Weather | Sports | Forums | Comics | Classifieds | Calendar | Movies
The silver screen makes actors larger than life, but Elizabeth Taylor makes life larger still, boldly reinventing herself onscreen and off.
By COLETTE BANCROFT, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times, published February 25, 2002
She was the first star to be paid a million dollars for a movie role and the first to publicly admit going into rehab for substance abuse.
She's been declared a Dame of the British Empire and declared dead several times.
She's owned many of the world's most fabulous jewels and raised more than $50-million for AIDS victims.
She won her two Oscars for playing an ambitious prostitute in BUtterfield 8 and a ferociously vulgar alcoholic in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Her raucous personal life -- eight marriages to seven husbands, some of the most publicized and scandalous affairs of the 20th century -- has been the stuff of tabloids since the '50s. Yet for the three decades that she reigned as a major Hollywood star, her name was synonymous with beauty and glamor.
In 1947, Life magazine called the illness-plagued child star "fragile," but Elizabeth Taylor persevered; she turns 70 on Wednesday. Though she's been more or less retired from the movies for years, she is still unequivocally a star.
It's not easy to maintain such status in a business that demands and devours the new. Taylor (don't call her Liz; she reportedly hates it) came to it equipped with many gifts: extraordinary beauty, of course, and considerable talent as an actor. She made plenty of awful movies, it's true (including one of the two she won the Oscar for), but she made some terrific ones too, and many in which she was the best thing.
But perhaps her greatest talent is the knack for reinventing herself at just the right moment. Many celebrities get locked into a single image and never grow beyond it. For women it's a particularly deadly trap; show business rarely allows them to age at all, and a woman who epitomizes an era when she's young is dated in no time. (Anyone seen Julie Christie or Jane Fonda or Jennifer Beals lately?)
But Taylor reigned onscreen for 30 years, and she did it by transforming herself, responding in her roles and personal image to the changes in society. Forget about Madonna and Cher; they're amateurs at this rising-from-the-ashes business compared to Elizabeth Taylor.
Taylor's first smash starring role was in National Velvet, released in 1944. In a world wracked by World War II, plucky little Velvet Brown riding her beloved horse to victory against all the odds was irresistible. No one cared that 12-year-old Taylor's delicate beauty and educated accent were all wrong for the lower-class heroine of Enid Bagnold's treasured book and that when Velvet cuts her hair to ride in the big steeplechase absolutely no one would mistake her for a boy; at a time when moviegoers longed for courage and triumph, she rode to the rescue, and they loved her for it.
Child stars notoriously fail to make the leap to adult success, but Taylor made it look easy. Amid the postwar boom, she starred in Father of the Bride in 1950 as the charming and impossible center of attention. Spencer Tracy huffs and puffs as the title character, but Taylor sweetly stands up to him as a perfect '50s fertility goddess. Despite her pristine white gown, Taylor's luxuriant body and bedroom eyes suggest that, given the appropriate endless offering of consumer goods, she just might produce the whole baby boom all by herself.
As the '50s moved toward the '60s and America's sunny optimism darkened, that sweet goddess got an attitude. Taylor's most notable roles reflected cultural changes: Her intense sexuality was no longer safely contained in a happy movie marriage but dangerously unbound, whether in the bitterly unsatisfied wife of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, the tragic call girl of BUtterfield 8 ("Mama, face it: I was the slut of all time.") or the woman in love with an unattainable man in any movie she made with Montgomery Clift.
All that '50s angst about sex erupted in the '60s, and Taylor morphed into the poster girl for breaking the rules. Cleopatra was a lousy movie, but it didn't need much advertising: Taylor's steamy onset romance with co-star Richard Burton got as much media attention as the previous year's presidential campaign, maybe more. She was excoriated in pulpits (the Catholic Church declared her an "erotic vagrant") and in editorials for both her unabashed lust and the regal attitude about it she seemed to have borrowed from her character -- and people just couldn't get enough of her.
In '63 she played the young and lovely Queen of the Nile, commanding the world's great men with a cut of her violet eyes; only three years later she transformed herself again into the terrifying Martha of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? It's still an astonishing performance, probably her best, certainly her most fearless. With one role, Taylor vaults from the studio-dominated moviemaking of her previous career into the wave of independent, socially conscious films of the '60s and '70s.
Martha is exuberantly cruel, excruciatingly intelligent, middle-aged, unbelievably boozy and unabashedly sexual. The fertility goddess is furious by now: "I'm the Earth Mother, and you're all flops." It's a stretch to call Martha a '60s feminist -- she's far too self-involved to be political -- but she's certainly a rejection of old roles, an object lesson of the damage they can do. And boy, can you hear her roar.
Though Taylor continued to make movies in the '70s and early '80s, her reinvention turned in other directions. She's still prone to odd choices in her personal life (Michael Jackson?) but between her business enterprises and Herculean charity work she has carved out yet another image.
This is a woman aging gracefully -- and that means not doing it perfectly but weathering the blows. Who else has surgery for a brain tumor and, when she's photographed afterward, all you can think of is how terrific those violet eyes look with white hair?
In Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Taylor's Maggie says to Brick, "I'll win, all right."
Brick says, "Win what? What is the victory of a cat on a hot tin roof?"
And Maggie says, "Just staying on it, I guess. As long as she can."
Happy birthday, to all the Elizabeth Taylors.