Elizabeth Taylor possessed a rare and radiant beauty. That dark hair. Those curves. Those eyes: enthralling. She was co-owner of the most aching big-screen kiss in movie history. And with Richard Burton, she was accomplice and wife (twice) in the most storied, stormy love affair of the 20th century.
When news came Wednesday of Dame Elizabeth Taylor’s death from congestive heart failure at age 79, there were countless entry points for a recounting of her fame and pop-culture endurance.
Would a remembrance begin with the two-time Academy Award winner’s film career, which spanned six decades? Her first breakthrough came when she was all of 12 years old. Or should it begin with her often nimble courting of fame, her paparazzi-documented celebrity? The seven husbands and eight marriages, the bouts of poor health? And then there was Taylor’s work for AIDS research, a legacy worthy of a legend.
This tango of onscreen allure, off- screen drama and stubborn decency is what made Taylor such a remarkable figure. She didn’t merely define movie star, she remade the notion in her own gorgeous and complicated, vulnerable and headstrong image.
She made more than 50 movies and was nominated for five Oscars, winning in 1961 and 1967. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences gave her its humanitarian award. The American Film Institute gave her its lifetime-achievement award. She also was a mother, raising four children.
Her sins — if one saw them that way, and many did during her affairs with crooner Eddie Fisher and then actor Richard Burton — were those of appetite. She drank. She ate. She liked jewels. She tussled with a prescription-drug problem and overeating. And she got married, a lot. Her conquests: Conrad “Nicky” Hilton Jr., Michael Wilding, Mike Todd, Fisher, Burton, Sen. John Warner and construction worker Larry Fortensky.
Silence a cause for concern
When Taylor entered Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles in mid-February, it could have been just another hospital stay in a parade of them so long that in 1978, John Belushi — a man with his own bedeviling cravings — made sport of her choking on chicken in a “Saturday Night Live” sketch. She survived the gag and the joker by 29 years.
Still, when information from the prodigiously Tweeting and communicative star grew quiet, it was cause for worry. Taylor often seemed as indomitable and defiant as the characters she played. She was tenacious like Maggie the Cat in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.” She could straight talk like Leslie Benedict in “Giant.” She could be as imperious as Cleopatra.
With her death, a particular kind of Hollywood glamour draws ever nearer to its own end. Gone are her elders but contemporaries: Bette Davis, Humphrey Bogart, the amazing Hepburns — Katharine and Audrey.
Taylor was a transitional figure, a stunning product of the studio system and a rebellious force as its power waned. She benefited from gossip columnist Hedda Hopper’s adoration and later survived the powerful writer’s assaults.
“She started out in the studio system, and that was a certain kind of celebrity. They controlled everything. She didn’t like that,” said William Mann, author of the 2009 Taylor biography, “How to Be a Movie Star.” “She didn’t like being told what do to, who to marry — as was the case with her first husband. When the studio system collapsed in the late ’50s, early ’60s, she took the reins of her career and rewrote the rules about how celebrity was sold and marketed.
“For one thing, she insisted she be paid a million dollars and receive a share of the profits. Which is the way they do business in Hollywood today.”
Born Feb. 27, 1932, in London, Taylor, her parents Francis Lenn Taylor and Sara Viola Warmbrodt — both American — and her brother moved to the U.S. in 1939.
String of Oscar nominations
Her incandescent breakthrough as a young equestrian came quickly in “National Velvet” (1944).
A second incarnation as a woman — desired and brimming — came with “A Place in the Sun” (1951). In director George Stevens’ film, a 19-year-old Taylor leans into Montgomery Clift’s yearning character to whisper before a kiss, “Tell Mama, tell Mama all.” It remains the most erotically charged scene in movie history.
For four consecutive years, beginning in 1957, Taylor was an Oscar nominee for her portrayals of a Southern belle in “Raintree Country”; an overheated spouse in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof”; tormented Catherine in “Suddenly, Last Summer”; and promiscuous Gloria in “Butterfield 8.” She won for the latter.
