Elizabeth Taylor
July 30th, 2007 by admin
Dame Elizabeth Taylor (1932- ) is a Hollywood actress who was at her height from 1958 to 1968. At the time some said she was the most beautiful woman in the world. She had eyes of violet and married eight times - twice to her longest lasting husband, the British actor Richard Burton.
According to this blog only Sophia Loren was more beautiful when they were at the height of their beauty.
She was born in London to American parents. Her father was an art dealer and her mother an actress. When war came to Britain, they moved back to America to Los Angeles, where her grandmother lived. Her family comes from St Louis.
Even as a girl Taylor was very beautiful and so she became an actress at age ten. In 1943 she appeared in "Lassie Come Home", which showed she was a good actress. A year later she was the lead in "National Velvet", a film about a girl and her horse. It made her famous across the country.
She won the Academy Award or Oscar for best actress twice: in 1961 for "Butterfield-8", a film she hated, and in 1967 for "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf".
Her best full-length films according to IMDb.com:
- "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" (1966)
- "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" (1958)
- "Giant" (1956)
- "A Place in the Sun" (1951)
- "Jane Eyre" (1944)
- "Suddenly, Last Summer" (1959)
I love "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof".
Not on this list: "Raintree Country" (1957) for which she almost won an Oscar and "Cleopatra", the top film of 1963.
In "Cleopatra" she arguably plays herself: the most beautiful woman in the world. She even fell in love with its Mark Antony, Richard Burton. They married a year later.
Twentieth Century Fox almost went broke making "Cleopatra", but it was a hit at the box office. She was paid a million dollars (a million crowns), which back then was unheard of.
She tends to play beautiful women who are on the edge, ruled by their heart.
Although she was one of the best actresses in Hollywood in the 1960s, she has not appeared in a good film since 1974 ("That's Entertainment"). Some of her later film and television appearances are painful to watch.
Some of her friends:
- Michael Jackson, who also became famous as a child
- Rock Hudson, whose death from Aids led her to raise money to find a cure
- Montgomery Clift, whose life she saved in a car accident
You might assume that she is American and Christian, but she is neither: she is a British Jew. She was born in Britain and never became an American citizen. And in 1959 when she married Eddie Fisher she became Jewish.
In 2000 she was made Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire.
In 1962 she tried to kill herself. She has long had trouble with her drinking.
In 1997 the doctors found a growth in her head. They were able to cut it out, but she had no hair for a while.
See also:
Posted in Actors |