Elizabeth Taylor

Elizabeth Taylor: Violet Eyes, Weaponised Fame

A casting director at Universal took one look at the child and passed: "the kid has nothing ... her eyes are too old, she doesn't have the face of a child." Two decades later she became the first movie star paid a million dollars for a role. Four decades later she used the same face to force an American president to say the word AIDS out loud. Taylor's life is the story of a commodity that learned what it was and decided how to spend itself.

The Child With the Wrong Face

She was born on 27 February 1932 in Hampstead Garden Suburb, London, to American parents from Arkansas City, Kansas: Francis Lenn Taylor, an art dealer, and Sara Sothern, a stage actress. The family had moved to London in 1929 and left for Los Angeles in 1939, when Elizabeth was seven, ahead of the war. She attended Byron House, a Montessori school in Highgate, and was raised in the Christian Science faith; Colonel Victor Cazalet served as her unofficial godfather and early influence. She held British and American citizenship from birth.

The eyes that Universal disliked were violet-blue and framed by a double row of lashes — the result of a genetic condition, distichiasis. It is the rare case of a physical accident that turned out to be a career.

National Velvet and the MGM Machine

Universal signed her in 1941, gave her a debut in There's One Born Every Minute (1942), and dropped her after a year. MGM signed her to a seven-year contract in 1943 after an audition for Lassie Come Home. National Velvet (1944), made when she was twelve, was a box-office hit and made her a star. The New York Times found her "whole manner in this picture is one of refreshing grace"; another reviewer wrote that she "is rapturously beautiful... I hardly know or care whether she can act or not" — a sentence that would shadow her for fifty years.

The transition to adult roles was managed with unusual skill. Father of the Bride (1950) took $6 million; A Place in the Sun (1951) brought critical acclaim; she lobbied George Stevens personally for Giant (1956), which revived her standing. Raintree County (1957) brought her first Academy Award nomination. She won a Golden Globe for Suddenly, Last Summer (1959) and the Academy Award for Best Actress for BUtterfield 8 (1960), her final MGM picture.

Cleopatra, and the Vatican

Cleopatra (1963) cost $62 million and paid her the first million-dollar fee in film history. Its more consequential product was her affair with Richard Burton, which became an international scandal severe enough that the Vatican condemned the pair for "erotic vagrancy." They married on 15 March 1964 and made eleven films together, earning a combined $88 million over the decade. Then, in 1966, came Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? — for which she gained weight, wore a wig and used makeup to play the fifty-year-old Martha, and won her second Academy Award. The New York Times critic wrote that she "does the best work of her career, sustained and urgent."

Seven Husbands

The marriages ran: Conrad Hilton Jr. (1950–51), which ended in divorce for mental cruelty and included a miscarriage during a violent outburst; Michael Wilding (1952–57), two sons; Mike Todd (1957–58), one daughter, ended by his death in a plane crash; Eddie Fisher (1959–64), whom she said she married "only due to her grief" and whose marriage to Debbie Reynolds she ended; Richard Burton twice (1964–74, 1975–76); Senator John Warner (1976–82), a period of depression, weight gain and deepening dependence on prescription drugs and alcohol; and Larry Fortensky (1991–96), a construction worker she met at the Betty Ford Center, married at Michael Jackson's Neverland Ranch. She sold the wedding photographs to People for $1 million and gave the money to her AIDS foundation. Of Burton she said simply: "After Richard, the men in my life were just there to hold the coat, to open the door."

The Fade, and the Stage

The late 1960s went badly. Reflections in a Golden Eye and The Comedians (both 1967) were poorly received; two Joseph Losey films failed in 1968. She did not fit the New Hollywood aesthetic, and the public had wearied of the coverage. She won a David di Donatello for X Y & Zee (1972), made her last film with Burton in 1973, and largely vanished from cinemas. She returned in The Mirror Crack'd (1980), then took her first substantial stage role as Regina Giddens in a Broadway production of The Little Foxes in 1981 — a six-month sold-out run despite mixed reviews. She played Helena Cassadine on General Hospital the same year, co-produced and starred in Private Lives with Burton in 1983, and closed her theatrical film career with The Flintstones in 1994. She converted to Judaism, and in 2001 announced her retirement from acting to concentrate on philanthropy.

Why Elizabeth Is Called a Genius

The case does not rest primarily on acting, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. It rests on an act of strategic self-understanding almost unique among celebrities. Taylor grasped, earlier and more clearly than anyone of her stature, that fame is a fungible asset with a market value, and that the value could be transferred to a cause. She said so with no sentimentality whatsoever: "I decided that with my name, I could open certain doors, that I was a commodity in itself... and use it to do some good. I wanted to retire, but the tabloids wouldn't let me. So, if you're going to screw me over, I'll use you." That is the reasoning of a strategist, and she executed it — first AIDS fundraiser in 1984, co-founding the organisation that became amfAR in 1985, testimony to the Senate and House for the Ryan White Care Act in 1986, and personal pressure that pushed Ronald Reagan into publicly acknowledging the disease in a 1987 speech. More than $270 million followed.

The counter-case: her two Oscars are for BUtterfield 8, widely regarded as a lesser film, and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, where the transformation was substantially physical. From the beginning critics praised her looks and hedged on her acting — "I hardly know or care whether she can act or not." She never trained, was manufactured by the studio system, and her fortune came less from film than from fragrance: biographers reckon she earned more from her eleven Elizabeth Arden scents than from her entire screen career. What she had was not interpretive brilliance but ruthless clarity about what she was worth and what it could buy.

The Estate That Keeps Working

She died on 23 March 2011. Her honours had accumulated across both careers: the Chaplin Award (1986), a French Legion of Honour knighthood (1987), the AFI Life Achievement Award (1993), the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award (1993), a CFDA Lifetime of Glamour Award (1997), the Screen Actors Guild's honorary and humanitarian awards (1997), a BAFTA Fellowship (1999), a GLAAD Vanguard Award (2000), appointment as Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II in 2000, and the Presidential Citizens Medal in 2002. The AFI ranked her the seventh greatest female screen legend in 1999. Her jewellery — the Krupp Diamond, the Taylor-Burton Diamond, La Peregrina pearl, all gifts from Burton — was auctioned by Christie's for $156.8 million, which went to her AIDS foundation. The estate still directs a quarter of her image royalties to it. She spent her fame down to the last cent, on purpose.