By David Raether
In 1983, Esquire Magazine published a now famous essay entitled, “Muhammad Ali Is the Most Famous Man in the World,” penned by the distinguished sports writer and columnist Bob Greene. In it, Greene described a trip he took with Ali in which it became apparent to him that everyone—and I mean everyone—knew Muhammad Ali.
At one point, as they were flying, Ali pointed out the window:
“Look at all those lights in all those houses… I could walk up to any one of those houses and knock on the door, and they would know me.”
He was probably right. Muhammad Ali was the most famous man in the world. And there was a time—from the late 1950s to the early 2000s—when you could easily argue that Elizabeth Taylor was the most famous woman in the world.
For a long time, I simply dismissed Elizabeth Taylor as just one of those people who was famous for being famous, and that was it. Like a Kardashian. The big problem with this dismissive attitude is that I hadn’t actually watched any of her movies. But then I did.
Oops. I had Elizabeth Taylor all wrong.
She is, in fact, a great, great actress. Granted, her life story, triumphs, foibles, scandals, and tragedies sort of overtook her life, but her fame was actually built on a track record of very outstanding performances in excellent films. Particularly a series of films in the late 1950s and early 1960s. It’s long past time for all of us to take Elizabeth Taylor seriously as an actress and artist.
Fame seems as if it might be fun, but it really isn’t. It strips you of your privacy and your ability to make mistakes and be wrong from time to time. It ruins the intimacy you want with yourself. No person has exemplified this more, perhaps, than Elizabeth Taylor. She appeared in her first feature film as a 12-year-old girl and was a star for the rest of her life. She dominated the covers of tabloids for decades. It was relentless.
Bill Murray had a great observation once: “I always say to people who want to be rich and famous, try being just rich first. See if that doesn’t cover most of it.”
Elizabeth Rosamund Taylor was born on Feb. 27, 1932, in London, England, to two American parents who were living in England at the time. Her father was an art dealer, and her mother was an actress. She, her parents, and her older brother lived in England for much of her childhood and grew up in a leafy and pleasant section of London. In 1939, the U.S. Ambassador to Great Britain, Joseph Kennedy, warned them that war was impending in Europe and advised them to move back to America.
The family took his advice, settling first in Pasadena and then later in Pacific Palisades before finally moving permanently to Beverly Hills. In case you’re wondering, those are all pretty nice places to live.
She was an exceptionally beautiful child. Particularly striking were her eyes. They were a shade of blue that looked almost violet with the right camera tricks, and she had a double set of eyelashes due to a genetic condition.
At her mother’s urging, she auditioned for several films and was cast for small parts in a few. Her breakthrough came at 12 years old when she was cast as Velvet Brown in National Velvet (1944). Her performance in this film was charming, natural, and completely winning. Oh yes, she was on her way. Over the next five years, Taylor appeared in a series of light comedies, including a memorable turn as one of the daughters in Life with Father (1947) and as Amy in the 1948 version of Little Women.
Taylor’s next big role was as Kay Banks (the bride) in Father of the Bride (1950), playing opposite Spencer Tracy. Her first big dramatic role was in A Place in the Sun (1951), where she starred opposite Montgomery Clift and Shelley Winters. Over the next several years, she appeared in a series of fairly standard melodramas and light comedies. Then, starting in 1956, she went on one of the greatest runs by any actress in Hollywood history: Giant (1956), Raintree County (1957), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), Suddenly Last Summer (1959), BUtterfield 8 (1960), Cleopatra (1963), Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), and, finally, The Taming of the Shrew (1967).
She was nominated for a Best Actress Oscar for four straight years (1957-1960) during this span. She finally won the Academy Award for BUtterfield 8 and then won again for her performance in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?.
It’s truly an astounding body of work. Over ten years, she was nominated for six Best Actress Oscars, winning twice. She was also married to four different men during this time, divorced twice, and widowed once. At one point, she nearly died from pneumonia while filming Cleopatra. Oh, and she nearly bankrupted a major studio: Fox nearly went under due to the cost overruns on Cleopatra—overruns blamed on Taylor and the delays sparked by her notorious love affair with her co-star, the Welsh actor Richard Burton.
And that’s the central problem with assessing Taylor as an artist. Her life and its attendant tabloid fame so often overwhelmed the work she did as an actress. Taylor was married eight times to seven different men—she married and divorced Burton twice. She publically struggled with alcoholism and drug addiction. In the 1980s, she became an activist for AIDS/HIV research at a time when those diseases were terrifying Americans. She was constantly on the cover of supermarket tabloids for some folderol or other for decades.
