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Production key-set master prints of Elizabeth Taylor from The Girl Who Had Everything by Virgil Apger.
American postcard by Fotofolio, NY, NY, no. P145. Photo: Sid Avery. Elizabeth Taylor sunning herself on the Marfa, Texas set of Giant, 1955.
British-American actress Elizabeth Taylor (1932-2011) began as a child star. As an adult, she came to be known for her acting talent and beauty. She had a much-publicised private life, including eight marriages and several near-death experiences. Taylor was considered one of the great actresses of Hollywood's Golden Age.
Elizabeth Rosemond Taylor was born in 1932 in Hampstead Garden, a northwestern suburb of London. She was the daughter of Francis Lenn Taylor and Sara Sothern, who were United States citizens residing in England. Her father was an art dealer, and her mother was a former stage actress. So Liz was a dual citizen of the United Kingdom and the United States, born British through her birth on British soil and a US citizen through her parents. At the age of three, Taylor began taking ballet lessons. Shortly before the beginning of World War II, her parents decided to return to the United States. They settled in Los Angeles, California, where her father established a new art gallery, which included many paintings he shipped from England. The gallery soon attracted numerous Hollywood celebrities who appreciated its modern European paintings. Universal Pictures gave the little, but already breathtakingly beautiful Taylor a seven-year contract, and only nine, Elizabeth appeared in her first film, There's One Born Every Minute (Harold Young, 1942). After less than a year, however, the studio fired Taylor for unknown reasons. MGM was searching for an English actress for Lassie Come Home (Fred M. Wilcox, 1943) with child-star Roddy McDowall. Taylor received the role and was offered a long-term contract. Her first assignment was a loan-out to 20th Century Fox for a film version of the Charlotte Brontë novel Jane Eyre (Robert Stevenson, 1943) with Orson Welles. Taylor returned to England to appear in The White Cliffs of Dover (Clarence Brown, 1944). Taylor's persistence in seeking the role of Velvet Brown in MGM's National Velvet (Clarence Brown, 1944) made her a star at the age of 12. Her character was a young girl, training her beloved horse to win the Grand National. The film costarred Mickey Rooney and English newcomer Angela Lansbury and became a great success. Next, she was cast in another animal film, Courage of Lassie (Fred M. Wilcox, 1946). The film's success led to another contract for Taylor paying her $750 per week. Her roles as the neurotic Mary Skinner in a loan-out to Warner Brothers' Life With Father (Michael Curtiz, 1947), Cynthia Bishop in Cynthia (Robert Z. Leonard, 1947), Carol Pringle in A Date with Judy (Richard Thorpe, 1948), and Susan Prackett in Julia Misbehaves (Jack Conway, 1948) were all successful. Taylor earned a reputation as a consistently successful adolescent actress, with a promising career. Her portrayal of Amy in the American classic Little Women (Mervyn LeRoy, 1949) was her last adolescent role.
In October 1948, Elizabeth Taylor sailed to England to film Conspirator (1949). Taylor made an easy transition to adult roles. Conspirator failed at the box office, but 16-year-old Taylor's portrayal of a 21-year-old debutante who unknowingly marries a communist spy was praised by critics for her first adult lead in a film. Her first box office success in an adult role came as Kay Banks in the comedy Father of the Bride (Vincente Minnelli, 1950), alongside Spencer Tracy. The film spawned a sequel, Father's Little Dividend (Vincente Minnelli, 1951), which also did well at the box office, but it would be Taylor's next picture that would set the course for her career as a dramatic actress. For her performance in A Place in the Sun (George Stevens, 1951), Taylor was hailed. She played Angela Vickers, a spoiled socialite who comes between George Eastman (Montgomery Clift) and his poor, pregnant factory-working girlfriend Alice Tripp (Shelley Winters). The film was based on Theodore Dreiser's novel An American Tragedy. Critic A.H. Weiler wrote in The New York Times: "Elizabeth's delineation of the rich and beauteous Angela is the top effort of her career". After some disappointingly run-of-the-mill films, a more substantial role followed opposite Rock Hudson and James Dean in the epic Giant (George Stevens, 1956). Taylor was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress four years in a row for Raintree County (Edward Dmytryk, 1957) opposite Montgomery Clift; Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (Richard Brooks, 1958) opposite Paul Newman; Suddenly, Last Summer (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1959) with Montgomery Clift and Katharine Hepburn; and finally winning for BUtterfield 8 (Daniel Mann, 1960). The film co-starred Laurence Harvey and her then-husband Eddie Fisher. Suddenly, Last Summer's success placed Taylor among the box-office top-ten, and she remained there almost every year for the next decade.
