Drama queen

Revisiting her work is revelatory,” Paul Newman said a few years ago of the legendary Elizabeth Taylor, who died at 79 on March 29. “Every time you watch her films, you discover something new.”

Her fans will have that chance today as Turner Classic Movies presents a 24-hour marathon including many classics.

She positively sizzles as Maggie the Cat in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” wriggling around in a slip trying to tempt her alcoholic and possibly closeted husband played by Newman in this censor-baiting adaptation of a Tennessee Williams play.

During the shoot, her husband, producer Mike Todd, died, but Taylor returned to the set to give her most dazzling performance up to that point.

“I was overwhelmed with her professionalism,” Newman said in a TCM tribute filmed a few years ago. “She later said that playing Maggie the Cat saved her.”

The role brought Taylor the second of her five Best Actress Oscar nominations. It was preceded by performance as an emotionally disturbed Civil War-era belle in the epic “Raintree County.”

While that film was in production, Taylor nursed co-star Montgomery Clift back to health after he was nearly killed in an automobile accident, requiring extensive plastic surgery.

Sympathy engendered by an emergency tracheotomy while suffering from pneumonia — the first of Taylor’s many brushes with death — is credited by most historians for her first Oscar win, playing a Manhattan call girl in “Butterfield 8.”

She appeared in this film with singer Eddie Fisher, who notoriously ditched his wife Debbie Reynolds to become the widowed Taylor’s husband.

“He consoled her with flowers,” Fisher and Reynolds’ daughter Carrie Fisher recalled recently. “And ultimately, he consoled her with his penis.”

An even bigger scandal loomed when Taylor then left Fisher for Richard Burton while they were co-starring in “Cleopatra.” She and Burton appeared in 11 more movies, including one that included Taylor’s greatest triumph as an actress.

One of the most beautiful women of the 20th century was cast as an alcoholic, slatternly, foul-mouthed faculty wife in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf,” a taboo-busting film that left Hollywood’s censorship system in tatters and paved the way for the present movie ratings system.

Burton persuaded a reluctant Taylor, who was in her thirties, to play the vitriolic Martha. She gained weight, wore a rat’s nest wig and was made up to play a character in her fifties. “When I got into my Martha suit, I forgot me,” she said of the role that brought her a second Oscar.

“She is not afraid to take chances in front of people,” Newman said in his tribute. “I find a lot of actors who reach the top, they become very protective and self-indulgent, but not Elizabeth. I was always staggered by her ferocity.”

That ferocity can also been seen in one of Taylor’s most underrated roles, as an oilman’s wife in the epic “Giant.”

Grace Kelly was the first choice of director George Stevens, who had reservations that Taylor, then 23, could play the character in middle age.

But he was persuaded to cast Taylor by co-star Rock Hudson. They became such close friends that her then-husband, Michael Wilding, flew down to the Texas location to investigate rumors his wife was having an affair with Hudson.

The movie’s wedding scene was filmed following an all-night bender.

“In between takes,” Hudson recalled, “Elizabeth and I were running out and throwing up. We were both so hungover we couldn’t speak. That’s what made the scene.”

As Newman said, “She’s a very instinctive actress. She knows her instrument and she knows how to make it work.”

LONG LIVE LIZ

If you want to watch a favorite classic or finally see the movies you’ve heard so much about, here is Sunday’s schedule of the TCM’s Elizabeth Taylor marathon.

6 a.m. — Lassie Come Home (1943).

7:30 a.m. — National Velvet (1944).

10 a.m. — Conspirator (1952).

11:30 a.m. — Father of the Bride (1950), with Spencer Tracy.

1:15 a.m. — Father’s Little Dividend (1951), with Spencer Tracy.

2:45 p.m. — Raintree County (1957), with Montgomery Clift, Eva Marie Saint and Agnes Moorehead.

6 p.m. — Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), with Paul Newman, Burl Ives and Judith Anderson.

8 p.m. — Butterfield 8 (1960), with Laurence Harvey and Eddie Fisher. Taylor’s first Best Actress Oscar.

10 p.m. — Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), with Richard Burton, George Segal and Sandy Dennis. Taylor’s second Best Actress Oscar.

12:30 a.m. — Giant (1956), with James Dean and Rock Hudson.

4 a.m. — Ivanhoe (1952), with Robert Taylor and Joan Fontaine.