Elizabeth Taylor - RIP

Amanda Barrie in Carry on Cleo.

Richard Burton however was fantastic. A boozer who hated acting making so many great films and being the first Westerner to visit Mecca (and I don't mean the Bingo hall).

Shame she's better known among young 'uns like me for being a semi- regular in The National Enquirer and The Star than for her movies. Which means that I can't really comment about her acting (only things I've seen with her were National Velvet and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, the latter being one of the most pretentious bits of cinematic wank ever to escape Hollywood). Though she gets points for raising so much money for AIDS research and for her genuine concern for people suffering from AIDS.

Insane = her Tennessee Williams-written flop "Boom" with Richard Burton. She seems drunk and on drugs the entire film. Actually, its so crazy it's worth watching.

RIP

Awww RIP pretty lady.

She MJ and Liberace gonna have one hell of a reunion party in da sky.

The BBC website was clearly all ready to go on this: as well as the news story, they have magicked up Obituary, In Pictures, Filmography and Private Life in the Spotlight in a matter of minutes.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-12833100

i hate when fake ilx rip threads turn real.

For a few years the most beautiful woman in the world. I wish she'd done more comedy (Reflections in a Golden Eye, X Y & Zee).

yes that laff riot romp reflections in a golden eye

anyway rest in peace big diamond bitch goddess icon drag queen violet eye rage machine. luv ya.

yes that laff riot romp reflections in a golden eye

She's hilarious in it! (Intentionally too)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nInE5TITzE8

i love reflections. i need it on dvd. almost a trance film in spots. you could write a book about that one. yes you could.

alfred have you seen this? so funny

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gR-vU44gd4

"Courageous" is thrown around a lot, but she really was in the eighties, fighting for AIDS research when no one else was – AND on behalf of gays.

So long, beautiful.

RIP

Most beautiful in A Place in the Sun and Father of the Bride, most whoa-talented-after-all in WAFoVWoolf.

RIP, Miss Tits (Burton's nickname for her).

morbs otm

damn

"only" 79!

Best in Virginia Woolf, but pretty damned memorable in Suddenly Last Summer, no more so than when she's in heels on a platform suspended over the snake pit.

Man, she was luminous in A Place in the Sun...

RIP, Liz.

haven't really seen any of her reputedly terrible post-prime vehicles except John Waters' fave, Boom!

A strike against talkies: that face, and then.... that voice.

was her last film appearance The Flintstones?

wikipedia says she did a TV movie, These Old Broads, in 2001

see, that's not film.

Neither is The Flintstones.

I thought she was terrific and believably old and slow in Giant.

Her child performances (National Velvet especially) are guileless.

RIP. She had the most beautiful eyes in the world.

One prominent and perhaps surprising dissenter about her looks was Richard Burton, who was twice her husband. The notion of his wife as “the most beautiful woman in the world is absolute nonsense,” he said.

“She has wonderful eyes,” he added, “but she has a double chin and an overdeveloped chest, and she’s rather short in the leg.”

on last week's 'at the movies' ebert (as read by bill kurtis) discussed the adaptation of jane eyre from 1943 w/orson welles and joan fontaine and showed a clip from the scene where she makes her first screen appearance.

I was going to post that! But I haven't seen the movie in years. I confuse her with Mary Nash.

https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-KSJEvkth-Kc/TXmLQBX2sWI/AAAAAAAAETY/JFakfftOhP8/s1600/JaneEyre.jpg

more like jane eerie, that face at that age

it's a relief to see someone in hollywood who has gone from very young to (relatively) old and basically kept the same face

more like jane eerie, that face at that age

― omar little, Thursday, March 24, 2011 6:33 PM (35 minutes ago) Bookmark

lmao... i wouldn't have even thought about it, but now im weirded out by it too

that vanity fair thing i swear MUST be done by sometimes ILX resident dan lacey

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wa-aKhOqX8g

thanks for posting Morbz!

that moment when she snorts when she laughs at 1:21 is excellent

"I'm sorry folks, I'm not used to acting" LOL

goddammit she's just so darn CUTE

"Did you see the Tony Awards?"

i think what she's mumbling after "Did you see the Tony Awards?" is something like "i screwed up my lines on that too."

yeah, she tells him how she got all the people's names wrong there too.

David Carr in the NY Times:

“I know I’m vulgar,” she once said, “but would you have me any other way?” In that respect, she was very much like Dolly Parton, another durable American star who turned sartorial trashiness into a virtue by claiming it as her own. No one invented Dolly Parton or Elizabeth Taylor, although many have claimed to, and their connection to their fans was, and has been, a visceral, living thing based on an honesty and directness.

But that is not the same as saying that she was not a lady. She was every inch a lady. It’s trite to say, but think of the biggest-wattage stars, like, say, Angelina Jolie. Ms. Jolie is remarkably beautiful and very talented, and, like Ms. Taylor, in control of her own career. But there is certain masculinity to Ms. Jolie’s appeal, a willingness to kick some tail on screen and go after whatever she wants off-screen. And before you dismiss the argument as the product of a diseased, sexist mind, a little thought experiment: Before there was Brangelina, there was Dickenliz. In the instance of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, who is the alpha? It’s not really even much of a question. Yet even though Ms. Taylor’s fans adored her with far more ferocity than Richard Burton’s talents ever engendered, she deferred to him.

