Dec 18, 2018 The beautiful actress was beloved and idolized by many. But to some special people in her life, she was just a grandmother. In a rare interview in 2014, the then 39-year-old fashion stylist Naomi DeLuce Wilding opened up about what it was like to grow up with one of the world’s most famous actresses: her grandmother, Elizabeth Taylor. Elizabeth Taylor defined modern celebrity and is considered the last classic Hollywood icon. Elizabeth Taylor Trust and Elizabeth Taylor Estate. The official website of Elizabeth Taylor.
STORY HIGHLIGHTS. Taylor died in Los Angeles' Cedars-Sinai hospital. She was famous for her beauty and many marriages.
Later in life, the actress was known for her charitable work(CNN) - Elizabeth Taylor, the legendary actress famed for her beauty, her jet-set lifestyle, her charitable endeavors and her many marriages, has died, her publicist told CNN Wednesday. She was 79.Taylor died 'peacefully today in Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles,' said a statement from her publicist. She was hospitalized six weeks ago with congestive heart failure, 'a condition with which she had struggled for many years. Though she had recently suffered a number of complications, her condition had stabilized and it was hoped that she would be able to return home. Sadly, this was not to be.' Though a two-time Oscar winner - for 'Butterfield 8' (1960) and 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf' (1966) - Taylor was more celebrated for simply being Elizabeth Taylor: sexy, glamorous, tempestuous, fragile, always trailing courtiers, media and fans.
She wasn't above playing to that image - she had a fragrance called 'White Diamonds' - or mocking it.' I am a very committed wife,' she once said. 'And I should be committed too - for being married so many times.' 2001: Liz Taylor talks diamondsShe was hailed, in her prime, as the world's most beautiful and desirable woman. Her affair with actor Richard Burton, which began on the set of the film 'Cleopatra,' fueled a paparazzi rush unrivaled in its time. The two later married - twice - providing gossip columns and movie magazines with a wealth of material.But Taylor could also be an effective and arresting actress.
Her harrowing performance in 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf' (1966), opposite Burton, showed her as shrewish, plain, embittered - the complete opposite of her real-life image.She also gave sharp performances in 'Giant' (1956), 'Raintree County' (1957), 'Cat on a Hot Tin Roof' (1958) - three films that helped build her reputation as a worldwide sex symbol - 'The Sandpiper' (1965) and 'Reflections in a Golden Eye' (1967).Taylor was a champion for a number of charitable causes, notably the fight against AIDS. She founded the Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation after the death of her friend Rock Hudson, and plowed both her time and money into its work, especially as her acting career waned in the 1980s.
The BBC once noted that her charity work had grossed as much as her film career.Acting and romanceElizabeth Rosemond Taylor was born February 27, 1932, in London, the daughter of two wealthy American art dealers, Francis and Sara Taylor. Her mother was a former actress who had given up the career when she married but encouraged her daughter in the pursuit. Indeed, Elizabeth Taylor and her mother were to remain extremely close until the latter's death in 1994 at age 99.Just after World War II began, her parents moved back to the United States and settled in Los Angeles, where Francis Taylor catered to a high-level clientele.
Young Elizabeth was noted early on for her looks: According to one perhaps apocryphal story, she was spotted by a talent scout who suggested her for Bonnie Blue Butler in 'Gone With the Wind,' but the idea was reportedly shot down by her father.Nevertheless, she eventually made her debut for Universal, which placed her in 1942's 'There's One Born Every Minute.' Taylor was then signed by MGM, which was to be her home for almost two decades, and made 'Lassie Come Home,' opposite Roddy McDowall.
The actor became a devoted friend.But it was Taylor's next film, 1944's 'National Velvet,' that made her a star. The story of a girl in love with her horse earned her public adulation - and her equine co-star, The Pie. (Her other co-star, Mickey Rooney, was taken.) For the rest of the 1940s, she was an MGM regular, some of her films winners - the 1949 version of 'Little Women' - and others, quickly forgotten, such as 'Julia Misbehaves.' In 1950, Taylor turned 18 and had her first hit as an adult, the classic 'Father of the Bride,' in which she played Spencer Tracy's soon-to-be-married daughter.
Real life mirrored art when Taylor decided to marry hotel heir Conrad 'Nicky' Hilton Jr., but the marriage wasn't nearly as successful as the film: It lasted just eight months.Critical acclaim arrived with Taylor's next film, 'A Place in the Sun,' based on the Theodore Dreiser novel 'An American Tragedy.' Taylor played the beautiful woman pursued by Montgomery Clift, who kills his pregnant girlfriend (Shelley Winters) while boating. The film received nine Academy Award nominations, but Taylor was shut out.It wasn't until 1958 that Taylor received her first Oscar nomination for 1957's 'Raintree County.'
