Elizabeth Taylor, 1932-2011: Hollywood's Star of Stars

Child actress, teen temptress, cinematic empress, Taylor helped define contemporary fame first by her beauty, then with her love life and finally with a multifaceted celebrity

By Richard Corliss Wednesday, Mar. 23, 2011
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    Elizabeth Taylor in the 1958 film Cat on a Hot Tin Roof .

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    This package would be reopened many times during this, her best movie decade, each time with another surprise inside. She usually played a woman of common sense and uncommon passion. In Stevens' Giant , she is a Virginia bloom transported as the yellow rose of Texas; in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Suddenly, Last Summer , as Tennessee Williams heroines, she exorcizes the demons of men's desires; in Butterfield 8 , she is a chic call girl who digs her stiletto heel into the cowhide of Laurence Harvey's thick skin. Taylor was exploring a wider, smarter, grander dramatic range: a dream of womanly invitation who could escalate without warning into arias of sexual confession or recrimination. In each role, she found the starting point for a creative journey at the crossroads of modern femininity, or proto-feminism, and ageless star quality.

    In the effulgence of Taylor's early maturity, the movies she made became, in part, documentaries of her erotic effect on men, the camera, the audience and herself. Halfway through the 1954 The Last Time I Saw Paris , in which she plays, more or less, Zelda Fitzgerald to Van Johnson's Scott, there's a moment when Taylor removes a gray dress to reveal the first of many slips that will be her signature attire in the '50s ( Cat on a Hot Tin Roof , Butterfield 8 ). As she catches a glimpse of herself in a full-length mirror, her shoulders sag and she shakes her head. It might be disappointment; it ought to be awe.

    Cat on a Hot Tin Roof , the first of her films about married couples who are each other's destiny and doom, is rooted in what her fans must have thought an impossible premise: a man — Paul Newman's Brick Pollitt — doesn't want to have sex with Elizabeth Taylor. Her Maggie spends most of the movie battering her heart against Brick's wall of drunken misanthropy and possible homosexuality. She acknowledges that their marriage has disintegrated into a rancorous formality ("I'm not living with you! We occupy the same cage, that's all") but still loves the guy. She has to; he's Paul Newman. And he must finally satisfy her, not only because the Hollywood code demands that he display his straightness but because she's Elizabeth Taylor.

    By the time Cat was released in 1958, the actress's off-screen life had produced as much drama, scandal and heartbreak as any of her films. Falling in love with Broadway and Hollywood impresario Michael Todd, she divorced her second husband, actor Michael Wilding, and married Todd two days later. It might have been the one great love of her life — and the one lasting marriage — if Todd hadn't died in a plane crash in early 1958. She soon found consolation in the arms of singer-actor Eddie Fisher, like Todd a Jewish boy of humble beginnings. Fisher ankled out of his own famous Hollywood marriage, with adorable ingenue Debbie Reynolds, and at 27 Taylor had her fourth marriage and, briefly, a new job description: home wrecker.

    So her next role, a haughty, high-priced call girl in Butterfield 8 , struck some as typecasting. Proclaiming, "I've had more fun in the backseat of a '39 Ford than I could ever have in the vault of the Chase National Bank," and angrily scrawling "No Sale" on a mirror with her lipstick, Taylor won an Oscar for Best Actress. It's a strong performance, but the Academy members might have been voting their sympathy: she had just undergone throat surgery. Shirley MacLaine, who had been the front runner that year, for The Apartment , quipped, "I lost to a tracheotomy!"

    All this was just the modest prequel to her volcanic romance with Richard Burton, her co-star in Cleopatra . Shooting began in 1960, but this imperial epic wasn't released until 1963, by which time it was the most expensive film ever in real dollars (and in real dollars, among the 50 highest-grossing films). Burton, as Marc Antony, must wait for half the picture for Taylor's Egyptian queen to throw over Rex Harrison's Caesar. Burton seems not so much conflicted as distracted, logy, reluctant to flash his sexual eloquence. At his best, he's bitter, haunted by Caesar's looming shadow. And as onscreen lovers, Taylor and Burton are often remote, frosty; the joke back then was that they'd worn themselves out rehearsing. Or they were exhausted by the suffocating attention that their tryst, and her ditching of Fisher, provoked in the gossip industry. Later, the actress said, "I don't remember much about Cleopatra . There were a lot of other things going on."

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