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Movies & TV

Elizabeth Taylor, 1932 – 2011

People have been waiting for Elizabeth Taylor to die for a very long time. The obituary in The New York Times this morning that had clearly been prepped decades ago the reference to the Sultan of Brunei dates it back to the 1970s at the very latest. And then there’s the fact that the bylined writer has been dead since 2005.

Banking an obit is cynical, sure, but it’s common practice with public figures of a certain visibility. And by the time of her death, Taylor’s visibility – her status as a tabloid figure, beset by one tragedy after another – had long eclipsed her reputation as an actress. That’s terribly unfair, as people who know Taylor only as an icon will discover in the coming days.

Taylor was, indeed, a hell of an actress. A natural as a child actor in movies like Lassie, Come Home and National Velvet, she matured into a powerful screen presence in movies like A Place In The Sun, Giant and Raintree County. Watching her opposite Paul Newman in 1958’s Cat On A Hot Tin Roof is to buy into the myth of Hollywood as a place where young gods come to be discovered.

It was during the shooting of that film that Taylor’s husband, producer and director Michael Todd, was killed in a plane crash Taylor found comfort in the arms of his best friend, the singer Eddie Fisher – who was married to Debbie Reynolds at the time. Taylor’s marriage to Fisher caused a scandal it was the first of many.

Taylor would ultimately leave Fisher for Richard Burton, her co-star in Cleopatra that couple would divorce, remarry, and divorce again before Burton’s death in 1984. During their first marriage, they starred as a warring, booze-soaked couple in Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf?, Mike Nichols’s 1966 adaptation of Edward Albee’s searing stage play.

Taylor won her second Oscar for Virginia Woolf – her first win was for a role as a prostitute in 1960’s considerably less challenging Butterfield 8 – while Burton lost the Best Actor prize to Paul Scofield in that year’s Best Picture winner A Man For All Seasons.

It’s Taylor’s scariest performance, and not just because she uglied herself up for the role. (Her character, Martha, is two decades older than Taylor was when she shot the film.) It’s the way she funnels decades of barely repressed rage into mocking, cackling sarcasm the way she delights in torturing the couple’s dinner guests, and the way she uses her physicality to intimidate them. This is a fully considered performance it’s not just shouting and swaggering. It’s someone connecting with a dark, angry part of herself, and giving it free reign.


In the days to come, people will fight about the meaning of Elizabeth Taylor. They’ll argue over whether she was a great actress or merely a stunningly beautiful person that directors were smart enough to put in front of a camera. They’ll bring up her legacy as a crusader for AIDS awareness and try to contrast it with her support of Michael Jackson as his own story grew stranger and stranger.

(I give Jay Leno three days, max, before he drops Larry Fortensky’s name on the air Leno got so much mileage out of the guy in the 1990s that it’s got to be the first place his mind goes now.)

But Taylor’s marriage to Fortensky – a construction worker whom she met while they were both at the Betty Ford Clinic in 1990 – speaks to something universal and primal about her, an impulsiveness and a loneliness that never seemed to leave her eyes. When she turned up in a walk-on role as Mama Flintstone in that terrible live-action Flintstones movie, she brought too much gravity to the proceedings the movie’s pre-teen target audience had no idea who that nice old lady was, or why their grandparents gasped (or sighed) when she entered the frame.

Maybe that’s why she pulled away from the movies after Burton’s death. Taylor spent most of the last three decades working on humanitarian causes and making the odd TV appearance. A generation has grown up knowing her as someone whose latest health scare is constantly teased on the front page of the National Enquirer – or, if they’re lucky, as the voice of Maggie Simpson.

Maggie Simpson. There are worse legacies.

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