By then, she was an even bigger star than before and known as much for her off-screen romances as her on-screen talent.She married actor Michael Wilding - 20 years her senior - in 1952, a marriage that lasted five years and produced two children, and then Hollywood producer Mike Todd a week after her divorce from Wilding. And after some sluggish work in the early '50s, she was appearing in some renowned films, notably 1956's 'Giant' opposite James Dean and Rock Hudson. Todd suggested her for the role of Maggie the Cat in 'Cat on a Hot Tin Roof' (1958), and Taylor steamed up the screen, spending a good part of the movie slinking around in a slip.Todd died in a plane crash in March 1958. Upon his death, Taylor was comforted by Todd's best friend, actor and singer Eddie Fisher. The comforting turned into an affair, complete with bold headlines, which broke apart Fisher's marriage to 'America's sweetheart,' actress Debbie Reynolds.
Taylor was now 'the other woman,' scorned as a homewrecker - and, based on box office returns, more popular than ever.Fisher and Taylor married in 1959 and appeared opposite each other in the next year's 'BUtterfield 8,' with Taylor cast as a sexually carnivorous party girl. Though she disliked the film, her performance - and a sudden case of pneumonia that threatened her life - invited the sympathy of the Motion Picture Academy, and she finally won an Oscar. 'I lost to a tracheotomy,' fellow nominee Shirley MacLaine quipped.Liz 'n' DickIn 1960, now perhaps the most famous actress in the world, Taylor was offered the lead in 20th Century Fox's production of 'Cleopatra.' Taylor demanded $1 million - the highest fee demanded by an actress up to that time. Producer Walter Wanger agreed, and the adventure of 'Cleopatra' - which would consume the showbiz world in ways unknown in the early '60s - began. (Fisher's ex-wife, Reynolds, would become the second woman to make $1 million for a picture.)The movie seemed gripped by a curse.
Taylor's illnesses - there were more than one - caused delays, forced casting changes and prompting the production to move from London to Rome. The original director, old Hollywood hand Rouben Mamoulian, was forced out and replaced by Joseph Mankiewicz ('All About Eve'). Weather wiped out days of filming and labor unrest undid more, pushing the budget, which was originally about $5 million, to $44 million - almost $300 million in 2010 dollars, more than 'Avatar.' And then there was one of the new actors, Richard Burton, who was cast as Marc Antony when Stephen Boyd had to leave the production.Burton, who was already known as much for his philandering ways as his Shakespearean expertise, had initially thought little of Taylor beyond her beauty. But he was quickly smitten: 'He tried to end it, but he kept turning around and coming back to her,' Mankiewicz's son Tom told Taylor biographer William J. 'He just couldn't help himself. He couldn't get enough of her.'
The two were inseparable - and very publicly so. Pictures of the couple finally prompted Burton's long-suffering wife, Sybil - who had attempted suicide - to file for divorce. Gossip columnist Hedda Hopper, both friend and foe to Taylor over the years, called her 'sick.' The Vatican released a message directed at her, saying she was guilty of 'erotic vagrancy.'
Congresswoman even introduced a bill banning Taylor and Burton - or 'Liz 'n' Dick,' as they were becoming known - from the United States. In response, Taylor asserted, 'I will never go back to America.' But America couldn't get enough of 'Le Scandale.' 'Cleopatra' actually did well at the box office - though not well enough to immediately escape its red ink: it took three years for 20th Century Fox to make its money back, and Taylor and Burton were now the 'It' couple of the moment.The two married in 1964, their every move a headline. Burton bought Taylor jewels, furs, baubles. The two caused near-riots when they appeared in public.
Burton's tour of 'Hamlet' sold out, and their movies together - 'The V.I.P.s,' 'The Sandpiper,' even the grim, groundbreaking 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf' - were hits, the latter also nominated for 10 Oscars. Taylor received a best actress trophy for her performance as the tempestuous Martha; Burton was nominated for his performance as the emasculated George.Eventually, however, the moviegoing public tired of the double act.
Taylor and Burton made four more films together - 'The Taming of the Shrew,' 'Doctor Faustus,' 'The Comedians' and the appropriately titled bomb 'Boom!' - but none had the success of their earlier work.
