Tag Archives: hollywood

Elizabeth Taylor has left the stage…

We will never see her like again…

A great Actress and a great humanitarian who lived life to the fullest…

She was one of the greatest Stars ever to come out of Hollywood’s Golden Age.

Her life both on and off the screen was the stuff of legend…

She spoke out for and fought for People With AIDS when everyone else was afraid of the social stigma.  Then she raised over $350 Million for AIDS Research.

She will never be forgotten.  They don’t make’em like her anymore…

She was one hell of a Dame….

“A Place in the Sun” proved she could be a serious actress.  And she appeared in it with her great friend Montgomery Clift, perhaps the only person as beautiful as she was:

She was my favorite Maggie in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof”:

“Giant”, with her great friend Rock Hudson and James Dean was to become legendary:

With “Cleopatra”, she became the first actor or actress to be paid $1Million for a film.  She met Richard Burton on the set and fireworks erupted as the two married stars began an affair. It was the scandal of the 20th Century, well after the previous scandal when she stole Eddie Fisher from Debbie Reynolds.

But she became ill and almost died, so all was forgiven. She won her first Oscar for “Butterfield 8” after her recovery and while shooting Cleopatra.  The “Cleopatra” drama almost bankrupted 20th Century Fox.

With “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf”, she and Burton gave incredible performances and she won her second Oscar.  Their offscreen dramas only added to the legend:

Perhaps her greatest role came later in her life.  AIDS activism.  She spoke out for people with AIDS when everyone else was afraid to do so.  She raised millions of dollars for AIDS research.

Here is a great interview from that era with Larry King:

Great article from Gene Seymour at CNN about Elizabeth Taylor and what would have happened if she had succumbed to her legendary 1960 illness instead of living on…

Those who remember hearing the news — my mother and her friends among them — swear that the whole world stopped at that moment. That’s how dominant, how unavoidable Taylor had become. And she wasn’t yet 30 years old.

By 1960, Taylor was as pervasive a presence in American culture as President Eisenhower, Mickey Mantle, Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe, who that same year — though no one knew it at the time — would make her last movie, “The Misfits,” before her own death two years later.

Almost 50 years have passed since then, and they’re still publishing cover stories about Monroe. If it hadn’t been for the emergency tracheotomy that saved Taylor’s life, the same would have been true for her.

Those articles would have chronicled in melancholic and rhapsodic tones how Taylor first came to prominence as the most beautiful child actress in motion-picture history. Watch her breakthrough role, at age 12, in 1944’s “National Velvet,” and maybe you’ll understand why even such grown film critics as The Nation’s James Agee fawned over her “with the peculiar sort of adoration I might have felt if we were both in the same grade of primary school.”

Her rise from MGM ingénue to an actress of such caliber that she’d been nominated for the best actress Oscar in 1957 (“Raintree County”), 1958 (“Cat on a Hot Tin Roof”), and 1959 (“Suddenly, Last Summer”) would have been framed in the context of great promise on the precipice of fulfillment.

Inevitably, those eulogies would have given as much space to her star-crossed, some might say “untidy,” romantic life. She had four marriages up till 1960, the last to her “BUtterfield 8” co-star Eddie Fisher who, tabloid gossips contended, was “stolen” by the dark-haired widow of producer Mike Todd from a happy marriage to golden gal Debbie Reynolds. The mythologists would have had quite a time sifting for meaning in all that mess.

By 1960, Taylor was as pervasive a presence in American culture as President Eisenhower, Mickey Mantle, Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe.

She won that elusive best actress Oscar for “Butterfield 8.” But if she had died in 1960, she never would have finished “Cleopatra” in 1963. She never would have scored that million-dollar salary — highest ever, at the time, for a movie star — to play the title role. She would have been spared the scandal and snafus plaguing that grand folly of an epic. But she never would have met and married Richard Burton, alongside whom she would play in the 1966 adaptation of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,” Edward Albee’s bawdy tragicomedy of manners, which led to her second Academy Award for best actress.

She wouldn’t have divorced Burton — and then married him again. She wouldn’t have had a couple more husbands, including a senator from Virginia named John Warner. Garry Trudeau wouldn’t have used that marriage in his “Doonesbury” comic strip as a departure point for gentle ridicule that yielded the now-indelible tag line assessing the “last star” in middle age: “A tad overweight, but violet eyes to die for.”

 

The extravagant jewelry, the charity work, the friendship with Michael Jackson, that peculiar turn as Fred’s mother-in-law in 1994’s “The Flintstones” (her last role, it turned out, in a Hollywood movie) — none of it would have happened if she had died 50 years ago. We will forever guess what happened to Marilyn Monroe and what would have happened if she hadn’t died. We don’t have to do that with Elizabeth Taylor.

And so what? If anything, she enhanced her legend by living through those decades of personal and professional turbulence. Not even Taylor could remain a top box-office draw forever. But if she wasn’t dominant, she remained unavoidable — and in the end, inimitable.

No leading film actress today, not even Angelina Jolie, can claim to have an off-screen life as riveting, as tumultuous, and as entertaining. When people call Elizabeth Taylor the “last star,” they speak of her as the final member in a glorious parade of personalities — Gable, Cooper, Dietrich, Hepburn, Wayne, Tracy — whose magnetism grew solely in dark rooms smelling like popcorn and illuminated on a big screen. No one could claim her place in that line now. No one should.

 

MORE:   Elizabeth Taylor: The ‘Last Star’ – CNN.com.