For people like myself, born in Britain in the inter-war years and growing up during the second world war, Elizabeth Taylor will always be thought of as the youngest of four British evacuees who brought their immaculate English accents to Hollywood and became an essential part of a corner of Tinseltown that was forever England. She and Peter Lawford were transported across the Atlantic by their parents as war clouds gathered over Europe and were put under contract by MGM in the early 1940s. Roddy McDowall followed when bombs began to fall on Britain, as did Angela Lansbury who was also signed by MGM. McDowall was the first to attain stardom, playing the Welsh miner's son in How Green Was My Valley and then appearing in MGM's children's classic, Lassie Come Home, in which Taylor had her first significant role. It was the beginning of a lifelong friendship and McDowall became her closest confidant.
Taylor, Lawford and McDowall were all in the tribute to British fortitude, The White Cliffs of Dover (1944), and the 12-year-old Taylor became a star as the farmer's daughter who triumphed at Aintree in National Velvet, with Lansbury as her elder sister. Lawford gave Taylor her first screen kiss at 16, an innocent enough peck, and although it's said that Taylor's mother rather fancied the idea of a courtship between the two, an order went out from MGM's boss Louis B Mayer that a romance should be discouraged. Taylor later said of Lawford: "Peter, to me, is the last word in sophistication and so terribly handsome." They did work together again on the glossy 1949 version of Little Women, in which Taylor played Amy March, and they remained close friends until his death.
McDowall became a leading character actor (he appeared with Lansbury in the 1971 Disney movie Bedknobs and Broomsticks) and a highly regarded photographer. Lawford was a member of the Kennedy clan and the Sinatra Rat Pack but ended up as a seedy alcoholic. Lansbury continues to be one of the most respected actors of her time. Taylor was later to be reunited on screen with McDowall in Cleopatra (1963), where he played Octavian, and with Lansbury in The Mirror Crack'd, when she played second fiddle as a faded Hollywood diva to Lansbury's Miss Marple. But she was the only one of this close-knit quartet to become a major screen star, one of the last to be created by the old studio system. She remained under contract to MGM until 1960, winning her first Oscar for her final movie there, the melodrama Butterfield 8.
Taylor was small (5ft 2in), dark-haired, her eyes a striking violet, her eyebrows unfashionably thick, her eyelashes as seductively employed as a courtesan's fan, and she was beautiful in different ways at various stages of her 70-year career, although her weight fluctuated alarmingly later in life. In 1941, the head of Universal Studios, when deciding not to renew Taylor's contract after her first film there, told her agent: "She can't sing, she can't act, she can't dance, she can't perform. What's more, her mother has to be the most unbearable woman it has been my displeasure to meet." This is rather like the infamous judgment on Fred Astaire's first screen test and similarly misses the point. Taylor from the start had a rare intensity, sincerity, confidence and vulnerability, and she was blessed with that indefinable, attention-grabbing presence we call charisma.
She was never out of the limelight as an actress or a celebrity from childhood until the end of her life. But her finest work was done early on, up until the late 1950s, when she was least conscious of acting. During this period she appeared as Spencer Tracy and Joan Bennett's daughter in Minnelli's Father of the Bride (1950); the entrancing object of the sad, social-climbing blue-collar Montgomery Clift in A Place in the Sun, and the strong city girl brought to Texas by rancher Rock Hudson in Giant, both directed by George Stevens; and in versions of two Tennessee Williams plays in which she was respectively the wife and the intimate cousin of a closeted gay, Cat On a Hot Tin Roof (1958) and Suddenly, Last Summer (1959).
When the 17-year-old hero and his girlfriend go to the cinema in small-town 1951 Texas in Peter Bogdanovich's The Last Picture Show, they see Taylor in Father of the Bride: she is clearly the belle idéale of postwar America. The iconic shot of her in a white bathing suit in Suddenly, Last Summer is famously ravishing and has a particular poignancy when one considers that in the scene from which it comes she's being exploited as bait to attract young men to her homosexual cousin. In fact, throughout her life she had a special affinity with gay men (McDowall, Clift and Hudson were also close confidants) and seemed happiest and most relaxed in their company. She was among the first celebrities to play a prominent role in promoting public consciousness over Aids and then raising money for HIV-related charities.
