Elizabeth Taylor, who died early Wednesday morning of congestive heart failure at age 79, did something no other actor ever did. At every stage of her career she became a superstar all over again. As a magical little girl, a pristine ingénue and a voluptuous woman, she created characters and images that enraptured or fascinated international audiences.
In the second half of the 20th century, no other Hollywood-bred celebrity was as frequently photographed, celebrated or vilified. Her eight marriages — including a couple to Richard Burton — landed her in headlines and altered her persona. So did her frequent illnesses, showy lifestyle and refreshing frankness about her own allure and appetites and weaknesses and causes. She went from playing pastoral children and impossibly desirable love objects to spewing out profanities as a series of coarse and combative voluptuaries.
The breadth of her performing life was staggering.
Generations of men and women who came of age watching her movies can bring back their own lives' passages by closing their eyes and recalling Taylor as she grew from childhood and adolescence to adulthood.
"I always was a fan of hers," John Waters said yesterday. "She was a real movie star and she did great stuff for AIDS. She was amazing. Right up to the end she had a great sense of humor." She was the idol of Waters' muse and star, Divine. "Look at some of the movies we made," Waters said, "like 'Multiple Maniacs,' and you can see we were paying tribute to her. Divine wanted to be Elizabeth Taylor." The director of "Hairspray" added, "She really was a hair-hopper."
She was captivating as the 12-year-old jockey obsessed with winning the Grand National Steeplechase in "National Velvet" (1944), especially when she declared that she wanted her dreams to come true quickly, so God wouldn't get a chance to wonder whether he'd given her too much glory.
She was miraculously soulful as the debutante in "A Place in the Sun" (1951), feeling all the power and fragility of a "scary" and "wonderful" love for a melancholy man (Montgomery Clift), then brewing a protective aura strong enough to shield both of them — before realizing, with a premonition of disaster, "Every time you leave me for a minute, it's like goodbye."
She offered an indelible image of sensual readiness as the frustrated wife of a broken-down Southern ex-athlete (Paul Newman) in "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" (1958). She turned a white slip into the sexiest of all movie outfits. But she also got the emotion behind the statement, "Living with somebody you love can be lonelier than living entirely alone — if the one you love doesn't love you." As Maggie the Cat she learned that the victory of a cat on a hot tin roof is "Just staying on it, I guess, as long as she can."
Taylor stayed on the hot tin roof of Hollywood stardom longer than any other star of her generation. Born in London on February 27, 1932, the daughter of American art dealers, she came to the U.S. when her parents brought her to Los Angeles right before the outbreak of the Second World War. She took a screen test at Universal and made a picture there. In MGM's "Lassie Come Home" (1943), as a Scottish aristocrat sympathetic to a commoner's love for his uncommon collie, she caught moviegoers' eyes. Even in a small, unbilled part in the 1944 "Jane Eyre" (a loan-out to Fox), she stood out from a gaggle of schoolgirls. An equally tiny role that year in "The White Cliffs of Dover" brought her under the guidance of Greta Garbo's best director, Clarence Brown.
When director Brown wasn't satisfied with a nation-wide search for an actor to play Velvet Brown, the heroine of "National Velvet," he asked, "Why not Elizabeth Taylor?" At the behest of MGM's producers and executives, she added pounds and put on muscle to play the athletic role.
"Frankly, I doubt I am qualified to arrive at any sensible assessment of Elizabeth Taylor," wrote poet-novelist-critic James Agee. "Ever since I first saw the child, two or three years ago, in I forget what minor role in what movie, I have been choked with the peculiar sort of adoration I might have felt if we were both in the same grade of primary school." Apparently, so were the MGM executives who seemed content to watch her develop a new physicality in forgettable roles in uninspired projects.
Reviewing "A Date With Judy" (1948), Otis L. Guernsey of the New York Herald Tribune noted, "The erstwhile child star of 'National Velvet' and other films has been touched by Metro's magic wand and turned into a real, 14-carat, 100-proof siren with a whole new career opening in front of her," and warned Hedy Lamarr to watch out for her.
