Movie Icons: Elizabeth Taylor
Dame Elizabeth Rosemond Taylor DBE (1932 – 2011) was a British-American actress. She began her career as a child actress in the early 1940s and was one of the most popular stars of classical Hollywood cinema in the 1950s. She then became the highest paid movie star in the 1960s, remaining a well-known public figure for the rest of her life.
During a career that spanned six decades, the legendary beauty with lavender eyes won two Oscars and made more than 50 films, performing alongside such fabled leading men as Spencer Tracy, Montgomery Clift, Marlon Brando and Richard Burton.
Long after she faded from the screen, she remained a mesmerizing figure, blessed and cursed by the extraordinary celebrity that moulded her life through its many phases: She was a child star who bloomed gracefully into an ingénue; a femme fatale on the screen and in life; a canny peddler of high-priced perfume; a pioneering activist in the fight against AIDS.
Her passions were legend. She loved to eat, which led to well-publicized battles with weight over the years. She loved men, dating many of the world’s richest and most famous, including Frank Sinatra, Henry Kissinger and Malcolm Forbes, and married eight times, including the two visits to the altar with Burton.
She loved jewels; amassing huge and expensive baubles the way children collect toys. But Taylor attracted misfortune too. According to one chronicler, she suffered more than 70 illnesses. In 1997, she had a benign brain tumour removed. By her own count, she nearly died four times. In 2004 she disclosed that she had congestive heart failure and crippling spinal problems that left her in constant pain. For much of her life she struggled with alcohol and prescription painkillers.
Elizabeth Rosemond Taylor was born in London of American parents on Feb. 27, 1932. Her mother, a former stage actress named Sara Sothern, and her father, art dealer Francis Taylor, gave her and brother Howard seaside holidays, servants and plenty of toys.
When she was 7, her family moved to Beverly Hills, where Francis managed an art gallery in the Beverly Hills Hotel. With her fetching little-woman looks and a mother who aggressively pushed her into auditions, Elizabeth was noticed by talent scouts and soon had a contract at Universal Pictures. In 1942 at age 10 she made her film debut in a little-noticed comedy, There’s One Born Every Minute. Soon she was earning more than her father, whose resentment of this fact deepened his reliance on alcohol and fuelled occasional beatings of his daughter.
She changed studios in 1943 when Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer was looking for a dog-loving English girl to play a small role in Lassie Come Home. Elizabeth landed the part and became an MGM contract player.
Critics did not really take notice of her until MGM cast her in National Velvet as Velvet Brown, a girl who dreams of riding in England’s Grand National steeplechase.
After the success of National Velvet, it was difficult for Taylor to call her life her own. Her contract, she said later, “made me an MGM chattel” for the next 18 years. The studio chose her roles, controlled her public appearances, picked her dates and stage-managed her first wedding. After a string of ingénue roles, she won her first romantic lead opposite Robert Taylor in the forgettable melodrama Conspirator (1950).
Taylor won her first critical praise as an adult actress in A Place in the Sun (opposite Montgomery Clift), directed by George Stevens. Playing a restless, sexually eager society girl drawn to a young man from a lower – class background.
Stevens later hired her for another demanding role in Giant (1956), an epic about two generations of Texans. She played the wife of cattleman Rock Hudson, and James Dean, who died in a car crash before the movie was released, played a wild young ranch hand.
Her next three films would bring her Oscar nominations.
The first was for Raintree County, a 1957 release directed by Edward Dmytryk, in which Taylor played a passionate Southern belle capable of madness.
The next nomination was for her portrayal of Maggie in Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958). Taylor played the beautiful, sexually seething wife of Paul Newman, the alcoholic, latently homosexual son of a Mississippi plantation owner. Although the actress was widowed in the midst of filming when Todd’s plane crashed, she managed to turn in a performance widely considered one of the best of her adult career.
Her third nomination recognised her work in Suddenly, Last Summer, another Williams story, which explored insanity, homosexuality and cannibalism. A commercial success like Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, it boosted Taylor into the box-office top 10 for the first time. She remained in the top 10 almost every year for the next decade.
In 1961 she won her first Oscar for her portrayal of a call girl in a tortured affair with a married man in Butterfield 8. Although she hated the part and the script, she agreed to the role because it ended her contractual obligations to MGM.
Her next project was Cleopatra for Twentieth Century Fox, the epic about the Egyptian queen who dies for love.
The production launched the most turbulent period of Taylor’s life. She contracted pneumonia during filming in Rome and underwent an emergency tracheotomy. She was reported to be near death for days. After she recovered and returned to the Cleopatra set, headlines around the world began to scream details of her affair with Burton. When the movie was finally released in 1963, the reviews were brutal, but audiences flocked to see its shameless-in-love stars.
Richard Burton met Taylor at a Sunday afternoon swim party in California, beginning a tumultuous affair on the set of Cleopatra. Because both were huge stars married to other people, their adultery caused a worldwide scandal.
