Elizabeth Taylor (1932-2011)

The world’s media is awash with tributes and retrospectives to Elizabeth Taylor who died Wednesday.  This blog is as apt a forum to continue the trend as any.

First a few qualifications of the Taylor legend.

She was not the last Golden Age star living and certainly far from the final link to studio era Hollywood.  Hyperbolic headlines suggesting as much did a disservice to many surviving veterans, each legends in their own right.  Like Taylor, 101 year old Louise Rainer won two Oscars for Best Actress but she did so a full 20 years before Liz’s second trip to the podium.  94 year old Olivia de Havilliand, a far more subtle performer than Taylor, the last surviving “Gone With the Wind” cast member and another double Oscar winner, continues to live and breath, as does her almost as celebrated, estranged sister Joan Fontaine, a comparative spring chicken at 93.  There’s also Humphrey Bogart’s widow to consider, for Lauren Bacall became a star around the same time as Taylor established herself as a child performer.

The granddaddy of them all is of course Mickey Rooney, the last link to silent cinema, who made his debut in 1926.  Rooney was the most popular star on the planet when the Second World War broke out, a full three years before Taylor made her debut.  After a fashion he continues to work to this day.

Taylor was not a great actress.  Her range was limited and her technique mannered.  Her mature performance style, the default setting after her success in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof”, was demonstrative and rather blowzy.  Certainly from the late 60s on she was a one note performer.

Taylor’s beauty is also a matter of taste.  She had an astonishing face, particularly in her youth, and her breasts were also much admired (Richard Burton once called them “apocalyptic”).  The figure tended toward the voluptuous and is best showcased in the still shocking Tennessee Williams melodrama “Suddenly, Last Summer”, where Taylor spills out of a white, one-piece swimsuit, sending simple minded natives into a cannibalistic frenzy that ends in her cousin being eaten.  However, she didn’t really age all that well and there are far more beautiful actresses of the era, remembering that the Taylor prime coincided with that of Ava Gardner, Marilyn Monroe, Kim Novak, Audrey Hepburn, Sophia Loren and Claudia Cardinale, to name but a few.

What Taylor did have, like all great stars, was a distinctive personality, one that transcended any particular role that she was associated with, acting in general and even, ultimately, the film medium itself.   After 1968 she was no longer a box office force and the good roles evaporated.  She became famous for being Liz Taylor, the oft-married, jewelry obsessed celebrity.  If you were born in the 1980s or later you probably only know her as the frumpy old friend of Wacko Jacko who had a perfume named after her and seemed to harp on about AIDS charities all the time.

Beneath the gossip and the scandal, the melodramas and the always life-threatening illnesses there was a core of actual achievement.  Between 1943 and 1968 Taylor the movie star did make some quality films.

Given that she became one of few actors to successfully segue from being a child star into an adult entertainer her career is best conceived of chronologically.  Taylor was a child star, a teenage star and, eventually, an adult star, and was in notable films at each phase.

Child Star

Taylor debuted at age 10 in 1942’s “There’s One Born Every Minute”.  Two films the following year got her noticed: “Lassie Come Home” is a bona fide classic, the definitive Lassie movie.  Her role in “Jane Eyre” later in 1943 was smaller but no less memorable.  Orson Welles later commented that while he had no taste for Polanski-style pervsion that the 11 year old Taylor had astonishingly adult facial features and was quite something.

Taylor’s real break through came in 1944 as the tom boy who ends up riding her race horse to Grand National triumph in “National Velvet”.  It’s exceptionally well written and acted, with a supporting cast that includes Donald Crisp, Mickey Rooney, Angela Lansbury and the brilliant Anne Revere, who won an Oscar. Taylor more than holds her own in this company.  Unusually for such films of the era the sentiment is kept in check, enabling Taylor and Revere to credibly essay an uneasy mother/daughter relationship.

Teenage Star

There were a few missteps in the early part of Taylor’s teen career, including an unwise attempt to turn her into a musical star in “A Date With Judy” (she talks about this in the 1974 documentary “That’s Entertainment”).  At 15 she had a small part in a quality adaptation of the theatrical smash “Life With Father” supporting William Powell in his last real lead.  She was also in the 1949 version of “Little Women”, a big hit in its day which now seems unnecessarily sentimental.

At 18 Taylor was the bride to Spencer Tracy’s long suffering patriarch in “Father of the Bride”, an uncompromising satire on American middle class suburban life.  The next year Taylor reprised the role in an altogether tamer but no less well crafted sequel.  Working with Tracy and a quality director like Vincente Minnelli did her confidence no harm.

Adult Star

Taylor the adult finally arrived later in 1951.  As the object of Montgomery Clift’s obsessive attention in “A Place in the Sun” she looks ravishing and there’s a fresh depth to her acting.  While the courtroom hysterics that climax the film date the scenes between she and Clift still hold up, carrying real emotional weight.  A homosexual, Clift became one of her few off screen unrequited loves.

Further ordinary films followed, though Taylor looks wonderful in a comparatively thankless role in Ivanhoe and steals “The Last Time I Saw Paris” from under the nose of Van Johnson.

The pinnacle of Taylor’s adult career began in 1956 and ran for just over a decade.