Taylor was praised as a child and adolescent, but from the early 50s until Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? it was customary for serious critics to regard her with patronising contempt. Variety said of A Place in the Sun that "the histrionics are of a quality so far beyond anything she has done previously that Stevens must be credited with a minor miracle". The acerbic Dwight Macdonald reviewing Suddenly, Last Summer in Esquire ironically complimented Joseph L Mankiewicz for his "directorial triumph: he has somehow extracted from Elizabeth Taylor a mediocre performance, which is a definite step-up in her dramatic career". Such reviews may well have been affected by the critics' refusal to respond to her beauty and magic spell. This must have been deeply dispiriting, especially as she was aware, we now know, of how mediocre the films MGM put her into were.
Since a riding accident during the shooting of National Velvet, Taylor was to be dogged by ill health, ranging from back problems to heart disease and cancer. The sympathy this attracted coexisted with a more mixed response to her succession of marriages, eight in all, to seven husbands. The public felt deeply for her when her third husband, the flamboyant Mike Todd was killed in a plane crash after little more than a year of marriage. But this rapidly changed. A few months later, she was widely depicted as a brazen predator after stealing Eddie Fisher from Debbie Reynolds, whose seemingly perfect marriage had been thought of as the most emblematic of the Eisenhower era. Another couple of years on, she became the century's most publicised Jezebel when she ditched Fisher during the filming of Cleopatra in the early 1960s and embarked on an affair with the married Richard Burton.
Cleopatra, in fact, was a turning point for her and a landmark in the history of Hollywood. She became the first star to be paid more than a million dollars, the film became legendary for its chaotic production history, and it made Taylor and Burton the most notorious lovers of the 20th century. They were as extravagant, reckless and wilful as the historical character they were playing on screen. The affair and the marriage made her determined to make her mark as a serious actress, a worthy partner to Burton. Some observers, however, see this as having a seriously detrimental effect on her work.
Over the next decade, Burton and Taylor were more celebrated for their vulgar ostentation and public rows than for their work. After Cleopatra, they appeared together in a further 10 films, most mirroring their marriage. Among them were The Sandpiper, in which liberated artist Taylor lures vicar-schoolteacher Burton off the straight and narrow; The Taming of the Shrew, which parallels their own tempestuous courtship; and the 1973 TV film, Divorce His-Divorce Hers, that more or less describes their final break-up. When they had come together after their divorce for a second brief marriage, an American columnist observed: "Sturm has remarried Drang". The one truly successful film of this period is Mike Nichols's version of Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, where a middle-aged academic couple tear each other apart in a manner reminiscent of Strindberg at his most atrabilious. Both gave raw, revealing performances.
Virginia Woolf brought Taylor her second Oscar, but her screen career from that point on can be seen as a downhill journey and the public tired of Burton and Taylor. She was very good in John Huston's Reflections in a Golden Eye opposite Marlon Brando, but it was not popular, and most of her films thereafter failed to secure a wide release or went straight to graveyard slots on TV. At least two, however, are worthy of attention: Boom! and Secret Ceremony, both British films directed by Joseph Losey in 1968. After the 70s, only two of her pictures were widely seen: The Mirror Crack'd (1980), the poorest of a British series of Agatha Christie period whodunits, and her final theatrical film, playing Pearl Slaghoople, in The Flintstones (1994), a live-action, one-joke movie spin-off from the 60s TV cartoon series. It was a sad end to her big-screen career, though she did a deal of TV, including Malice in Wonderland (1985), a docudrama about Hollywood gossip columnists in which she plays Louella Parsons.
In those last couple of decades Elizabeth Taylor became a heroic coper with ill health, a supporter of good causes, and a vociferously loyal friend to, among others, Michael Jackson. She couldn't shift tickets at the box office, but she was in demand as a star and a celebrity on the cover of popular magazines. She was always a dual national, born in Britain of American parents, and thus eligible to become a Dame of the British Empire in 2000.
Her only stage appearances were starring opposite Burton in Private Lives, Coward's bittersweet comedy of marriage and divorce that perfectly reflected their relationship, and as the southern bitch Regina in a 1981 revival of Lillian Hellman's The Little Foxes, the London version of which showed up the inadequacy of her stagecraft. But in looking at her life towards the end she invoked one of the greatest female roles of the 20th century: "I'm Mother Courage, baby, I've been through it all."
So how will history judge her? In 1999, the American Film Institute, after an earnest weighing of evidence over performance, reputation, influence and so on, came up with a list of more than 100 film actresses who might be considered female screen legends. They submitted it to a carefully chosen selection of professionals from all branches of the film industry. Taylor was placed seventh, just ahead of Judy Garland, Marlene Dietrich and Joan Crawford and behind Katharine Hepburn, Bette Davis, Audrey Hepburn, Ingrid Bergman, Greta Garbo and Marilyn Monroe. This seems, for the moment, a satisfactory seating arrangement in the cinematic pantheon.