In 1960, Elizabeth Taylor became the highest-paid actor in Hollywood when she signed a $1 million dollar contract to play the title role in 20th Century Fox's lavish production of Cleopatra (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1963). During the filming, she began a romance with her future husband Richard Burton, who played Mark Antony in the film. The romance received much attention from the tabloid press, as both were married at the time. Taylor ultimately received $7 million for her role. Her second Academy Award, also for Best Actress in a Leading Role, was for her performance as Martha in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (Mike Nichols, 1966), playing opposite then-husband Richard Burton. Taylor saw the film as her chance to really act because her character was to be twenty years older. She added gray hairs and transformed herself both physically and vocally: she intentionally gained weight, minimized makeup, and added excessive mascara to her eyes along with smudgy bags beneath them. Taylor and Burton appeared together in six other films during the decade, among them The V.I.P.s (Anthony Asquith, 1963), The Sandpiper (Vincente Minnelli, 1965), and The Taming of the Shrew (Franco Zeffirelli, 1967). By 1967 their films had earned $200 million at the box office. Their next films Doctor Faustus (Richard Burton, Nevill Coghill, 1967), The Comedians (Peter Glenville, 1967), and Boom! (Joseph Losey, 1968), however, all failed at the box office. Taylor appeared in John Huston's Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967) opposite Marlon Brando and Secret Ceremony (Joseph Losey, 1968) opposite Mia Farrow. By the end of the decade, her box-office drawing power had considerably diminished, as evidenced by the failure of The Only Game in Town (George Stevens, 1970), with Warren Beatty. Throughout the 1970s, Taylor continued to star in numerous theatrical films, such as Zee and Co. (Brian G. Hutton, 1972) with Michael Caine, Ash Wednesday (Larry Peerce, 1973), The Blue Bird (George Cukor, 1976) with Jane Fonda and Ava Gardner, and A Little Night Music (Harold Prince, 1977). With Richard Burton, she co-starred in Under Milk Wood (Andrew Sinclair, 1972) and Hammersmith Is Out (Peter Ustinov, 1972). In 1980, Elizabeth Taylor starred in the mystery film The Mirror Crack'd (Guy Hamilton, 1980), based on an Agatha Christie novel. In 1985, she played movie gossip columnist Louella Parsons in the TV film Malice in Wonderland (Gus Trikonis, 1985) opposite Jane Alexander, who played Hedda Hopper. Taylor appeared in the miniseries North and South (Richard T. Heffron, 1985) and her last theatrical film was The Flintstones (Brian Levant, 1994). Taylor also acted on the stage, making her Broadway and West End debuts in 1982 with a revival of Lillian Hellman's The Little Foxes. She was then in a production of Noël Coward's Private Lives (1983), in which she starred with her former husband, Richard Burton. The student-run Burton Taylor Studio in Oxford was named for the famous couple after Burton appeared as Doctor Faustus in the Oxford University Dramatic Society production of the Marlowe play. Taylor played the ghostly, wordless Helen of Troy, who is entreated by Faustus to make him immortal with a kiss. In 2007, Taylor acted on-stage again, appearing opposite James Earl Jones in a benefit performance of the A. R. Gurney play Love Letters. The event's goal was to raise $1 million for Taylor's AIDS foundation. Tickets for the show were priced at $2,500, and more than 500 people attended. The event happened to coincide with the 2007 Writers Guild of America strike and, rather than cross the picket line, Taylor requested a "one-night dispensation". The Writers Guild agreed not to picket the Paramount Pictures lot that night to allow for the performance. In the early 1980s, Elizabeth Taylor had moved to Bel Air, California, which was her residence until her death. Taylor was married eight times to seven husbands, including actor Michael Wilding, producer Michael Todd, singer-actor Eddie Fisher, and Richard Burton, whom she married twice. In 2011, she died at the age of 79 in Los Angeles, surrounded by her four children.