Her first marriage was to hotel heir Conrad Hilton, Jr. when she was 18. MGM used the wedding as part of the publicity campaign for Father of the Bride. The marriage lasted a year and generated a ton of negative publicity for the still-teenaged Taylor. In 1952, she married the British actor Michael Wilding, who was 20 years her senior. That marriage lasted five years and produced two of her four children: Michael and Christopher. Her third marriage was to movie producer Mike Todd. They had a daughter, Liza. That marriage ended tragically when Todd was killed in a plane crash.
She then started an affair with the married singer Eddie Fisher, who was married to Debbie Reynolds, her best friend at the time. The two eventually married and remained together for five years. It ended when she began an affair with Richard Burton. She and Burton (who starred opposite her) caused an enormous uproar for the affair during the filming of Cleopatra. Which, of course, made her even more famous.
Taylor was the first actor paid $1 million for her performance, and she also managed to convince Fox to give her 10% of the profits and insisted the film be shot in Todd-AO, a film format developed by her late husband for which she then owned the rights. Filming was delayed on numerous occasions due to poor weather and a series of serious health problems for Taylor. The delays proved devastatingly costly, and the film had Fox teetering on the edge of bankruptcy.
The Richard Burton years coincided with her decline as a serious figure in important films. By the late 1960s, she was no longer the ingenue and ended up in a series of films that were both commercial and critical failures.
She pulled away from acting in the mid-1970s when she began dating and married U.S. Senator John Warner of Virginia. That marriage lasted six years. Taylor eventually did some theater and some television. In the mid-1980s, she became involved in AIDS activism and raised more than $270 million for HIV/AIDS research.
In 1991, she surprised just about everyone when she married Larry Fortensky, a construction worker with an amazing mullet, whom she met while in alcohol rehab at the Betty Ford Center. Although they divorced after four years, Taylor and Fortensky remained close until the end of his life after brain surgery.
Elizabeth Taylor died of congestive heart failure in 2011. In her funeral instructions, she asked that the ceremony be a private Jewish funeral and that it start 15 minutes late because, according to her publicist, ‘she wanted to be late for her own funeral.” Ha! Classic. And fitting.
Elizabeth Taylor is truly one of the greatest actors in film history. Don’t let her messy, highly public, and tremendously complicated tabloid life distract you from the quality of her work. She was truly one of the greats. Here are seven Elizabeth Taylor movies I recommend you not miss.
When I was in elementary school, it seemed like every other girl wanted a horse. Which was a pretty ridiculous aspiration for a girl growing up in my neighborhood (let’s just say we weren’t the horsey set or neighborhood). We were more of the rusty used car type of place. But that is part of the magic of movies—they can transport you to a world you wished you lived in.
And here is the movie you and your tween daughter should watch if either of you ever wanted a horse. Set in England, a young Elizabeth Taylor plays Velvet Taylor, a 12-year-old girl who is just crazy about horses. She wins a young gelding in a raffle and decides to train her to run in the Grand National Steeplechase. The movie is uplifting and a bit of a tear-jerker, too. You’ll love it. The amazing cast also includes the likes of Mickey Rooney and Angela Lansbury.
The summer before my freshman year in college, my mom gave me a copy of Theodore Dreiser’s dark 1925 novel An American Tragedy. Why she gave me that book for my birthday, I have no idea. Probably for the same reason she gave me a microscope when I was in fourth grade, despite me never once having expressed an interest in microorganisms. Well, I read the book and found it gripping and disturbing.
This film is largely based on Dreiser’s novel and is a brilliant and searing drama about the class system, unexpected pregnancies, and murder. It marked Taylor’s first serious and important film and is simply outstanding. The movie won six Academy Awards, including Best Picture. Montgomery Clift plays the prodigal son of a wealthy industrialist who starts an affair with a fellow factory worker (Shelley Winters) and gets her pregnant while simultaneously wooing society girl Angela Vickers (Taylor).
I first saw this movie in a revival house in college. I was suspicious that it wouldn’t be any good because, by that time, in my mind, Elizabeth Taylor wasn’t really an important actress but merely someone on the cover of supermarket tabloids. “Okay,” I thought as I walked out, “I was completely wrong about Elizabeth Taylor.” Not the first time I was wrong about something.
My theory on this movie is that it’s the Gravity’s Rainbow of movies. Everyone will tell you how great that book by Thomas Pynchon is, much like this movie. People will swear it’s great. And then you ask them when they first saw it, and you get a response along the lines of, “Uh, well, I, uh, haven’t actually seen it.” The difference is that this movie is actually a great movie. Like every other Pynchon novel, Gravity's Rainbow is boring and terrible. There I said it: Pynchon is terrible.
