Tom Long: Elizabeth Taylor is a lasting symbol of Hollywood

22 March, 2011

She was a child star, an Oscar-winning actress, Cleopatra of the Nile, one of the most desired — and married — women on Earth.

But by the time of her death Wednesday at age 79, Elizabeth Taylor was most famous, at least to the generations born since the ’70s, for being famous.

Her various ills and many divorces, her friendship with Michael Jackson, her ballooning and shrinking weight were all the stuff of tabloid fodder. The girl who had been born in London to American parents but moved to Hollywood as a child had become an image, not a person, more a punch line than an actress.

“She’s been in poor health for a very long time, and I hope that’s not the memory America has today,” said Gary Hoppenstand, a professor at Michigan State University and the editor of the journal Pop Culture. “The memory they should have is of one of the most glamorous actresses of her era,” Hoppenstand said. “There was no one who packed more punch than Elizabeth Taylor.”

For nearly three decades, from the mid-’40s through the ’60s, Taylor was one of Hollywood’s premier sex symbols and most controversial stars.

She matured from playing a horse-racing innocent in 1944′s “National Velvet” at the age of 12 to a socialite heroine in “A Place in the Sun” seven years later.

In the ’50s, Taylor also established her credentials as a dramatic actress. She worked with James Dean and Rock Hudson in “Giant” (1956) and then earned her first of five Oscar nominations in 1957 with the Civil War yarn “Raintree County.”

Along the way, she was already picking up and dropping husbands — hotel magnate Nicky Hilton, actor Michael Wilding, producer Mike Todd — and by 1958 the onetime child star had turned to steamier fare like “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” co-starring Paul Newman

“Liz Taylor in a slip I’m sure launched more than a million fantasies,” said Jerry Herron, an American Studies professor at Wayne State University and dean of the honors college there.

Taylor’s fame and renown as a sexual siren peaked, though, in 1963 with the release of “Cleopatra,” still arguably the most expensive box-office bomb of all time in adjusted dollars. It was while making “Cleopatra” that Taylor fell in love with co-star Richard Burton, a Welsh, Shakespearian-trained actor.

The two carried on an open affair even as Taylor was still married to singer Eddie Fisher, and the public looked on, appalled and fully entertained.

“A gossip magazine wasn’t a gossip magazine back then unless it had Liz Taylor on the cover,” said MSU’s Hoppenstand.

She made the cover of Life magazine 11 times from 1947 to 1972. The 1967 headline — “My nagging, scheming, seductive, honest wife” — quoted Burton. Taylor and Burton would marry twice and continue their tempestuous relationship for more than 15 years.

Teaming with Burton ultimately led Taylor to her best and most unlikely role. Gaining substantial weight and donning a salt-and-pepper wig, she played the shrewish, foul-mouthed and middle-aged Martha to Burton’s drunken, beaten George in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” in 1966. Taylor’s impassioned, reeling performance won her a second best actress Oscar (the first came for playing a call girl in 1960′s less notable “Butterfield 8″).

She never reached such an artistic peak again, and performed less and less as the years went on. In 1994, she made her last big screen appearance, in “The Flintstones,” no less. In the early ’80s, she tried Broadway with success (“The Little Foxes”) and failure (“Private Lives”).

It was as if she knew she could never top “Virginia Woolf,” and she could never fully get away from the image of the dysfunctional Martha.

Taylor took on causes — she was one of the first to come out for AIDS funding after her friend Rock Hudson died from the disease in the ’80s — marketed perfumes in her name, and did rare TV roles, the last being “These Old Broads” in 2001.

Wayne State’s Herron compares her later years to a modern-day Garbo-esque ability to walk away from the spotlight. “She did some amazing stuff and then disappeared,” Herron said.

“Unlike someone like Madonna who’s famous for publicly re-inventing herself, I don’t think Elizabeth Taylor ever looked like she was reinventing anything. She was being herself in public,” Herron said.

Although she may not have been acting, Taylor continued to work for charitable causes. She received a special humanitarian Oscar for her work with AIDS in 1993.

“She advocated for the tolerance of differences in a way that was very effective,” said MSU’s Hoppenstand.

“She was a person who apparently lived life to the fullest, and I don’t think she had time for naysayers who looked down on those who might be perceived as outsiders,” he said.

Taylor, eight times married, owner of three Oscars, former screen goddess and constant subject of gossip for some seven decades, died of congestive heart failure Wednesday in Los Angeles.

“You’ve got to think that woman had one of the most fascinating inner lives of any human ever to walk the planet,” Herron said.

To some she was a faded actress; to others, she will always be the seductive, controversial and colorful Queen of the Nile.

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