Sources: Wikipedia and IMDb.
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02 Jul 1956, Los Angeles, California, USA --- Elizabeth Taylor at the premiere of --- Image by © Michael Ochs Archives/Corbis
"Minka as Elizabeth Taylor's character in Butterfield 8"
Biography
Elizabeth Taylor was the ultimate movie star: violet-eyed, luminously beautiful, and bigger than life; although never the most gifted actress, she was the most magnetic, commanding the spotlight with unparalleled power. Few figures have been the recipient of such adoration, the target of such ridicule, or the subject of such gossip and innuendo, and where so many before and after her withered and died in the intense glare of their fame, Taylor thrived; celebrity was her lifeblood, the public eye her constant companion. She knew no moderation -- it was all or nothing. Whether good (two Oscars, one of the first million-dollar paychecks, and charity work), bad (health and weight problems, drug battles, and other tragedies), or ugly (eight failed marriages, movie disasters, and countless scandals), no triumph or setback was too personal for media consumption.
Born February 27, 1932, in London, Taylor literally grew up in public. At the beginning of World War II, her family relocated to Hollywood, and by the age of ten she was already under contract at Universal. She made her screen debut in 1942's There's One Born Every Minute, followed a year later by a prominent role in Lassie Come Home. For MGM, she co-starred in the 1944 adaptation of Jane Eyre, then appeared in The White Cliffs of Dover. With her first lead role as a teen equestrian in the 1944 family classic National Velvet, Taylor became a star. To their credit, MGM did not exploit her, despite her incredible beauty; she did not even reappear onscreen for two more years, returning with Courage of Lassie. Taylor next starred as Cynthia in 1947, followed by Life With Father. In Julia Misbehaves, she enjoyed her first grown-up role, and then portrayed Amy in the 1947 adaptation of Little Women.
Taylor's first romantic lead came opposite Robert Taylor in 1949's Conspirator. Her love life was already blossoming offscreen as well; that same year she began dating millionaire Howard Hughes, but broke off the relationship to marry hotel heir Nicky Hilton when she was just 17 years old. The marriage made international headlines, and in 1950 Taylor scored a major hit as Spencer Tracy's daughter in Vincente Minnelli's Father of the Bride; a sequel, Father's Little Dividend, premiered a year later. Renowned as one of the world's most beautiful women, Taylor was nevertheless largely dismissed as an actress prior to an excellent performance in the George Stevens drama A Place in the Sun; soon, she was earning upwards of 5,000 dollars a week.
Taylor's marriage to Hilton proved short-lived, and in 1952 she married actor Michael Wilding. Often her romantic life overshadowed her career; indeed, her films of the early '50s were largely undistinguished and frequently performed poorly at the box office. In 1956, however, the actress reunited with Stevens to star in his epic adaptation of the Edna Ferber novel Giant. It was a blockbuster, as was her 1957 follow-up Raintree County, for which she earned a Best Actress Oscar nomination. That same year, Taylor's marriage to Wilding ended, and she soon announced her much-publicized engagement to producer Mike Todd; his tragic death in a plane crash the following year left her the world's most glamorous widow, and her fame grew even larger. Whatever sympathy audiences held for Taylor quickly vanished, however, when she was soon identified as the other woman in the break-up of singer Eddie Fisher and actress Debbie Reynolds; their romantic triangle played out in the headlines of tabloids the world over, and although Taylor eventually stole Fisher away, the careers of all three performers were boosted by the scandal -- the public simply could not get enough.