But Taylor loathed studio chief Louis B. Mayer and the contract she said enslaved her to MGM. She did some good work there, more elsewhere.
Director Vincente Minnelli cast her shrewdly in MGM's upper-middle-class family comedy "Father of the Bride" (1950), and its sequel, "Father's Little Dividend" (1951), as Spencer Tracy's daughter. She's charmingly petulant when proclaiming her own maturity ("This isn't a kids' party," she insists, "It's my wedding and my friends"), and she's the picture of nuptial perfection in her gown. By the time the original film appeared in theaters, Nicky Hilton, of the Hilton-hotels dynasty, had married her. By the premiere of the second film, the marriage was through. Taylor later said she had been too immature. Others said Hilton was a lout.
At Paramount for "A Place in the Sun," made before those movies but released after them, a great director, George Stevens, partnered her with that bluesy spellbinder Montgomery Clift and caught her in full sensuous bloom. In this free adaptation of Theodore Dreiser's "An American Tragedy" (referenced more recently in Woody Allen's "Match Point"), Taylor plays a society girl who, once ignited, stays true to her passions. Clift plays the upwardly-hopeful poor relation of a wealthy manufacturing family. She sets off emotional currents that pass from her to Clift and return strengthened and enriched.
The amorous scenes tingle with a rare screen quality: a shared sensitivity between soul-mates. (She and Clift immediately became lifelong off-screen friends.) In their famous slow dance, Taylor and Clift gently stab at each other with a sort of sharpened tenderness. She misinterprets his distance — which springs mostly from his guilt over his secret affair with a factory girl (Shelley Winters) — and prods him into saying, "I love you; I've loved you since the first moment I saw you; I guess maybe I've even loved you before I saw you." As soon as she says she loves him too, they close in on each other, as the camera, still swaying to the music, captures them in close-ups so gigantic that they seem to drink each other in through their pores. She recognizes instinctively what he knows concretely: Their love can last only if they create their own world for it. The performers conjure unmatched blends of intimacy and wonderment streaked with panic.
Amazingly, back at MGM, she found herself in studio fluff like "Love is Better than Ever" — a lesser effort from "Singin' in the Rain" director Stanley Donen, whose own marriage was breaking up. Partly to separate Taylor from scandal because of her burgeoning relationship with Donen, MGM sent her to London for the medieval extravaganza "Ivanhoe." As Rebecca, a righteous Jewish moneylender's daughter, Taylor is such a seductive camera subject that her boredom with the role hardly registers. When the villain, a wilting flower of Norman chivalry, says he'd gladly die for the mere knowledge that Rebecca could love him, you believe him. Taylor's knock-out has gumption — at one point she dresses up like Robin Hood, or maybe Peter Pan — but her beauty is her not-so-secret weapon. Her Cupid-puckered lips spray every man with arrows.
In England, she met her next husband, the urbane, 20-years-older actor Michael Wilding, with whom she would have two children. Ironically, this marriage would break under the weight of her burgeoning importance to the studio, though MGM was delivering her worst run of assignments yet. She did give an affecting performance in writer-director Richard Brooks' travesty of F. Scott's Fitzgerald's "Babylon Revisited," "The Last Time I Saw Paris" (1954), as the wife of an alcoholic writer (Van Johnson). She alone struck the Fitzgeraldian note of glorious doomed glamour.