Anyway, this is a classic 1950s western epic. And you really should see it. First of all, it has James Dean in it. It was only his third leading role and also his final picture. He died in a car crash before the film was released. There is something deeply visceral about seeing James Dean in a movie. He’s unconventionally handsome and vaguely feral but also somehow modest and shy. I still can’t think of another movie star like him. Taylor plays the married woman Dean is pursuing. He’s an oil wildcatter, and she’s a proper Eastern woman married to Rock Hudson. The scene where Dean shows up at a party at their house, covered in oil and ready to fight for her… whoa. This movie also has one of my favorite lines of all time: “Vic, you shoulda shot that guy a long time ago. Now he’s too rich to kill.” Taylor is just simply gorgeous and heart-throbbing. Forget the Pynchon, my friends, and rent Giant.
The Tennessee Williams stage play exploded on the screen in this sultry and utterly compelling film. Taylor plays Maggie “the Cat” Pollit, the sexually frustrated wife of alcoholic (and impotent) Brick Pollit (Paul Newman). Brick is from a wealthy Southern family and is pathetically obsessed with his high school football exploits. My mother’s review of this movie: “Lots of people parading around in their underwear. I didn’t care for it.” Well, I did. And it’s just great. Plus, you get to see Burl Ives as Harvey 'Big Daddy' Pollitt. Don’t sleep on this classic.
Guess what? It’s another steamy (yet ultimately tragic) melodrama with Liz Taylor, the “most desirable woman in town.” This time, Taylor is the woman wronged, and, boy oh boy, is she going to set straight that rich guy (Laurence Harvey) who treated her like a prostitute. After all, she’s no prostitute—she’s just a high-end call girl who likes casual sex and one-night stands. But this guy left her money after their fling, and she’s incensed about it. And now she’s going to track this adulterous man down and let him know about it. I can only imagine how titillating and revolutionary this movie was in 1960! The title refers to the old system of telephone numbers in which the first two numbers correspond to the first two letters of your exchange. My phone number as a kid was JUniper 8-6547. The naming system was eventually abandoned by the late 1960s.
Taylor won an Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance, despite the fact that she was contractually forced to make the film and publicly chastised it after its release, along with her husband at the time, co-star Eddie Fisher.
Taylor won her second Academy Award for Best Actress in this movie about, well, the worst cocktail party ever. Adapted from Edward Albee’s play of the same name, the film starred Taylor as Martha, the daughter of a university president, and her on-again/off-again husband Richard Burton as George, a history professor at that same university. The vitriol they play between each other is awfully unsettling. You sometimes feel as if you are sticking your nose in on a really bad evening between the two of them in real life.
If you and your partner are going through a rough patch, how about watching a portrait of a terrible marriage so you can feel slightly better about yours? It might just be the movie for you. Afterward, you can look at your partner and say, “Well, at least we’re not that bad.” And believe me, they were bad. And in this case, bad enough to cause a massive change in the MPAA film rating system and prohibit anyone under 18 from seeing the film in theatres due to the profane language and subject matter. Yikes!
Now here’s a steamy picture! Set on a U.S. Army base in the South in the late 1940s, Marlon Brando and Elizabeth Taylor are a married couple whose marriage is, well, in shambles. She’s having an affair with another officer, while Brando harbors repressed homosexual desires for a super hot stable boy, Private Williams (Robert Forster). Oh, my! Meanwhile, the stable boy gets the hots for Taylor (who wouldn’t?). It’s just a mess from there. There’s a suicide attempt and a murder thrown in just to make things even messier.
If you’re looking for an old-fashioned, steamy melodrama, this is the movie for you. Taylor is incredibly sexy in this movie, by the way—perhaps more than usual. John Huston directed the film from a script by Gladys Hill and Chapman Mortimer that was adapted from the Carson McCullers novel of the same name. The cast also includes Brian Keith and Julie Harris. You might want to have a hand fan available just to cool yourself off from time to time. And, of course, a glass of bourbon with crushed ice.
David Raether is a veteran TV writer and essayist. He worked for 12 years as a television sitcom writer/producer, including a 111-episode run on the ground-breaking ABC comedy “Roseanne.” His essays have been published by Salon.com, The Times of London, and Longforms.org, and have been lauded by The Atlantic Magazine and the BBC World Service. His memoir, Homeless: A Picaresque Memoir from Our Times, is awaiting publication.