Taylor's sexy image was further elevated by an impossibly sensual performance in 1958's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof; another Tennessee Williams adaptation, Suddenly Last Summer, followed a year later, and both were highly successful. To complete the terms of her MGM contract, she grudgingly agreed to star in 1960's Butterfield 8; upon completing the film Taylor traveled to Britain to begin work on the much-heralded Cleopatra, for which she received an unprecedented one-million-dollar fee. In London she became dangerously ill, and underwent a life-saving emergency tracheotomy. Hollywood sympathy proved sufficient for her to win a Best Actress Oscar for Butterfield 8, although much of the good will extended toward her again dissipated in the wake of the mounting difficulties facing Cleopatra. With five million dollars already spent, producers pulled the plug and relocated the shoot to Italy, replacing co-star Stephen Boyd with Richard Burton. The final tally placed the film at a cost of 37 million dollars, making it the most costly project in film history; scheduled for a 16-week shoot, the production actually took years, and despite mountains of pre-publicity, it was a huge disaster at the box office upon its 1963 premiere.
Still, the notice paid to Cleopatra paled in comparison to the scrutiny which greeted Taylor's latest romance, with Burton; she left Fisher to marry the actor in 1964, and perhaps no Hollywood relationship was ever the subject of such intense media coverage. Theirs was a passionate, stormy relationship, played out in the press and onscreen in films including 1963's The V.I.P.'s and 1965's The Sandpiper. In 1966, the couple starred in Mike Nichols' controversial directorial debut Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, arguably Taylor's best performance; overweight, verbally cutting, and defiantly unglamorous, she won a second Oscar for her work as the embittered wife of Burton's alcoholic professor. Their real-life marriage managed to survive, however, and after Taylor appeared opposite Marlon Brando in 1967's Reflections in a Golden Eye, she and Burton reunited for The Comedians. She also starred in Franco Zeffirelli's The Taming of the Shrew, but none were successful at the box office; 1968's Doctor Faustus was a disaster, and later that year Boom! failed to gross even one-quarter of its costs. After 1969's Secret Ceremony, Taylor starred in The Only Game in Town, a year later; when they too failed, her days of million-dollar salaries were over, and she began working on percentage.
With Burton, Taylor next appeared in a small role in 1971's Under Milk Wood; next was X, Y and Zee, followed by another spousal collaboration, Hammersmith Is Out. In 1972 the Burtons also co-starred in a television feature, Divorce His, Divorce Hers; the title proved prescient, as two years later, the couple did indeed divorce after a decade together. However, few anticipated the next development in their relationship: In 1975, it was announced that Taylor and Burton had remarried, but this time their union lasted barely a year. In the meantime, she was largely absent from films, and did not reappear until 1976's The Blue Bird; a year later, she starred in the telefilm Victory at Entebbe. Taylor concluded the decade with a prolific burst of feature films (A Little Night Music, Winter Kills, The Mirror Crack'd) and TV work (Return Engagement), but audiences no longer seemed interested. Indeed, she made more headlines for her increasing weight, continued health problems, and revelations of drug and alcohol abuse than she did for any of her films. As always, Taylor's love life remained the focus of much speculation as well, and from 1976 to 1982 she was married to politician John Warner.
With no film offers forthcoming, Taylor turned to the stage, and in 1981 she starred in a production of The Little Foxes. In 1983, she and Burton also reunited to co-star on Broadway in Private Lives. Television also remained an option, and in 1983 she and Carol Burnett co-starred in Between Friends. However, Taylor's primary focus during the decades to follow was charity work; following the death of her close friend, Rock Hudson, she became a leader in the battle against AIDS, and for her efforts won the 1993 Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award. She also launched a successful line of perfumes. And of course, Taylor remained a fixture of tabloid headlines; she maintained a close friendship with another favorite target of the tabloids, King-of-Pop Michael Jackson, and during a well-publicized stay at the Betty Ford Clinic, she began a romance with Larry Fortensky, a construction worker many years her junior. They married in 1989, but like her other relationships, it did not last. In between, there was also the occasional film or television project. In 1988, she and Zeffirelli reunited for Young Toscanini, but the picture was never released; a 1989 TV adaptation of Sweet Bird of Youth earned Taylor considerable publicity, but she didn't appear in another film until 1994 with The Flintstones.