At the same time, a new generation was latching on to a younger group of stars; Taylor, though still in her 30s, seemed part of another time.Woman of charityThe actress' career continued to languish, as she entered her 40s. Such films as 'The Only Game in Town,' 'X, Y and Zee' and 'Ash Wednesday' did nothing for her reputation. Her marriage to Burton also faltered; the two divorced in 1974, and though they remarried the next year, the second attempt ended nine months later.Indeed, Taylor was starting to become a figure of mockery. During a fund-raising dinner for her sixth husband, U.S. Senator John Warner, R-Virginia, Taylor choked on a chicken bone. The incident, including a bulked-up Taylor, was viciously parodied on 'Saturday Night Live,' with John Belushi playing Taylor.But the glamour of being Elizabeth Taylor never faded. She was a 'guest' at the much-watched Luke-Laura 'General Hospital' wedding in 1983 and launched several perfume lines, starting with Passion later in the decade.Most notably, however, she devoted herself to charity.
In 1985, she organized a benefit dinner to raise money for her friend Rock Hudson, who was dying of AIDS. The project eventually led to the American Foundation for AIDS Research (amFAR); in 1991, she began the Elizabeth Taylor HIV/AIDS Foundation.Taylor did a handful of parts in the '90s and '00s - most notably a 1992 spot on 'The Simpsons,' in which she spoke Maggie Simpson's first word - but generally devoted herself to social and charitable causes.
She married one more time in 1991 to a construction worker named Larry Fortensky and defended her friend, pop king Michael Jackson. She had more health woes: a trip to the Betty Ford Clinic in the late '80s - where she met Fortensky - as well as a brain tumor and severe back problems. The latter put her in a wheelchair.But through all of it - the gossip, the ailments, the loves and losses - she remained indomitable. She even joined Twitter to send regular updates on her life.Why not?
She was born to the spotlight, and no amount of tittle-tattle was going to take it away.' Some audience out there, and don't ask me who they are, but there are millions, like scandal.
They like filth,' she told CNN's Larry King in 2006. 'And if they want to hear that I'm dead, sorry, folks, I'm not. And I don't plan on it.'
The novelist Elizabeth Taylor, pictured in 1954, once expressed gratitude for having had a “rather uneventful life.” PHOTOGRAPH BY KEYSTONE/HULTON ARCHIVE/GETTYThe novelist Elizabeth Taylor’s career began with a stroke of bad luck. She sold her first book, an understated satire about a young wife on an Air Force base in wartime Britain, in 1945.
A few months earlier, “National Velvet” had made the twelve-year-old actress Elizabeth Taylor an international star. Over the next thirty years, as one Taylor became a household name, the other published eleven more novels and several collections of short stories. She died in 1975, a few weeks after her namesake’s remarriage to Richard Burton.Taylor, the writer, spent most of her life in the suburbs outside London with her husband, the owner of a local confectionary factory. Her quiet routine, she said, gave her time to write. In interviews, she described working out the plots of her books while she did the ironing. “I have had a rather uneventful life, thank God,” she told the London Times, in 1971. But, she added, “another, more eventful world intrudes from time to time in the form of fan letters to the other Elizabeth Taylor.
Men write to me and ask for a picture of me in my bikini. My husband thinks I should send one and shake them, but I have not got a bikini.”. Taylor, who published from the late forties to the end of the sixties, may be best known as a practitioner of the plotless, slice-of-life magazine story (though it’s also been said that she’s “”). Her main subject is the placid daily existence of middle-class suburban women: cooking, cleaning, gardening, caring for children, chatting with friends. Like her stories, her novels are stitched together out of a series of fragmented scenes.
They are remarkable, and occasionally frustrating, for their implacable evenness of sympathy and lack of a unifying consciousness—often, just as a character’s narrative interest has been established, Taylor’s focus will swing away, almost perversely, to a new point of view. Forster, who, along with Virginia Woolf, is one of Taylor’s most obvious influences, she relies on seemingly arbitrary events—casual deaths, unexpected coincidences—to suggest the confusion and disorder underneath the surface of everyday life. Almost invariably, her books end on a note of irresolution, falling into silence like exhausted debaters at the end of a long argument. Taylor was praised by writers who worked in a similar style, such as Elizabeth Bowen and Rosamond Lehmann; Kingsley Amis, perhaps her most vehement supporter, called her “one of the best English novelists born in this century.” But her novels were alternately criticized for their self-consciously artistic form and their circumscribed subject matter—and Taylor herself was sometimes characterized as a watered-down Virginia Woolf who lacked Woolf’s high bohemian glamour. Saul Bellow, a judge for the Booker Prize the year Taylor’s novel “Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont” was nominated, opened the first meeting with the words, “I seem to hear the tinkle of teacups.” Even Taylor’s biographer, Nicola Beauman, bemoans her subject’s conventional life choices, and speculates that some trauma in Taylor’s past must have led her “to dread the idea of a room of one’s own, of the courage needed to go into it and close the door.”Domestic routine has long been seen as the enemy of artistic ambition—at best, an annoying interruption; at worst, a dangerous distraction.
