Elizabeth Taylor, 1932–2011: the first all-purpose star

The passing of Dame Elizabeth Taylor has seen the dusting down of that obituary standard, “The end of an era.”

We shall not see such beauty, such eccentricity, such fondness for the marriage process, again. Most of the big movie stars who co-starred with her have passed. Paul Newman, Rock Hudson, Montgomery Clift, James Dean, Katharine Hepburn, Marlon Brando and of course Richard Burton… all gone. (Hence the “Last of true Hollywood icons” tribute from Joan Collins.) Elizabeth Taylor could conversely be seen as the start of something – the all-purpose star. The idea of actor as something beyond their work has become irresistible since Taylor first broke through as a child star. Look at the global gossip industry around Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, the woman linked with a £4m adaptation of Taylor’s most famous role. The Brangelina bandwagon had nothing on Taylor–Burton for glamour. And they married in sub-Saharan Africa three decades before the Jolie–Pitts headed for Namibia.

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Taylor was an outspoken activist before Sean Penn, or Mia Farrow, or Leonardo DiCaprio. She certainly had the acting chops to be remembered for nothing but her work, in films such as Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Cat On A Hot Tin Roof and Butterfield 8. It would be an incomplete obituary which didn’t mention her eight marriages, in particular the two to the Welsh actor many saw as her soulmate. If you want confirmation of this, a Google search at time of writing on Elizabeth Taylor produces 11.3 million results. Google-searching on “Elizabeth Taylor” minus “Richard Burton” gives 1.34 million results. Any photo, even of her later years, would confirm a glamour and striking looks. With an actor’s talent for understatement, Burton wrote in 1966 of his first sighting of the 19-year-old Taylor: “She was so extraordinarily beautiful that I nearly laughed out loud. She … [was] famine, fire, destruction and plague. She was, in short, too bloody much.” The glamour was there in anecdotes from a pre-bling era. In her last interview, Taylor was asked – by Kim Kardashian, of all people – whether she preferred the 29.4 carat diamond from Mike Todd, the 33.19 carat Krupp diamonds or the Taylor–Burton 69.42 carat. Tough to imagine Meryl Streep or Judi Dench, for all their undoubted talents, being asked a similar question. Oh, and for those interested, she went for the Krupp. Diamonds aside, Elizabeth Taylor’s philanthropy is now as celebrated as her film career. As both George Michael on Twitter and Sir Nick Partridge, chief executive of the Terrence Higgins Trust pointed out on Wednesday, she spoke loudly and clearly about HIV when doing so was less than fashionable. Donations have been requested by her family to be sent to the Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation. That loyalty to causes extended to her friends, as the late Michael Jackson (whatever you may think of him) could no doubt have attested. The modern star is expected to be appraised not only on their work, but what charities they support, what they’re wearing, what company they’re keeping and – if the publication is particularly cruel – how they look on any given day. In that sense, Elizabeth Taylor was the first kind of star who demanded, intentionally or not, that level of attention on all those fronts. There were movie stars before Elizabeth Taylor, and movie stars will go after her. Stars with her beauty, her colourful love life, her longstanding commitment to charity and her talent. A club of one, which just lost its founder member.

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