighed more than them, the 33rd Academy Awards in 1961 was altogether more exciting.

Here, Elizabeth Taylor is pictured an hour after accepting the best actress award for Butterfield 8, two hours after fainting backstage, and six weeks after an emergency tracheotomy while filming Cleopatra. She's pictured three years before she left her fourth husband (Eddie Fisher, just out of shot) for her Cleopatra co-star Richard Burton. And she's at a table that's groaning under the weighty glamour of a night's festivities. There is Dom Perignon. There's an Oscar. There is bread. Taylor was famed for her appetite. Filming Cleopatra in Rome, she'd get "buckets of Chasen's chilli" flown over from Los Angeles. Rumour has it that aged 13, she'd lunch in the Hollywood canteens with Nibbles, her pet chipmunk. Perhaps, though, her foodie influence on him was ill-advised. "I left a chocolate Easter egg, opened, on top of a wardrobe," she told Interview magazine in 2007. When she entered the bedroom, "I'd always hear a clatter from wherever Nibbles was swinging. But there was no sound. I looked up at the wardrobe and there was the Easter egg, half gone, and there was Nibbles, dead... I almost died myself."

After Taylor's death last year, a menu of her typical day's diet in 1960 was printed in the Village Voice: Breakfast – Mimosa, crispy bacon, scrambled eggs. Lunch – peanut butter and bacon sandwich, Chateau Margaux 1945. Dinner – crispy fried chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy, corn bread, biscuits and gravy, peas, trifle, homemade potato chips and a Jack Daniels, on the rocks. "Is Elizabeth Taylor fat?" Joan Rivers once said. "Her favourite food is seconds." RIP, an appetite to envy.