Elizabeth Taylor

The Gaze That Stopped Hollywood

Elizabeth Taylor was never an ordinary child. By age ten, she already carried the weight of a contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and a violet gaze that intimidated directors twice her age. There was no transition or respite between childhood and stardom.

Her breakthrough into serious acting came in 1951 with A Place in the Sun. There she proved that her beauty was not a decoration but a dramatic weapon. Montgomery Clift was her co-star in that film and also the start of a series of intense friendships that defined her time in the studio system.

But the studio system treated her like private property.

Taylor hated many of the roles her contracts forced on her. She made The Last Time I Saw Paris almost out of commercial obligation, while her private life began generating more headlines than her releases. Her technique was instinctive and visceral because she never went through acting schools. She simply stood in front of the camera and let her magnetism do the dirty work.

The Million-Dollar Contract

In 1963, she broke every financial rule in the industry. She demanded a million dollars to star in Cleopatra, and she got it. She was the first woman to earn that sum, and the shoot in Rome nearly sank the studio, Fox, because of delays and an outlandish budget.

There, she met Richard Burton.

That volcanic romance overshadowed the film itself and changed celebrity gossip forever. The couple became a roving brand that devoured diamonds and starred in jewel-filled productions such as Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in 1966. For that role, Taylor gained weight and made herself look plain to prove that her talent was greater than her looks.

She won her second Oscar and moved away for good from the sweet-girl image Hollywood tried to sell her for decades. But movies were changing, and the grand period dramas lost ground to the auteur cinema of the seventies.

Philanthropy and Strategic Retreat

From the 1980s on, her screen appearances became increasingly selective. She appeared in The Mirror Crack'd in 1980 and chose to focus on Broadway theater, with productions such as The Little Foxes. The industry no longer knew where to place a legend of her caliber, who refused mediocre supporting roles.

Then the script of her life changed.

The death of Rock Hudson in 1985 pushed her into a public fight against AIDS. She raised more than $270 million for the cause at a time when social stigma silenced most of her fellow actors. Her humanitarian work ended up meaning more to her than any premiere on the red carpet.

Her last big-screen appearance was a cameo in The Flintstones in 1994. After that, she turned to her business ventures in perfume and jewelry until her health declined for good. She died at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles on March 23, 2011, from heart failure. She was 79 years old.