Elizabeth Grant has stood at the helm of her beauty empire for more than sixty years, regaling admirers with personal stories, notably one event that nearly killed her. When a German rocket dropped soundlessly from the sky on a peaceful Sunday in wartime London, its impact and resultant bomblast damage took her down, sliced her face, rendered her deaf in one ear and very nearly blinded her.

A young makeup artist at Ellstree Studios, she thought herself so repulsively scarred, she could no longer face acting luminaries like Vivien Leigh, Margaret Leighton, and Robert Taylor with any degree of confidence. “I honestly thought my life was over,” Elizabeth says.
But as readers will learn, she easily has more than nine lives. From that misfortune came salvation in the discovery of her proprietary Torricelumn serum, a complex of marine ingredients that restored her complexion to sheer luminosity. This singular event, presented in charismatic fashion on Canada’s Shopping Channel, was just one of the reasons I felt compelled to know more about her. I sensed a wealth of wisdom and experience lurking beneath her self-deprecating wit. A more profound history – one that had lain hidden for decades -- was waiting to be unearthed.

Revealing the multiple sides of Elizabeth was a painstaking labour of love, and one of my most rewarding journeys. Little by little, she emerged from self-imposed shadows with shocking and disturbing accounts of her nightmarish childhood. Years of abuse and neglect had spawned crushing self-doubt, yet she soldiered on, nursing a remarkable will to survive at any cost – even daring to reach for the unreachable. The Elizabeth Grant story spins a cinematic voyage on three continents, through Heaven and Hell. Compelling, tragic, wistful and humourous, it charts a unique woman’s determination to overcome every boulder in her path. Her survival is a raw and powerful testament to human perseverance and her ultimate success provides inspiration that transcends time.