On Elizabeth Taylor the star, almost everything worth saying has already been said.
On Taylor the actress, we tread more carefully, as the days after a icon’s death are the moment for generosity, not brutal frankness.
She was sometimes astounding and always, somehow, in charge. She was queen of a certain kind of no-holds-barred emotionalism, drawn to washouts, alcoholics, neurotics and pampered wrecks. True fans treasure her overblown performances as much, if not more, than her officially “good” ones, the point being that there’s such a thin line between them.
If she hadn’t been constitutionally drawn to such soused theatrics, her Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? would not have been the fearless and weirdly intuitive portrait it is. Tottering under that grey wig, a tumbler never far from being flung against the nearest wall, she risks ridiculousness in the role, as in quite a number of others. But having achieved the level of stardom she did, what’s remarkable is that Taylor continued to go for broke, making most other contemporary screen goddesses seem like timid, indecisive show-ponies as she did so.
If there’s an archetypal Taylor scene we could focus on, it’s the image of her sprawling in bed. One suspects she felt most comfortable acting when not having to stand, since most of her key roles furnish ample excuse to take to a four-poster, a sofa or a chaise-longue in a pose of either seduction, wailing decrepitude, or occasionally both.
The poster for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof shows her perched, famously, in a white satin slip, with only bedposts and pillows behind her. The one for Suddenly, Last Summer has her in a state of troubled repose, while Monty Clift and Katharine Hepburn look in on her through the bedroom door.
Cleopatra is virtually a Bed, Bath and Beyond tour of her Alexandrian palace, cushioning both the Caesar and Antony relationships with a staggering yardage of Egyptian silk and cotton. (MTV could break the movie up into half-hour segments and call it “Blingest Entombment Cribs”.)
In the opening scene of Butterfield 8, Taylor’s high-priced call girl wakes up to rinse her mouth out with bourbon. More imperiously, she wakes up to scream “Pain! Injection!” at her household of servants, while surrounded by small dogs in a Mediterranean island mansion (that’s Boom!, also from Tennessee Williams, and one of the two back-to-back oddities she made with Joseph Losey in 1968).
In the other one, Secret Ceremony, she follows Mia Farrow back to a wackily ornate polychromatic palace in West London, under the delusion that they may be long-lost mother and daughter. In this deliriously bizarre film, perhaps the maddest of Taylor’s whole career, she keeps going to bed in the middle of the day, then getting up to plunder the rather moth-eaten wardrobe of Farrow’s dead ma.
Her characters are always threatening to hit the hay and simply not wake up – a choice her tragic, childless actress makes at the end of The Mirror Crack’d. So it’s no surprise she decided to tackle the role of Alexandra Del Lago, the ageing movie star in Sweet Bird of Youth, for a version Nicolas Roeg filmed for television in 1989 – her final substantial performance, discounting The Flintstones as we must. This character spends virtually the whole play on her oversized hotel bed, washing pills down with vodka and inhaling oxygen from a tank, to help her forget. “Can you control your memory like that?”, asks her gigolo paramour, Chance Wayne. “I’ve had to learn to,” she replies.
If we remember John Wayne on a saddle and Brigitte Bardot on a beach, one hopes Elizabeth Taylor is happy to be immortalised as great in bed.
What will be your lasting memory of Elizabeth Taylor on-screen? Please leave your comments in the box below.
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