In 1997, the actress once again became a featured tabloid topic when she underwent brain surgery to remove a benign tumor. The same year, she received attention of a more favorable variety with Happy Birthday Elizabeth: A Celebration of Life, a TV special in which she was paid tribute by a number of stars including Madonna, Shirley MacLaine, John Travolta, Dennis Hopper, and Cher. In 2001, Taylor managed the impressive feat of dredging up both old tabloid headlines and creating new ones, thanks to her starring role in the television movie These Old Broads. Co-starring with Shirley MacLaine, Joan Collins, and her old rival, Debbie Reynolds, Taylor's involvement with the project -- which was co-written by Reynolds' daughter, Carrie Fisher, and featured her son, Todd Fisher, in a supporting role -- engendered more than a few inches in the nation's gossip columns, although both Taylor and Reynolds were quick to point out that they had laid their differences to rest a long time ago. - Jason Ankeny, Rovi
Production key-set master prints of Elizabeth Taylor from The Girl Who Had Everything by Virgil Apger.
A rare one by John Barry-- That's it for the soundtrack LPs, folks-- Hope you enjoyed them-- Next up is more Thriftstore Christian LPs, and then on to a new category: Cruel And Unusual LPs!
From my programme dated 1982. This as you can read is the opening night of the Little Foxes at the Kennedy Center, Washington, March 17th 1981
Back when my dad was in the Army Air Corps, stationed in Hayward, California, he and a bunch of his buddies went out to see National Velvet being filmed near Big Basin Park in Boulder Creek, California. In this shot, taken by one of the studio photographers, Elizabeth Taylor is posing with them.
Production key-set master prints of Elizabeth Taylor from The Girl Who Had Everything by Virgil Apger.
One of my costume ideas for this year is Cleopatra a la Liz Taylor in the 1963 biopoc. This is my first attempt at creating the make-up. Important note - I tried two liquid liners and both performed miserably. Black pencil was passable but the best was powdered black eyeshadow.
Ignore the headress - I'll be making a more appropriate one or wearing a straight black wig. I just wanted to see if I liked the concept.
(February 27, 1932 – March 23, 2011)
Liz Taylor passed away while I was in LA. A talented and award-winning actress along with being an advocate for AIDS awareness, research and cure. May she rest in peace.
1954 --- Elizabeth Taylor photographed in a mirror, 1954. --- Image by © Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS
From the back cover of my 1982 programme. Here is Dame Elizabeth as Regina Giddens. It was one of the best performances mother and I had ever seen and I shall never forget the end of the play when everyone has walked out on Regina and she is standing at the top of a staircase looking so tragic because no one wants her and you could see her bosom rising and falling in despair.
THE LOT AT THE LIZ IS A SUMMER LONG TEMPORARY INSTALLATION CELEBRATING THE VALUES, VISION AND HISTORY OF WHITMAN-WALKER HEALTH.
No Kings Collective has designed a temporary urban installation wrapping the space that was once home to Whitman-Walker with a series of murals. Throughout the 30,000 square-foot piece, they explore core theme such as “Work It Girl,” celebrating Whitman-Walker Health’s work with the LGBTQ community. The aim of the installation is to share the stories of the health center while creating a space that reflects the values of openness, inclusion and diversity that are the epitome of Whitman-Walker. Fivesquares Development served as the catalyst for this project, showcasing support for the community vision and celebrating the city before embarking on a new chapter for the space.