But many writers have lately —cooking, cleaning, caring for children—as a subject for fiction. And Taylor’s writing, with its sly humor and careful observations about everyday life, has enjoyed a resurgence of interest. The feminist press Virago has reissued her novels in the U.K., and NYRB Classics has now published three of her novels (as well as a selection of her stories) in the U.S. The latest of these, “A View of the Harbour,” may be Taylor’s most nuanced study of the push and pull between domestic and artistic labor. The book reflects her struggle to reconcile the two, and makes an implicit argument that even the most mundane matters of family and home are worth everyone’s attention. Taylor was born in 1912 and grew up outside London, near a stretch of the Thames popular with artists and intellectuals during her childhood. In Beauman’s biography, she comes across as precocious and single-minded: by twelve, she was submitting poetry to the Bloomsbury journal Life and Letters; by sixteen, she had written three “very sad” novels and several plays.
Despite being from a lower-middle-class family—her father was an insurance agent and her mother trained as a dressmaker—Taylor attended the best girls’ school in the area, where she took private Greek lessons, won the English prize every year, and refused to do any math. She became an atheist, played the lead in amateur theatricals, and went swimming naked in the Thames with sensitive young men.None of her early novels were published; the sensitive young men didn’t pan out; a firework went off during one of the plays and left the vision in her left eye permanently damaged. Barred from university by her math grades, she trained, briefly and miserably, as a typist, and worked as a governess, a kindergarten teacher, and a librarian.
Eventually, she turned to politics, and to marriage. By 1937, she had a husband, a child, and an active membership in the Communist Party.Taylor’s published fiction bears few overt traces of her early enthusiasm. But the heroic artists of her childhood left their mark.
One of her central themes is the conflict between creative autonomy and social responsibility; seven of her twelve novels feature writers or painters as characters. Like other writers who grew up on the edge of the cultural ferment of the twenties—that “perpetual summer,” as a character in one of her stories calls the period—Taylor, in her fiction, examines that older generation with a half envious, half critical eye: the vantage point of a younger sister watching her elder siblings get ready for a dance.“A View of the Harbour,” Taylor’s third novel, was published in 1947.
It is set in a declining coastal town in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, and, as the title suggests, it is a study in perspective. Taylor builds up a picture of the town through the eyes of a dozen of its inhabitants. The organizing symbol is a lighthouse, wheeling around and momentarily illuminating each character’s thoughts in turn.The image of the lighthouse and the way Taylor dips in and out of the minds of her characters inevitably recalls Virginia Woolf’s “To the Lighthouse.” But the range of characters in “A View of the Harbour”—a retired shopkeeper, hugely fat and paralyzed from the waist down; her listless daughters; their tenant, who works on a fishing boat and can’t decide which daughter he’s in love with—is broader than any in Woolf’s fiction. A good part of the novel is devoted to the inner lives of women who cook other people’s food, serve their drinks, clean their clothes, and take care of their children. A subtle but persistent undercurrent of sexual longing and frustration runs through almost every scene. Tying all this together is an argument about the proper subject of art and the conditions under which it can be made. The novel sets up two artistic types: Bertram, a retired naval officer hoping to begin a second career as a painter of coastal scenes, and Beth, an old-fashioned domestic novelist married to the town doctor.
Bertram is a visitor, the only artist to come to town since the war. His last name—Hemingway, a cruel name for a watercolor painter—marks him as a caricature of a certain sort of solitary artist.
“All his life at sea,” Taylor writes, “he had thought of retiring thus, of taking rooms at some harbour pub, of painting those aspects of the sea which for thirty or more years he had felt awaited his recognition.” Bertram’s qualifications for this position appear to be a sensitivity to light and color, a knowledge of basic painting terms, and an unencumbered schedule. Sketching the harbor from the lighthouse, he sees the town as a series of luminous details: the white and green of the ocean, the “cubist effect” of the harbor buildings, the peeling sky-blue and apricot plaster of their walls. In contrast to Bertram, Beth is introduced against the backdrop of domestic chaos.