After a two-year separation, Taylor divorced Eddie Fisher in early 1964 and married Burton. Theirs was a marriage on a grand scale. She gave him a Van Gogh; he lavished her with priceless gems, including the behemoth Krupp diamond and a 25-carat, heart-shaped pendant of diamonds, rubies and emeralds originally made for the bride of the man who built the Taj Mahal. Burton also outbid shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis for a $1.1-million, 69-carat diamond ring from Cartier in New York that became known as the Taylor-Burton diamond.
America’s most famous couple not only spent extravagantly, but also fought and drank to excess. When their union finally unravelled, a Swiss court divorced them on June 26, 1974. The next year they retied the knot before an African tribal chief in Botswana. Less than a year later, in 1976, they severed the tie in a Haitian divorce, but their love for each other continued.
Taylor said that if Burton had not had a fatal brain haemorrhage in Geneva in 1984 she probably would have wound up with him a third time. “I was still madly in love with him until the day he died,” she said.
Taylor co-starred with Burton in several more movies, including The V.I.P.s (1963); The Sandpiper (1965); Doctor Faustus, The Comedians and The Taming of the Shrew (all 1967); Boom! (1968); Under Milk Wood and Hammersmith Is Out (both 1972); and an aptly titled television movie, Divorce His, Divorce Hers (1973). Critics found most of their collaborations unremarkable.
The exception came in 1966, when the ritzy couple were cast against type in Edward Albee’s drama of marital angst, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Taylor gained 25 pounds and donned a grey wig and extra padding to play Martha, the frumpy, foul-mouthed, highly educated wife of Burton’s henpecked college professor. She was reportedly terrified by the challenge of playing a role so far removed from her glamorous persona.
The director Mike Nichols put the Burtons and the other two cast members – George Segal and Sandy Dennis – through weeks of private rehearsals and closed the set during filming. Gradually, Taylor said, she grew so comfortable in her Martha suit that it freed her acting. Critics lavished praise on her performance, calling it the best of her career. The film won five Oscars, including Taylor’s second for best actress.
Her next film, Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967) with Marlon Brando, showed more of Taylor as a serious actress, but it was followed by a torrent of bad movies that made it easy for critics to dismiss her again. Nonetheless, she played a surprisingly broad range of roles, including a rollicking performance as a bitchy wife in the 1972 movie X Y & Zee.
Taylor portrayed an aging movie star in The Mirror Crack’d (1980), an all-star adaptation of Agatha Christie’s novel. She also dabbled in television movies and returned to the stage, earning mixed reviews on Broadway in 1981 in The Little Foxes. In 1983, she reunited professionally with Burton in the Noel Coward farce Private Lives, a play about a divorced couple whose romance is rekindled by a chance meeting.
The end of 1983 she was bloated and abusing alcohol and pills. Confronted by her family and close friend Roddy McDowall, she checked into the Betty Ford Centre in Rancho Mirage, where she slept in a dormitory, went on clean-up detail. Her public announcement that she was being treated for substance abuse encouraged other celebrities, including Liza Minnelli, to disclose their own struggles.
A clean and sober Taylor held on to her newfound health for a few years, until pain from a crushed vertebra sent her back to pills and booze. According to an investigation some years later by the attorney general of California, her addictions were enabled by three of her personal doctors, who wrote more than 1,000 prescriptions over seven years for painkillers, tranquilizers, antidepressants and stimulants.
With her acting career in decline, she turned to business. In 1987 she introduced Elizabeth Taylor’s Passion, a perfume sold in a purple, heart-shaped flask for $165 an ounce. It would eventually become the fourth-bestselling women’s fragrance in America, grossing $70 million a year. In the 1990s she introduced another successful scent, White Diamonds.
Among her last acting jobs was the modest role of Fred Flintstone’s mother-in-law in the 1994 release The Flintstones, Universal’s live-action version of the cartoon series. She also lent her voice to a character on the popular animated show The Simpsons.
In 2001, she co-starred with Debbie Reynolds in the ABC movie These Old Broads, in which Reynolds played an aging Hollywood actress and Taylor her agent. The movie brought a happy ending to one of Hollywood’s most famous feuds.
Taylor had many gay friends and, as the AIDS epidemic mushroomed, some of them were dying. In 1985, she became the most prominent celebrity to back what was then a most unfashionable cause. She agreed to chair the first major AIDS benefit, a fundraising dinner for the non-profit AIDS Project Los Angeles.
She began calling her A-list friends to solicit their support. Some of Hollywood’s biggest stars turned her down. Taylor redoubled her efforts, aided along the way by the stunning announcement that Rock Hudson, the handsome matinee idol and Giant co-star, had the dreaded disease. She stood by Hudson, just as years later she would stand by pop-idol Jackson during the latter’s struggle to defend himself against child abuse allegations.
Thanks to Taylor’s high profile and public sympathy for Hudson, the star-studded AIDS fundraiser netted $1 million and attracted 2,500 guests. Hudson was too ill to attend but used the occasion to release a major public statement about his illness.
Through her various efforts she would eventually raise more than $270 million for AIDS prevention and care.
The film star Elizabeth Taylor, died of heart failure aged 79, at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. She was in the public eye from the age of 11 and remained there even decades after her last hit movie.
Source: [email protected] and en.wikipedia.org
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