“Giant” is really an overblown soap opera, overlong and a little pointless but the love triangle between she, Rock Hudson and James Dean set against Texas oil fields has its fans, particularly as it turned out to be Dean’s final movie.  Taylor chews scenery.

“Raintree County” is even slighter but it garnered the actress her first Oscar nomination.  For what I’m not really sure.  Perhaps it was displaced recognition from the year before.

In 1958 Taylor enjoyed another signature part, that of Maggie the Cat in Richard Brooks’ adaptation of Tennessee Williams’ play “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof”.  Cavorting around in a slip for most of the film, unsuccessfully attempting to cajole her (implied) homosexual husband into showing her some physical attention, Taylor is the epitome of Southern sexiness.  A more deserved Oscar nomination resulted.

The next year came another Williams’ inspired film, the truly outrageous “Suddenly, Last Summer”.  The rest of the cast might include an uncomfortable looking Monty Clift and a way over the top Katharine Hepburn but Taylor in the flashback sequence is what you most remember.  Used by her gay cousin as “bait” to entice young men Taylor spills out of her see through swimsuit in a manner unheard of by a mainstream star.

I haven’t seen “Butterfield 8″, her 1960 feature.  By all accounts it isn’t that good.  Playing a prostitute Taylor is said to be little more than adequate.  She nonetheless won a third Oscar nomination, one that coincided with a life threatening illness.  Legend has it that Taylor owed her first Academy Award to a tracheotomy.  Further sympathy was engendered by the death of third husband Mike Todd in a plane crash.

It would be three years before Taylor would be seen on screen again though she was seldom out of newspaper headlines during that time.  Becoming the first actress ever paid $1 million for a film, Taylor’s decision to play the title part in “Cleopatra” changed the course of her life and career.

From a forty year perspective it is hard for us conceive just how big a deal the affair enjoyed between Taylor and Richard Burton, the actor playing Marc Anthony, was.  Already considered a scarlet woman for stealing Debbie Reynolds’ husband Eddie Fisher in the wake of Todd’s death, Taylor’s abandonment of him in favour of the equally married Burton sent world media into an unprecedented frenzy.  For better or for worse it stands as the biggest sex scandal in movie history.

“Cleopatra” itself got rather lost in the process.  Beset by all sorts of logistical problems and cost over runs - some of which stemmed from Taylor’s long, illness related absences and fluctuations in weight - it would perhaps have ended up better if writer/director Joseph L Mankiewicz was permitted to release it in two halves as he originally wanted.  Taylor was so dismayed at the inconsistency of the end product that she threw up at the premiere.

“Cleopatra” does have some things going for it.  Rex Harrison and Roddy McDowell give exceptional, restrained performances and some of the spectacle has a gaudy kind of power.  Taylor herself is adequate in some scenes and plain awful in others.

It was both the most watched film of its year and the biggest box office disaster.  Few if any movies can claim as much.  The budget just overran any possibility of recouping the investment.

Taylor and Burton were married in 1964, a mere confirmation of their status as the most famous couple in the world.  Of the next five films in which they co-starred only the last two were any good.

“Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” is the ultimate Elizabeth Taylor role and film, the one part in which her mature hysteria and blowzy looks fits the material, perfectly blending with Burton’s nuanced rage.  Playing a couple of argumentative, game-playing academics who turn a social dinner into a vitriolic war of words, many in the film’s audience thought they were watching autobiography.  Taylor’s Oscar was this time deserved.

“The Taming of the Shrew”, which followed the next year, was a Shakespearean variation on the same theme.  The Taylor cleavage beats out the Bard’s verse at every step.

Arguably there were only two further worthwhile - or at least interesting - parts.  “Reflections in a Golden Eye” might not be completely successful, particularly in its heavy handed end, but Taylor’s southern belle taunting of another homosexual husband played by another quality method actor does bring to mind “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof”.  She and co-star Marlon Brando didn’t much get on, and this helps, particularly in the scene where she whips him in public.

“Secret Ceremony” is the better of the two films Joseph Losey directed Taylor in in 1968 (the other, “Boom”, another co-starer with Burton, is a curio at best).  Playing a distraught mother who develops a symbiotic relationship with a young girl who bares an uncanny resemblance to her deceased daughter, Taylor fits in well to an ensemble cast that includes Mia Farrow, Robert Mitchum and Peggy Ashcroft.

The Decline.

Thereafter, Taylor’s output was disappointing.  Further films with Burton - none of the successful - continued in the early 1970s.  After their final split Taylor seemed to have difficulty finding a niche, experimenting with bland romances, thrillers and even a musical.  Her last lead role came in 1980 in “The Mirror Crack’d”, an Agatha Christie mystery that at least allowed her to show some of the old fire, cast in a part she could play from first hand experience, that of a 1950s movie actress.  Fellow veterans from that era - Rock Hudson, Tony Curtis, Kim Novak and Angela Lansbury - are on hand to complete the pleasant, anachronistic feel.

While some minor TV work followed and she turned up for a final theatrical cameo in 1994 in “The Flintstone” Taylor’s personal life and ill health took precedence over serious acting work.  For a while a politician’s wife, she met her next and final husband in re-hab.  Work for AIDS charities and a high profile friendship with Michael Jackson were all that she was known for in her last two decades but unlike many latter day celebrities the Elizabeth Taylor legend was grounded in some real achievement.