She triumphed again in 1967 for her turn as Martha, to Richard Burton’s George, in the adaptation of Edward Albee’s living-room drama, “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” Decades before Charlize Theron or Halle Berry won Oscars for camouflaging their beauty and digging into emotional ugliness, Taylor bellowed as that bitter college professor’s wife.
If Taylor set a trend then, she did so again with her work for AIDS. She co-founded what would become the American Foundation for AIDS Research (AmFAR) in 1985.
She could be a ferociously loyal friend. In 1995, Taylor appeared during Diane Sawyer’s “PrimeTime Live” interview with Michael Jackson as he rebutted accusations of pedophilia. When her friend died in 2009, she released a statement: “I loved Michael with all my soul, and I can’t imagine life without him. We had so much in common, and we had such loving fun together.”
Before there was the concept of “bling,” Taylor lived it. In 1969, Burton famously gave her a 69-carat, pear- shaped diamond. Years later, her fragrance, White Diamonds, with $67.2 million in sales, remains the best-selling celebrity scent.
Up until her death, Taylor remained a staple in entertainment news. Last summer, when rumors surfaced of a face-off between Angelina Jolie and Catherine Zeta-Jones for a reprise of Cleopatra, Taylor went all Twitter on them. “Hold your horses world,” she tweeted. “I’ve been hearing all kinds of rumors about someone being cast to play me in a film about Richard and myself. No one is going to play Elizabeth Taylor but Elizabeth Taylor herself.”
On screen and off
“I want it all quickly ’cause I don’t want God to stop and think and wonder if I’m getting more than my share.”
As Velvet Brown in “National Velvet,” 1944
“Mama, face it. I was the slut of all time.” As Gloria Wandrous in “Butterfield 8,” 1960
“Some audience out there — and don’t ask me who they are, but there are millions — like scandal. They like filth. And if they want to hear that I’m dead, sorry, folks, I’m not. And I don’t plan on it.”
“Larry King Live,” May 2006“If it weren’t for homosexuals, there would be no culture. We can trace that back thousands of years. So many of the great musicians, the great painters were homosexuals. Without their input, it would be an entirely different, flat world.”
Interview magazine, February 2007
“I have never wanted to be a queen! Cleopatra was a role, and I am an actor, so it was fun to play one, but it’s not real. The real Cleopatra had an incredibly complicated life, and she had to be very, very canny to survive as long as she did. For me, the most interesting thing about her was her passion. The things that are important to me — being a mother, a businesswoman, an activist — are all things that were born out of great passion.”
Harper’s Bazaar, February 2011
The Best Kiss. Ever
“A Place in the Sun” (1951)
“Tell Mama, tell Mama all,” says wealthy Angela Vickers to gentle striver George Eastman (Montgomery Clift) before leaning in for their first kiss. The pair were so beautiful together, you nearly wanted to drown poor Shelley Winters’ character yourself.
An Enduring Role Model
“Giant” (1956)
In a turning point of this saga of a Texas marriage, Taylor stands in the shadows, relying not on her visage but her voice. Rock Hudson slouches in a chair in the foreground. He has all the light, cast from a nearby fireplace. But she owns the scene in which she suggests they take a break.
Meowww
“Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” (1958)
Was there ever this much beauty and “mendacity” beneath the roof of one Southern mansion? Throughout this tale of secrets and closeted desire, we pull for Taylor’s antsy Maggie and wonder — like Big Daddy — what in tarnation is wrong with Paul Newman’s astoundingly handsome Brick.
No “Pretty Woman” end
“Butterfield 8” (1960)
“A mess” is what critic Pauline Kael deemed this drama that begins with Gloria Wandrous (Taylor) furious that a wealthy one-night stand has left money for her in the morning. The film gets more melodramatic each year, but Taylor’s Gloria is touching as she embarks on a relationship with a married man. Like her, we want the impossible to happen. Oscar winner.
Fighters for the ages
“Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” (1966)
Pairing the just-married Taylor and Richard Burton as George and Martha could have been disastrous stunt casting. Instead, it’s an unforgettable plunge into marital abyss with a couple who knew how to fight on screen and off. Oscar winner.
