Elizabeth Taylor was a British-American actress who was born in 1932. In the early 1940s, she started out as a child actress. By the 1950s, she was one of the most famous actresses of classical Hollywood movies.
She went on to become the highest-paid movie star of the 1960s and became a well-known public figure for the rest of her life. In 1999, the American Film Institute ranked her the seventh-greatest female screen legend of Classic Hollywood cinema.
Taylor was born in London to well-known American parents. In 1939, she and her family moved to Los Angeles. She got her start in acting with a little part in the Universal Pictures movie There’s One Born Every Minute (1942), but the studio dissolved her contract after a year.
After appearing in National Velvet (1944), she signed with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and became a prominent teen star.
In the 1950s, she moved on to more adult parts, starring in the comedy Father of the Bride (1950) and getting great reviews for her role in the drama A Place in the Sun (1951).
Taylor wanted to abandon her career in the early 1950s, even though she was one of MGM’s most bankable performers. She didn’t like the studio’s control and didn’t like a lot of the movies she was given to work on.
In the middle of the 1950s, she started getting better parts, starting with the epic drama Giant (1956). In the years that followed, she starred in several films that were both critically and commercially successful.
There were two movie versions of Tennessee Williams’ plays: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958) and Suddenly, Last Summer (1959). Taylor received a Golden Globe for Best Actress for the second one. She didn’t appreciate playing a call girl in Butterfield 8 (1960), her last movie for MGM, yet she received the Academy Award for Best Actress for her portrayal.
Taylor and Richard Burton, who co-starred in the 1961 movie Cleopatra, started an affair outside of their marriages, which generated a controversy.
Even though people didn’t like it, they stayed together and got married in 1964. The media called them “Liz and Dick,” and they made 11 movies together.
Taylor got the highest praise of her career for Woolf, which won her a second Academy Award and other prizes for her performance. In 1974, she and Burton got a divorce, but they got back together soon after and got married again in 1975. The second marriage ended in divorce in 1976.
Taylor’s acting career started to go downhill in the late 1960s, but she kept playing in movies until the mid-1970s. After that, she focused on helping her sixth husband, United States Senator John Warner (R-Virginia), with his career.
She had her first big stage roles and performed in a number of TV movies and shows in the 1980s. After Sophia Loren, she was the second famous person to start a perfume line.
Taylor was one of the first famous people to speak out about HIV/AIDS. She helped start the Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation in 1991 and the American Foundation for AIDS Research in 1985.
She spent her time doing good works from the early 1990s until her death, and she won many awards for them, including the Presidential Citizens Medal.
Taylor’s personal life was always in the news during her career. She married seven men and had eight marriages. She also converted to Judaism, had a number of serious illnesses, and lived a jet-set lifestyle, collecting one of the world’s most costly private jewelry collections.
Taylor died in 2011 at the age of 79 from congestive heart failure after being sick for a long time.
Taylor was one of the last stars of Hollywood’s golden age and one of the first stars of the contemporary era. She was the perfect example of a classic movie star during the time of the studio system.
MGM deliberately designed and controlled her public image to make her look different from “normal” people.
Taylor became the first celebrity to have their genuine private life be the center of public curiosity when the traditional Hollywood era ended in the 1960s and paparazzi photography became a routine part of media culture.
Adam Bernstein of The Washington Post says that “more than for any movie role, she became famous for being famous, setting a media template for later generations of entertainers, models, and all kinds of semi-somebodies.”
Taylor won a lot of acting awards during her career, but critics at the time often didn’t pay attention to her movies. Film historian Jeanine Basinger says, “No actress ever had a harder time getting critics to see her onscreen as someone other than Elizabeth Taylor…” “Her persona ate her alive.”
Many reviewers still think that she constantly played herself instead of acting, and her movie parts were often similar to her real life.
The New York Times’ Mel Gussow, on the other hand, said that “the range of [Taylor’s] acting was surprisingly wide,” even though she never had any professional training.
Peter Bradshaw, a movie reviewer, said she was “an actress of such sexiness it was an incitement to riot—sultry and queenly at the same time” and “a smart, intuitive acting presence in her later years.”
David Thomson said, “She had the range, nerve, and instinct that only Bette Davis had before. Like Davis, Taylor was a monster and an empress, a sweetheart and a scold, an idiot and a wise woman.”
The National Film Registry has kept five of her movies: Lassie Come Home, National Velvet, A Place in the Sun, Giant, and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? The American Film Institute has also named her the seventh greatest female screen legend of classical Hollywood cinema.
Journalists and professors concerned in the role of women in Western society have also talked about Taylor. Camille Paglia says that Taylor was a “pre-feminist woman” who “wields the sexual power that feminism cannot explain and has tried to destroy.”
We can feel the world-changing effects of legendary heroines like Delilah, Salome, and Helen of Troy via stars like Taylor.
M.G. Lord, a cultural critic, labels Taylor a “accidental feminist.” She says that while Taylor didn’t call herself a feminist, many of her movies featured feminist themes and “introduced a broad audience to feminist ideas.”
Ben W. Heineman Jr. and Cristine Russell also say in The Atlantic that her role in Giant “dismantled stereotypes about women and minorities.”
People see Taylor as a gay icon, and she is well-known for her work to raise awareness about HIV/AIDS. After she died, GLAAD said that she “was an icon not only in Hollywood, but in the LGBT community, where she worked to make sure that everyone was treated with the respect and dignity we all deserve.” Sir Nick Partridge of the Terrence Higgins Trust called her “the first major star to publicly fight fear and prejudice towards AIDS.”
Paul Flynn of The Guardian said that she was “a new type of gay icon, one whose position is based not on tragedy, but on her work for the LGBTQ community.”
Former President Bill Clinton said after her death, “Elizabeth’s legacy will live on in many people around the world whose lives will be longer and better because of her work and the work of those she inspired.”
(Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons / Pinterest / Britannica).
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