selenak

Having just found out that Elizabeth Taylor died: sometimes she was called the last great star - the last survivor of the old Hollywood studio system. "Baby, I'm Mother Courage", was what she said herself. "I've seen it all." A Mother Courage in diamonds and furcoats, to be sure, but there's something to it. She was larger than life in that way few people manage without dying young, one of the few child stars to make it to adult fame and become so famous that their childhood incarnation is almost forgotten by comparison. In many ways the counterpart and opposite to Marilyn Monroe in what the public made of them, and the myths they came to embody: Marilyn the blonde who dies, victim of the studios and the men and her life; Elizabeth the dark haired survivor, famous for breaking directors, the studio system (her salary for Cleopatra was unprecedented in Hollywood history, and in the same year Marilyn was offered a pittance for the film she was eventually fired from, Something's Got To Give), and husbands. The reality was probably more complicated in both cases, but then, it always is. She must have been a great friend to have, as Rock Hudson and Montgomery Clift in their times of need could testify. (In Clift's case it was she who got him the male lead in Suddenly Last Summer at a point where he was regarded as unemployable by the studio.) On screen, she can be breathtakingly beautiful, of course, but also, at her best, able to get that force of personality across. I remember her best as Maggie the Cat in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Kate in Taming of the Shrew and Martha in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, and if people ever did her a disservice, it was assuming she and Richard Burton didn't act in the later, as if the lines weren't written by Edward Albee (who didn't write them with them in mind) and it didn't take effort to make George and Martha their own people. Then of course there was the film where she and Burton met, which was a flop at the time, Cleopatra. I never understood why it was a flop, by the way; the screenplay is a Mankiewiczs in fine form (brother H. would have been proud), and despite the usual Hollywoodian liberties with history contains one of the best uses of Cleopatra's Ptolemaic background in dialogue. (Antony: "I'm fond of almost all things Greek." Cleopatra: "As an almost all Greek thing myself...") You want to know my favourite moment? It comes at the very end of the big spectacle number of the film, Cleopatra's entrance in Rome. When the whole big earnest pompous endeavor has reached its climax, Cleopatra/Elizabeth looks at the camera, and us. And winks. And that, the splendour and the irony, was Elizabeth Taylor in a nutshell to me.

R.I.P., Elizabeth Taylor. Truly, a lass unparalleled.

Maggie the Cat. As people pointed out, shooting this paricular Tennessee Williams play in colour was a must for Paul Newman's and Elizabeth Taylor's eyes alone:

Two scenes from Who Is Afraid of Virginia Woolf?: