Elizabeth Taylor

St. James Encyclopedia of Pop Culture, Jan 29, 2002 by Robyn Karney

Fame and notoriety attached themselves to Elizabeth Taylor very early in her life and never left her. It is more than likely that she will forever occupy a place in both cultural and social history as twentieth-century America's most celebrated woman--as well as one of its most beautiful--and certainly Hollywood's last genuine star in the great tradition. Whether in good films or bad, the pull of her magnetic presence continually drew hordes of fans, mesmerized by her screen persona and her off-screen life, which took on the aura of myth.

A national institution and a living legend, Taylor became the paradigmatic exemplar of media-driven notions of celebrity, and an emblem of outrageous excess--conditions that defined her adult image. Her extraordinary, colorful and, indeed, remarkable life, made her an object of constant fascination to the public, among whom she variously evoked admiration, even worship, as well as periodically inviting derision or attracting moral outrage. However, the notoriety that has attached to her fabled marriages (seven husbands, eight weddings), her abundant wealth, her disappointments and tragedies, her many illnesses, weight problems, and battles with substance abuse, served seriously to overshadow her acting achievements to the detriment of her professional reputation.

By the time she voluntarily retired from filmmaking after a character role as Pearl Slaghoople in The Flintstones(1994), her 51st and last film, Elizabeth Taylor had the longest postwar career of any actress in Hollywood. It was largely as undistinguished as it was lengthy, her abundance of talent and intelligence too often buried, as she herself observed with her customary candor, in a welter of mediocrity. Nevertheless, among her credits, the handful of good roles in worthwhile films rightfully earned her five Academy Award nominations and two Oscars, the French Legion d'Honneur, and the American Film Institute Lifetime Achievement award; while her eloquent campaigning for causes, notably in the field of AIDS research, brought her the Academy's Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award.

Elizabeth Rosemond Taylor was born in Hampstead, London, on February 27, 1932, the daughter of American parents. Francis Taylor was an art dealer and his wife Sara was a socially ambitious former stage actress. Thanks to their influential connections, Elizabeth and her elder brother Howard enjoyed a privileged early childhood. To escape World War II, the Taylors returned to the United States in 1939, finally settling in Beverly Hills, where Francis opened a fashionable gallery in the Beverly Hills Hotel. With child and teen stars a popular fixture of Hollywood movies at that time, Sara Taylor was determined that her pretty, violet-eyed daughter would be one of them.

A shy child who loved animals, Elizabeth had no desire to become an actress but, in the grip of an iron-willed mother, found herself at age nine auditioning for MGM, who turned her down, and Universal who took her on. She made her debut playing an objectionable brat with little to say in a poor comedy called There's One Born Every Minute (1941), after which the studio dropped her. She lived the natural life of a child again until late the following year when she made Lassie Come Home for MGM, beginning a contractual association with MGM that lasted until the early 1960s. The studio immediately lent her to Fox for a tiny role as the child who dies in Jane Eyre (1943), after which she was enrolled in the MGM schoolroom, and appeared (mostly in small featured roles) in a string of films that were largely forgettable. It was the death of normality. Owned by the studio and controlled by her mother, Elizabeth did as she was told, her self-image gradually shaped by her movies, her adolescence a fantasy lived through the roles she played.

In 1943, while training for her first major role--in National Velvet--Elizabeth fell from her horse and sustained a spinal injury, the first of several such over the course of her life. When the film was released in 1944, her performance as Velvet Brown who, disguised as a boy jockey, wins the Grand National, enchanted critics and audiences alike. Fresh, natural, and vivacious, the 12-year-old also revealed the beginnings of her great beauty that even the braces on Velvet's teeth failed to mar. Over the next few years Elizabeth was transformed from sparkling teenager to ripening, sensuous woman, with no intermediate stage. As the eponymous Cynthia (1947), her role sounded a perilous echo of her own life--an over-protected, over-controlled teenager battling with her mother (Mary Astor) to gain adolescent freedoms; in A Date with Judy (1948) she was the sophisticated, sexy, and knowing teenager who sets out successfully to catch the man (Robert Stack, aged 29) earmarked for Judy (Jane Powell).

In a radio interview with Louella Parsons just before the release of Cynthia, the 15-year-old rising star, who had not yet been allowed a boyfriend, said that she wanted to be a great actress, but added, with ironic prescience, "most of all, I want to snare a husband." Meanwhile, MGM sent her to England in late 1948 to play a wife--married to Robert Taylor--in Conspirator, a film whose only merit was to reveal the actress's burgeoning beauty, talent, and physical maturity. She was 17.