But it was George Stevens who really came to the rescue with "Giant" (1956). In this adaptation of an Edna Ferber best-seller, Taylor played Leslie, the wealthy and cultured Maryland-bred wife of Texas rancher Bick Benedict (Rock Hudson) and the romantic ideal of upstart oilman Jett Rink (James Dean). It's Dean's picture — he commits grand theft, bringing his invented-on-the-spot modern mannerisms into a high-gloss production. But Taylor draws on her bank of sensitivity when Leslie recognizes Jett's ambitions and his feelings for her. She also develops enough power and emotional heft in the course of this three hour and 18-minute film to persuade you she can be a matriarch of a revitalized Texas clan, complete with interracial grand-kids. Off-screen, she wed another older man and one of the true loves of her life — the outsized impresario Mike Todd, who was enjoying tremendous success with the smash Oscar-winning novelty film, "Around the World in 80 Days" (1956).
As soon as she and Wilding separated, Todd informed her he would be her next husband. He made her life a round of gifts and celebrations, and they had a daughter. (At the same time, she acted in and won an Oscar nomination for the Civil War saga "Raintree County"). But their marriage lasted little over a year. He died when his chartered plane, The Lucky Liz, crashed in New Mexico, en route from L.A. to New York. Taylor was in the midst of filming "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof." After burying her husband, she performed like a trouper. To the public and later to her biographers, the extreme events of her private life appeared to bleed through into her career. It seemed right for her to become a Tennessee Williams heroine, emotions dripping at the seams. (She won another Oscar nomination.)
When she fell in love with Todd's protégé and best man, the singer Eddie Fisher, who at the time was in a supposedly storybook marriage with another MGM star, Debbie Reynolds, the press (pro or con) depicted Taylor as part of the new hedonistic streak in postwar culture. But she was still old-fashioned enough to believe in marriage, and for this one, she even converted to Judaism (Fisher was Jewish; Todd had been, too). Still, here she was, wedding the man who had comforted her at her late husband's death, and appearing in Joseph L. Mankiewicz's terrible if profitable Tennessee Williams farrago, "Suddenly Last Summer," as a traumatized woman whose gay brother was killed by cannibalistic street urchins. (She won yet another Oscar nomination.) She continued delving into decadence with the horribly botched adaptation of John O'Hara's novel, "Butterfield 8," this time as a nymphomaniac — and she actually won the Oscar.
But the drama behind that win proved more stirring than that dreadful movie. While Fox was attempting to film an epic new version of "Cleopatra" in damp old England, Taylor contracted a viral infection and two bouts of double pneumonia — the second of which, complicated by extreme anemia, almost killed her, right in the heart of awards season. Touched by her near-tragedy, groups as wholesome as the cadets at West Point offered prayers for her. The Oscar win was seen, by Taylor, and everyone else, as a sign of Hollywood's support at her time of crisis. Not even the wily writer-director Mankiewicz, called in to take over "Cleopatra" when it faltered, could predict what happened next.
The die was cast when Mankiewicz recast the role of Mark Antony, substituting Richard Burton for Stephen Boyd (he also put in Rex Harrison as Caesar, who'd been played by Peter Finch.) Fisher had been drained by his wife's medical and emotional neediness. Burton replenished her spirits with his poetic and often bawdy bluster. They began, if not the romance, then the romantic spectacle of the century. Their behind-the-scenes chemistry didn't energize "Cleopatra," the "Heaven's Gate" of 1960 (though a lot more entertaining, it nearly brought down Fox).
But for the next 16 years, the public fed on their marriage and separation and reconciliation, their remarriage and divorce, and the spats and affectionate extravagances that peppered the entertainment press. They'd be forever linked. In 1983, long after their split (and shortly before Burton's untimely death), this most public couple even appeared in a stage revival of Noel Coward's "Private Lives."
They would star in nine movies and one TV film together, and achieve critical and popular success in Mike Nichols' film of "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" (1966). Even in that hit, their talents are mismatched. Burton possessed both classical training and natural force. In Edward Albee's pop-Strindberg tale of a death-grip marriage, he's the one who brings genuine pathos to men and women battling with each other and their sense of their own limits, while Taylor is all too clearly "acting up a storm." (She was the one who won the Oscar.)
