For all of Elizabeth Taylor’s memorable film characters — Maggie, the “cat” in the Tennessee Williams classic, a call girl in “Butterfield 8,” Egyptian Queen Cleopatra — there was no part for which she was better suited than the role of Elizabeth Taylor.
More than any other movie star, Taylor lived in the public domain. And unlike modern-day celebrities, who are famous for just being famous, there was actually edgy, chiseled, granite substance behind Taylor’s star power.
Who else had bookend Oscars, a name synonymous with important causes, her own line of perfume, a who’s who list of husbands and her own Twitter account?
“Hold your horses world,” the Hollywood empress tweeted last summer. “I’ve been hearing all kinds of rumours [sic] about someone being cast to play me in a film about Richard [Burton] and myself. No one is going to play Elizabeth Taylor, but Elizabeth Taylor herself.”
Taylor’s rich, amazing life was a dazzling Hollywood screenplay, from her humble beginnings to her sad but dignified end.
It had mind-bending plot twists and more drama then a miniseries. It had tension and turmoil, triumph and tears, all the ingredients for a box-office smash.
The original diva, Taylor owned the screen during the golden era of moviemaking. A precocious child star who danced for the future queen of England at age 3, Taylor made her name in 1944 as a 12-year-old starring in “National Velvet,” a touching film about a girl’s love for her horse.
It helped that the London-born Taylor could speak with a British accent and ride a horse like a jockey. It didn’t hurt that she had penetrating beauty and violet-hued eyes that inspired romantic poetry. Cameramen said that she had no bad angle and that her face was flawlessly symmetrical.
It was that breathtaking beauty, an emotional exquisiteness that transcended the pin-up posters, that was the hallmark of her brilliant career. It was a straightjacket from which she eventually escaped to become an icon.
“The shock of Elizabeth was not only her beauty,” director Mike Nichols said yesterday. “It was her generosity. Her giant laugh. Her vitality, whether tackling a complex scene on film or where we would all have dinner until dawn. She is singular and indelible on film and in our hearts.”
It was Nichols who directed Taylor in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” — where she stretched out of her comfort zone to play a foul-mouthed shrew opposite husband Richard Burton.
Ironically, it was Burton, the love of her life who dissented on the beauty issue. The notion of his wife as “the most beautiful woman in the world is absolute nonsense,” he said.
“She has wonderful eyes,” Burton said “but she has a double chin and an overdeveloped chest, and she’s rather short in the leg.”
Even Taylor’s own mother didn’t put much stock in her looks.
At birth, her mom said little Elizabeth’s “tiny face was so tightly closed, it looked as if it would never unfold.”
Elizabeth Rosemond Taylor was born in London on Feb. 27, 1932, the daughter of Francis Taylor, an art dealer, and the former Sara Sothern, an American stage actress.
Barely out of diapers, but with extensive ballet training already behind her, Taylor danced for Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret Rose at London’s Hippodrome. A year later, at age 4, she was given a wild horse that she learned to ride like a pro.
At the onset of World War II, the Taylors moved to the United States, where Elizabeth’s father opened a gallery in Beverly Hills. In 1942, the talented girl made her screen debut with a bit part in the comedy “There’s One Born Every Minute.”
A handful of other parts followed until she broke through with “National Velvet.”
Still in school at 16, Elizabeth would dash from the classroom to the movie set, where she played passionate love scenes with Robert Taylor in “Conspirator.” Two years later, she was married to hotel heir Conrad Hilton Jr., a union that lasted a mere seven months.
“I have the emotions of a child in the body of a woman,” she once said. “I was rushed into womanhood for the movies.”
Taylor went on to win two Best Actress Oscars, one for her role as a prostitute in 1960’s “Butterfield 8” and another in 1966, for “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”
But only a star as conflicted as Taylor could upstage her own acting with controversial romances, distracting good looks, endless physical ailments and a pioneering advocacy for the fight against AIDS.
On more than one occasion, Taylor was close to death, once before her first Oscar and decades later with a benign brain tumor and heart scares.
Her medical setbacks included hip-replacement surgeries and heart-valve operations.
“I’ve been lucky all my life,” she said in 1992, just before turning 60. “Everything was handed to me. Looks, fame, wealth, honors, love. I rarely had to fight for anything. But I’ve paid for that luck with disasters.”
Taylor found some balance as one of the world’s most visible anti-AIDS activists — increasing AIDS awareness after her movie-star friend Rock Hudson died from the disease. She’s credited with raising nearly $100 million to fight the disease.
“Acting is, to me now, artificial,” Taylor said in 2005. “Seeing people suffer is real. It couldn’t be more real. Some people don’t like to look at it in the face because it’s painful. But if nobody does, then nothing gets done.”
Taylor embraced the fame that made her an icon. And even though “Liz” was perfect for newspaper headlines, she never liked the nickname because “I can sound like such a hiss,” she once told a reporter.
To another, she described the perfect headstone: “Here lies Elizabeth. She hated being called Liz. But she lived.”