Elizabeth Taylor, 1932-2011
Dame Elizabeth Taylor died of congestive heart failure on March 23, 2011, at Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles. She was 79.
She was a star, right to the end.
It didn't matter that Elizabeth Taylor had retired years ago. It didn't matter that she hadn't made a movie since 2001, and that was a wan TV comedy called These Old Broads. It didn't matter that to younger generations, she was known mostly as a tabloid heading or a punchline - if she was known at all.
Elizabeth Taylor was still a star. Maybe The Star.
Because a star is something more than an actor. A star is someone you think about even when they're not working. A star is someone who fascinates, purely through the power of their personality. And Taylor had fascinated the world since she was a little girl.
No, Taylor was an actress, and an often underrated one, eventually winning two Oscars and the respect of her colleagues. A tireless fundraiser, too. (The legendary 69-carat diamond that love-of-her-life Richard Burton gave her in 1969? She later sold it to fund a Botswana hospital.)
"The world is saddened today, but it is a very personal saddness for me, due to our sixty years of friendship," said Margaret O'Brien, who costarred with Taylor in Jane Eyre and Little Women when they were both children. "We will all remain forever in debt to Elizabeth for her immense contributions as an actress, her efforts to fight AIDS, and the countless charities she gave to so selflessly. Life loved Elizabeth and and Elizabeth loved life."
Yes, Taylor was a professional, a performer and a philanthropist. But more than anything else, Elizabeth Taylor was an icon.
She was born in England to two transplanted Americans, an ambitious art dealer and a former actress. Yet while Sara Taylor was retired, there was nothing retiring about her. After the family returned to America in 1939, she used connections to get her daughter a contract at Universal; it was for six months, at $100 a week. The studio canceled it early.
"She can't sing, she can’t dance, she can't perform," one executive reportedly snapped - at least getting two out of three right. He also noted that her mother was "one of the most unbearable women it has been my displeasure to meet."
Mama Taylor might have been unbearable, but she was also unstoppable. She soon got her astonishingly beautiful little girl - her large violet eyes framed by double rows of black lashes, a genetic mutation that made it seem like she was always wearing mascara - strong parts in Lassie Come Home and Jane Eyre.
"Some of my best leading men," Elizabeth quipped later, "have been dogs and horses."
She wasn’t completely kidding. In 1944, at age 12, she won the lead in National Velvet and emerged as a major star. As Velvet Brown, a headstrong girl who disguises her gender in order to compete in a horse race, the future icon of womanhood ironically came to fame in a cross-dressing film role. The emotional gravity of her performance instantly distinguished her from peppy moppets like Shirley Temple and winsome teens like Judy Garland. MGM signed Taylor to a long-term contract, bragging the youngster could nail even difficult scenes in a single take.
Even then, the life of a child star was difficult, as Taylor's co-stars like Margaret O'Brien and Peggy Ann Garner would soon find out. Yet Taylor, who grew up in public - Courage of Lassie, Life With Father, Little Women - never went through the dreaded awkward stage.
And then, at 18, she bloomed, making an effortless transition from a teen starlet to an adult actress with 1950's Father of the Bride. As a 5-foot-2-inch wedding-cake doll, she was the full focus of Spencer Tracy's fierce protectiveness. The next year, in A Place in the Sun, she was the object of desire that enthralled Montgomery Clift, even on his deathbed.
Yet her career was overshadowed by her tempestuous love affairs and multiple marriages - eight in all. Few celebrities are as firmly entrenched in the pop culture landscape as Taylor, who never fell out of the limelight for long.
Although critically acclaimed for her Oscar-winning performances in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf and Butterfield 8, her acting career was bookended by films more notable as TV series (Lassie Come Home was her second film, and her final one was The Flintstones in which she played Wilma's mother).
Her eight marriages brought her as much attention as her film performances. The first, to hotel heir Conrad "Nicky" Hilton, Jr. in 1950, would have made Taylor Paris Hilton's great aunt if she'd stuck it out; the couple divorced within 8 months. The eighth and final marriage to Larry Fortensky in 1991 would have made Taylor the patron saint of cougars; she was 56 at the time and he was 40.
Her other husbands included a Hollywood producer who died in a plane crash (Michael Todd), a 1950s heartthrob singer (Eddie Fisher), an actor so gifted it was said he could read the phone book and still be entertaining (Richard Burton), and a US Senator (John Warner, R-Virginia.)
The latter union was probably Taylor's biggest marital mistake. It was no secret that her subsequent unhappiness at being a politician's wife led to a weight gain that made her the butt of many jokes. Warner's attitude toward his more famous wife and women's issues in general also began to take their toll.
Perhaps Taylor was distracted by the men who now flitted through her life. Perhaps she liked the easy paychecks too much. But after A Little Night Music in 1977, her hard-won position as a serious film actress was pretty much abdicated.
Still, she tried Broadway twice, including a trouble-plagued revival of Noel Coward's Private Lives in 1983 - only, perhaps, because it reunited her, at least onstage, with Burton. She reached back to earlier triumphs, revisiting Tennessee Williams for a 1989 TV version of Sweet Bird of Youth.
The years of great performances were gone, but the iconography, however, remained, and Taylor was always too smart to let something as priceless as fame go to waste. When Giant costar Rock Hudson died of AIDS, she flew into action, buttonholing politicians, hosting fundraisers, giving money. "There's still so much more to do," she said in 2005. "I can't sit back and be complacent, and none of us should be. I get around now in a wheelchair, but I get around."
She might not have been the most faithful wife you could find, but no one was a better friend. She first met Roddy McDowall on Lassie Come Home in 1942 and remained his confidante until his death; she stuck by Michael Jackson through scandal, trials, illness.
Taylor once said, "I've been through it all, baby, I'm mother courage." May we all find a piece of that courage and pay it forward with her passing.