Director-choreographer Herbert Ross staged the dance sequence between Elizabeth Taylor and George Segal at the roadside café.
During shooting, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton used identical red bicycles, lettered in gold, to get around the huge Warner Bros. studio lot.
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.
Every credited member of the cast received an Academy Award nomination.
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.
In addition to Sleuth and Give 'em Hell, Harry!, only one of three films in which entire on-screen billed cast received acting Oscar nominations. (Although Sleuth's credits did contain a number of nonexistent phony cast members to mislead audiences into thinking it was more than a two-character thriller and Virginia Woolf did feature two unbilled bit players as roadhouse employees.)
In her A&E Biography special, Elizabeth Taylor remarked that her performance as Martha remains her personal best.
In this film, Elizabeth Taylor does an exaggerated impression of Bette Davis saying a line from Beyond the Forest: "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 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.
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".
The first film to use the word "bugger" in its dialogue.
The first movie to be given the MPAA tag: "No one under 18 will be admitted unless accompanied by his parent."
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.
The only Best Picture Academy Award nominee to be nominated for every award category in which it was eligible.
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.
The record changer turntable shown on the corner shelf is a Glaser-Steers model.
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.