They would always be better individually than in movies in which, as Pauline Kael put it, "Burton ostentatiously plays down to her, and she valiantly tries to act up to him, and they're both awful." Their vehicles, often theatrically based, veered from prestige items like "The Taming of the Shrew" (1967) to 24-karat camp, like the Tennessee Williams-derived "Boom!" (1968), a Waters favorite. The better reviewers called them tone-deaf culture vultures. Even so, now and then they got things right: parts of "Shrew" were unobjectionable and she brought a lovely presence (in a brief role) and Burton his love of poetry to Dylan Thomas' "Under Milk Wood" (1971).
Still, the ultimate gift that Burton gave her was to free her of all embarrassment or inhibition — as she demonstrated, ironically, only in her best solo flights. She's wonderful in John Huston's adaptation of Carson McCullers' "Reflections in a Golden Eye" (1967), as the adulterous wife of a repressed homosexual major in a southern fort. She brings humor and gusto to a woman of fierce if conventional desires. She's hilariously blunt with her husband, notably when she asks, "Have you ever been collared and dragged out into the street and thrashed by a naked woman?"
Elsewhere, she's adorably infantile, in a garish, overgrown way: Her fluttering facial expressions and half-conscious gestures are as non-verbally eloquent as the reflexes of babes. Kael hailed her in the Edna O'Brien-scripted "X Y and Zee" (1972) for growing into "the raucous-demanding-woman role she faked in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" …. Elizabeth Taylor has changed before our eyes from the fragile child with a woman's face to the fabled beauty to this great bawd."
Even the inadvertently hilarious "The Sandpiper" (1965), in which she played a Big Sur beatnik, and attention-defying soap opera "Ash Wednesday" (1973), which hinged on her character getting a face-lift, cast a spell on Waters. He once based an art piece on her stitches in "Ash Wednesday" transforming into his pencil moustache.
"I saw every Elizabeth Taylor movie," Waters said yesterday. "They were huge influences." The one time Waters met Taylor, at her Labor Day poolside party in 1997, he told her how much he liked the much-lambasted "Boom." Waters recalled yesterday, "She got mad -- she said 'That's a terrible movie.' I think she thought I was insulting her, because it was the first thing that I said to her. But I explained that I showed it in film festivals and I thought it was really good. Then she was lovely and nice and really sweet."
The novelist and essayist Wilfrid Sheed, sick to death of the Burtons and the cult of celebrity, back in 1968 wondered what would happen to Taylor after their probable break-up. He presciently asked, "Will Miss Taylor continue to wrestle with Thespis, or devote herself to good works, or simply become a force for world peace?" As it turned out, as long as her health lasted, she was able to do all three, though her most ambitious acting was on stage and the rest was mostly on television. Her last major turn was in the inept 1980 Agatha Christie mystery, "The Mirror Crack'd," but in a self-satirical role, as a fading star, she exuded an ironic insouciance even when wearing a hat that looked like a floral bathing cap. She projected insincerity with peerless cunning. She even showed aplomb in a literally cartoonish mother-in-law role in the abysmal 1993 live-action version of "The Flintstones," her final big-screen movie.
In 1976 she married John Warner and helped him campaign successfully for the Senate (they divorced in 1982), and in 1991, she wed an ex-construction worker, Larry Fortensky (they divorced in 1996). Unlucky as a wife, she became a famously loyal friend, and not just to Michael Jackson. Her affection for Rock Hudson led her to become a leading fundraiser for AIDS research, as the national chairwoman of American Foundation for AIDS Research and later the founder of her own Elizabeth Taylor AIDS foundation.
This legacy surely will outlast her highly-promoted perfume lines and reams of publicity — but not her hours of indelible imagery.
Elizabeth Taylor implanted new and lasting images of innocence, concupiscence, and uninhibited adulthood on the world's movie screens. If Shakespeare gave literature the Ages of Man, she gave the cinema the Ages of Woman, and it's likely to remain an unequalled feat.