At breakfast, as she tries to read the reviews of her last novel, her young daughter, Stevie, starts to cry, because her older sister, a morose and awkward twenty-year-old unhappily stranded at home, has put on her coat too roughly. Her husband, waiting in the car to take Stevie to school, starts honking impatiently.
As he drives away, her best friend, on her way to London for the day, drops in to ask if she needs any new clothes. Beth finally sits down to work on her novel. Just as she’s reached the climactic death scene of an only child, her own child comes back from school.“A View of the Harbour” is written in two distinct registers that echo Beth and Bertram’s competing perspectives. There is the lyric exploration of consciousness—the sensory impressions and fragmented perceptions with which Taylor conveys the inner lives of her characters—and, in counterpoint, the detailing of daily minutiae. Taylor’s characters are accident-prone and harried by errands; their reveries are interrupted by the quotidian—running out of toilet paper, washing the dishes, thinking about food. In its first two chapters, “A View of the Harbour” addresses diarrhea, astigmatism, paralysis, rheumatism, bronchitis, and depression—plus there is an ominous story about a girl who raised her hand to be excused in class but “didn’t get there in time.” One of the book’s major plot twists relies on an accident involving boiling water and an overfilled kettle.
In the contest between Beth and Bertram, Bertram at first seems to have the upper hand. Having cut himself off from his social ties, his time is his own. With nothing to impede his creative focus, he spends his days wandering around the harbor, trying to find the best spot to set up his canvas. Beth, on the other hand, is unable to block out the world for extended periods.
Even when she finds time to work, she worries that what she has written is contaminated by her domestic circumstances. Looking back over her novel in progress, she sees “little jarring reverberations now here, now there,” the traces of interruptions caused by her children: “Here I nursed Prudence with bronchitis; here Stevie was ill for a month; here I put down my pen to bottle fruit.”But, as the book progresses, Bertram becomes increasingly frustrated with his inability to capture the “prevailing light” of a scene.
On the paper, “the greens became mud, the birds suggested no possibility of movement, stuck motionless above the waves, the crests of the waves themselves would never spill.” He needs to try a new medium, he thinks—oils instead of watercolor, perhaps—or maybe he has too many distractions.Taylor hints that the real reason for Bertram’s failure is quite different. He can’t reproduce the light-filled scenes of his imagination because the world that he imagines no longer exists, if it ever did. “An artist sees human nature differently—with different eyes,” he says loftily, but his artistic vision seems to make him less, not more, perceptive than other people. As he walks through town, he notices its outdated storefronts and misspelled signs, the debris of its former prosperity, but not the ebbing livelihood of its inhabitants. He sees men clearing rusty coils of barbed wire, the remnants of a coastal defense system, off the beach, but not the broader changes caused by war: the bad food and worn clothes of postwar austerity, the dearth of military-aged men, the exhaustion and the paranoia.His blindness is bound up with a self-protective inability to recognize what’s obvious to everyone he meets: that he’s an old man, that he’ll never be successful, and that his artistic ambitions are a form of distraction.
Unwilling to admit this to himself, he spends more and more time running small errands for his neighbors. By the end of the book, he’s married to a younger woman with an imperious personality, and he spends his time polishing the silverware and managing their daily routine.Bertram is not the book’s only object of satire. Beth is self-absorbed and often foolish.
She describes her dreams at length to uncaring listeners and fails to notice that her husband and best friend are having an affair. Taylor never misses a chance to poke fun at her love of interminable deathbed scenes and Victorian funeral processions. Still, by the end of “A View of the Harbour,” she has finished her novel and drawn a flourish under the last line.Taylor wrote “A View of the Harbour” while she was raising two young children, and Beth’s fears about the effect of her domestic circumstances on her writing seem in part a reflection of Taylor’s own. In one of her letters from this period, she caps a long roster of famous female authors with the fatalistic conclusion, “Women writers do not have children.” Another, written a few years earlier, expounds on this theme at greater length. Jesus, I never can get over this—it is as bitter as gall—that I have got to choose. I know it is wrong that I have to. I don’t think anything enrages me as much as seeing in famous men’s autobiographies photographs of their studies, libraries, quiet places where they work.
Then I think of Harriet Beecher Stowe with the yelling baby in one arm & a pen in the other hand. What happened to that baby? How did it fare?Taylor wrote these words in 1941. Three quarters of a century later, raising children and writing books are still frequently viewed as all-consuming, mutually exclusive activities; Taylor herself often felt torn between the two roles, and, as she grew older, became increasingly withdrawn. But, as she negotiated art and life, authorship and motherhood, public recognition and private happiness, she found her own way forward, by making her refusal to choose the subject of her work.