Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,854

This is the grave of Elizabeth Taylor.

Born in London in 1932, Elizabeth Taylor was American. Her father was the art dealer Francis Taylor and her mother was the stage actress Sara Sothern. They were big time socialites doing their art in that city and they knew everyone and they partied in that pre-World War II period and Taylor grew up wealthy and surrounded by the nation’s leading cultural figures, not to mention whoever showed up from everywhere else. They only returned to the United States in 1939 because of the impending war. They moved to Los Angeles.

It did not take long in the U.S. for the child Elizabeth Taylor to start acting. She did a couple of early movies and hit it big in 1944 with National Velvet, after MGM signed her. That role got her a ton of acclaim, some of it pretty creepy. James Agee wrote in The Nation “is rapturously beautiful… I hardly know or care whether she can act or not.” She did a lot of teen movies in the late 40s as she became quite popular with girls of her age. But these were Lassie movies and the like, not top rate material. Better was Life with Father, from 1947 and with William Powell playing her father and then Little Women, directed by Mervyn LeRoy, from 1949.

Of course most child stars age out of Hollywood, but Taylor very much did not. MGM managed her closely and started putting her in adult roles in the early 50s that became some of the most acclaimed of her career. 1950s’ Father of the Bride was the most important film in her transition to adult stardom, directed by Vincente Minelli and starring Spencer Tracy and Joan Bennett. MGM followed that by putting her in A Place in the Sun in 1951 and Ivanhoe in 1952. The former was especially important. George Stevens directed A Place in the Sun and Taylor later noted that he was the first director who tasked her with actually acting and she learned a ton on the film. But note that I phrase that as MGM putting her in roles. She hated all of it. She felt she had no control over her life. She wanted to end her career in the early 50s and live something like a normal life. She was really miserable under the studio’s tight control. She renewed her contract in 1952 only because she needed the money as a young mother who felt nervous about her future.

But Taylor persevered and continued to receive some of the best roles Hollywood offered. That included Giant, released in 1956 and starring her, Rock Hudson, and James Dean. Now that’s a complicated group of people! She was cast in two of the great Tennessee Williams adaptations of the era, 1958’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and 1959’s Suddenly, Last Summer. She hated playing a prostitute in Butterfield 8, but she won the Best Actress Oscar for it.

Of course Taylor’s personal life became legendary and was filled with so many disastrous marriages and poor choices. I have no idea what it would be like to be that famous so I am sure she was dealing with things I could not even imagine. Throughout the early 50s, she was cycling through marriages. The first was to Conrad Hilton Jr., son of the hotel magnate, so that was the type of guy she was dating all the time. That only lasted a year. Then she married the actor Michael Wilding. That lasted 5 years. Then came the producer Mike Todd for a year and then another five year marriage, this time to Eddie Fisher. So by the time her affair with Richard Burton went public, which was seen as super scandalous, she was already a known mess. But really, the affair and subsequent marriage to Burton extended her career and gave her new artistic life. Of course, it was unstable; Burton was as big a disaster personally and she was. But they also decided to work together and while I have never been blown away by their chemistry on screen, they were unquestionably two enormously magnetic star powers. There were of course affairs left and right, starting publicly with Fisher in the early 50s.

The marriage to Burton happened right at the same time that she was getting out of her MGM contract finally, so she was happy to have more artistic control as well. She and Burton were big enough stars that they could dictate what they were going to do more than almost anyone else in Hollywood, especially given they were a team. They starred in 11 films together, with the peak being the mid 60s. Those included 1963’s The V.I.P.s, 1965’s The Sandpiper, and 1967’s The Taming of the Shrew. The most important of their collaborations was of course 1966’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, which probably remains her most respected film today and for which she won her second Oscar. Of course, they had the best directors for these films–Vincente Minelli, Franco Zeffirelli, Mike Nichols. Moreover, there is Cleopatra, which was both the most expensive film ever made up to that point and also a gigantic box office success.

By the early 70s, Taylor wasn’t working much. She and Burton were having even more problems than normal. They divorced, remarried, and divorced again in 1976. By that time, she was seeing John Warner, the Virginia senator. She became devoted to using her star power to promote his rising political star power. They married shortly after the second divorce to Burton and remained married until 1982. But when marriage seven went belly up, she returned to work. She got in very early on the stars having their own brands thing. Sophia Loren was the first star to have her own perfume brand, but Taylor jumped on that train fast and was second. She also became a major advocate for HIV-AIDS prevention and treatment at a time when a lot of Hollywood was scared to do so. She cofounded the American Foundation for AIDS Research in 1985 and then started the Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation in 1991.

Unfortunately, Taylor became a joke later in life because her last marriage was to Larry Fortensky, a construction worker she met at the Betty Ford Center when they were both in for rehab. Maybe she finally found happiness for awhile, but I’m not sure we really needed Letterman and Leno turning her personal life into comedy every night. That marriage eventually ended too, but I hope she found some peace for a little while at least.

Taylor died in 2011, at the age of 79. Congestive heart failure finally got her. There’s obviously more to say here, but this is what we have time for in the main body of the post.

Elizabeth Taylor is buried in Forest Lawn Memorial Park, Glendale, California.

If you would like this series to visit other people who were nominated for the 1961 Academy Awards, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Burt Lancaster, who won Best Actor for Elmer Gantry is in Los Angeles and Chill Wills, nominated for Best Supporting Actor for The Alamo, is buried in another grave in Glendale. Previous posts are archived here and here.