“Isn't that fat little tart here yet?”
--Richard Burton, 1964, in church, awaiting his bride,
Elizabeth Taylor, who is late for the ceremony
Dame Elizabeth Rosemond Taylor, DBE was born in London on February 27, 1932, and died today. She was, without a doubt, one of the last and biggest of the old, Hollywood, pre-television stars. Only Shirley Temple and Mickey Rooney (who starred with Taylor in National Velvet) remain.
Her career began as a child with several successful films, including Lassie Come Home and the role she campaigned for, the lead in National Velvet. Her first role was for Universal in There's One Born Every Minute. As she grew to young womanhood, she made a series of typically successful but forgettable light romantic movies through 1955. The exception was George Stevens' A Place in the Sun, her first and one of her best adult acting performances.
In the mid-1950s, she was able to use her star power and experience in the business to obtain the meaty roles she wanted: She had an important role in George Stevens' Giant in 1956, and was nominated for Best Actress for four years in a row: for Raintree County (1957), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), Suddenly, Last Summer (1959) and Butterfield 8 (1960 – for which she deservedly won the award). She was then awarded a million dollar contract for the film that marked the beginning of the end of her career, Cleopatra. Her on-set romance with co-star Richard Burton was major press at the time and may have saved the 1963 film from being a box office disaster. For the rest of the decade she made other films that were financial successes, and her grueling role in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf won her a second Oscar in 1966. Perhaps her last genuinely outstanding acting performance was in The Only Game in Town in 1970, opposite Warren Beatty, which was a box office flop.
For the last three decades of her life, Taylor was something of an on-going international media sensation. She was married several times, often to socially and financially prominent persons. She took up important causes (AIDS research, for example) that others avoided. The English-speaking world adored gossipping about her, and she was on the cover of innumerable tabloid papers.
Other actresses, notably Irene Dunn, had fought for and obtained top billing in motion pictures. But Elizabeth Taylor also got the rewarding contracts and the money; she was a trendsetter in that respect.
What do we make of her? I have a conjecture to offer. I find her the apt pupil of two other ex-patriate Hollywood women who were nearly, but not quite, a generation her senior: Vivien Leigh and Zsa Zsa Gabor. Like Vivien Leigh, to whom she bore a striking resemblance as the raven-haired, gorgeous flower of England, she knew how to appear lovely and act before the cameras. And she knew how close good acting was to mental instability, having played Zelda Fitzgerald in The Last Time I Saw Paris. She knew when she was on the edge or being dangerous. She also had some of the social skill and unforgettable charm of Zsa Zsa Gabor. Like Zsa Zsa, she could marry well and become a socialite herself, “famous for being famous.”
Taylor could drink hard and talk honestly. She needed to find her match in life. That man was Richard Burton, her Welch equivalent to Gabor's truest love, George Sanders. He drank even more than she did and spoke even more bluntly. Taylor and Burton were horrific but electrifying in Virginia Woolf. They gave famous, amazing dinner parties on location while filming together. Burton died in 1984 and need wait for her no longer. They can throw even better parties together now in the clouds, now that the final curtain has fallen.
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