Film fans of a certain age came of age with Elizabeth Taylor.
“She grew up onscreen,” says Sean Clark, director of the UNLV Graduate Screenwriting Program and a professor of film at the school. “She aged with us. People who saw her in her White Diamonds phase late in her career might not have seen her as the really young and beautiful actress from 'National Velvet,' when she was just becoming a woman.
“She grew old in front of us, and with us.”
One of the greatest American movie stars of her or any generation, Taylor died Wednesday morning at age 79, succumbing to congestive heart failure at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.
When Clark encounters waves of film students unfamiliar with Taylor’s film career, which spanned six decades and 50 films, he says, “There are movie stars, and they are movie stars for a reason. The camera likes them, we like them, and they are our royalty. But underneath that royalty is talent, and we often don’t recognize that talent because they are movie stars.”
Clark compares Taylor to the late Tony Curtis, in that the aura and power of her stardom concealed her gifts as an actor.
“It’s easy to forget how good they were in their art and craft,” he says. “In Giant, she was fabulous. You have (James) Dean and (Rock) Hudson just eating up the scenery, but she stands out among them. … It’s a testament to how great Paul Newman was that in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof that she was not turning him on, she was so powerful in how she became Maggie the Cat. She was iconic in that role.”
In Giant, which covers two generations, Taylor and Hudson display the dexterity to “play old.” Taylor was 24 at the time of the movie’s filming.
“In Giant, her and Rock Hudson are playing people decades older than they are,” Clark says. “And they played it with amazing grace. That’s what we have to take away from her film career. I see her that way, or as Maggie the Cat, or in Giant.
“If you look at her in National Velvet, the way she becomes a woman as she makes this movie. It was beautiful and magnetic at the same time.”
Taylor won Oscars for her performances in 1960’s Butterfield 8 and 1966’s Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in which she starred opposite Richard Burton, to whom she was married twice. Her octet of marriages was often the source of ridicule, for the uncommonly high number and even whom she selected as partners.
“Her bigger-than-life persona clouds so much of her good work, and it was kind of weird when she would go off and marry Larry Fortensky,” Clark says. “The oddness of it all made people look at her and say, ‘That’s beneath her.’ They would know her as a friend of Michael Jackson’s and nothing else.”
But Taylor offset the unflattering coverage of her offscreen life by donating to charities fighting AIDS across the country. Her death will likely lead film buffs back to her great films, the many classics, or even the comically haughty Cleopatra.
“She was what you wanted to see in her, that’s what she projected,” Clark says. “At her peak, she was a worldwide phenomenon, as big as any star or athlete.”
And a model, in innumerable ways, for those who followed.
Follow John Katsilometes on Twitter at twitter.com/JohnnyKats. Also, follow Kats With the Dish at twitter.com/KatsWithTheDish.
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