That may be why, apart from her manifest beauty, she remained, as the director George Stevens said, the girl every American boy “thinks he can marry.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/27/weekinreview/27carr.html

I get what he's saying but it feels like a condescending way to say it. Pitting Jolie's "masculinity" against Taylor's "demureness" off screen just seems like an incredibly dated and boring way to talk about those two women, if he must talk about them in the same article...though everyone seems intent on doing it.
It's like the Jackie O and Marilyn archetype, the virgin and the whore...that whole line of conversation just annoys the hell out of me.

TAKE THAT LOHAN

http://www.vulture.com/2013/06/see-helena-bonham-carter-as-elizabeth-taylor.html

http://pixel.nymag.com/imgs/daily/vulture/2013/06/05/05-burton-taylor.o.jpg/a_560x0.jpg

They both look so good/similar to Taylor and Burton. However, I'm still not sure we really need a movie about them whether it has good actors or not.

omg @ dominic west

wow

Anyone ever seen X, Y and Zee, aka Zee and Co.? Domestic fights w/ Michael Caine AND a love scene w/ Susannah York!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zee_and_Co.

Kael loves her in it. I saw it once when I had a local video store but rented The Sandpiper instead.

It's showing in 35mm at Lincoln Center tomw night.

http://filmlinc.com/page/-/uploads/films/Zee3.jpg

Liz is very funny in it, mostly intentionally and especially in the first half. There's a weird lesbophobic early '70s ending, no wonder Kael loved it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8GdEYIzP2k

NYC retro, lots on 35mm... i have still never seen Secret Ceremony and Ash Wednesday.

https://quadcinema.com/program/essential-liz/

Secret Ceremony is weird, good-bad but worthwhile. Only thing I remember about Ash Wednesday is plastic surgery.

The one I look forward to is The Driver's Seat, which I've seen a couple of times but on poor prints.

i don't remember even hearing of that one.

Liz was one of the many inspirations for my new name.

John Simon called Secret Ceremony "worse than bad, militantly loathsome," Pauline Kael called it "truly terrible" and Rex Reed called it "a piece of garbage." So definitely go see that one.

But I have seen all of Joseph Losey's 1962-71 films except for it! Also, there's the presence of Mitchum and Mia, and Fernando Croce finds it intentionally funny:

http://www.cinepassion.org/Reviews/s/SecretCeremony.html

Kael loved Ash Wednesday for her lurid performance

xp As he says there, it parallels Boom! in many ways. Same kind of borderline laughable provocation.

both Ash Wednesday and Secret Ceremony are kinda bad -- even tho Losey is a better filmmaker than Larry Peerce, Mia Farrow is particularly grating in SC, and the dialogue, oy. Still, it has a scene where Liz belches after chowing down on breakfast pastries and sausage.

Kael loved Ash Wednesday for her lurid performance

hmm, not so:

In a few scenes, Elizabeth Taylor is done up like Arletty playing Garance in CHILDREN OF PARADISE, and she's absolutely ravishing, in an unearthly, ageless way. But the film is a long-drawn-out ghoulish commercial for cosmetic surgery-made, apparently, for people who can't think of anything to do with their lives but go backward. Jean-Claude Tramont is credited with the script and Larry Peerce is credited with the direction, but there is no script and there is no direction. With Keith Baxter, Helmut Berger, and Henry Fonda giving a sour, dumb performance.

I disagree about it being a "commercial" and Fonda btw. Keith Baxter plays her gay fashion photographer confidante.

The Sandpiper is worth a look if you can deal with lush, hopelessly miscast turkeys. When the titular bird flies onto Liz's head in the middle of a romantic tete-a-tete with Dick...

Kael:

https://letterboxd.com/notpaulinekael/film/the-sandpiper/

Whenever I see that movie I just wonder about the real-world pricetag of that fabulous beachfront "shack" in Big Sur that Liz is slumming in

Kael:

https://letterboxd.com/notpaulinekael/film/the-sandpiper🕸/

It's Kael -- I remember the Taylor cupping-the-breasts line.

this movie is ridiculous and I have enjoyed it several times

It is the handle of someone on Letterboxd who has transcribed Kael's writing. xxp

Yes, Liz certainly has a nice wardrobe for a struggling artist and single parent. I could read Burton's mind: "Christ, these lines."

Charles Bronson stepped in as Cos the sculptor when Sammy Davis Jr had to bow out.

That link above is weird though, it's sort of cut-and-pasted from Kael's review in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang but jumbled up and with new phrases added, such as "massive-headed Burton"

I think she reworked her old reviews for the mini-reviews that made up the 5001 Nights at the Movies compilation (per the Letterboxd tag).

Aug 12 71 the only time I get testy with E is when she has had a couple & has taken a pink pill..in conjunction with the booze gives her a kind of false euphoria & becomes sentimental & a reminiscent of her mother. Since her mother is the bore of all epochs this can be a bit hard

— Richard Burton (@BurtonDiaries) August 12, 2019

Have been quarantining with Liz Taylor movies I've missed.

Father of the Bride (1950): Spencer Tracy's film really, and I've never seen him better. Something very real about the dad who puts up with all kinds of craziness to make his daughter happy. Witty, satirical script. This and the sequel Father's Little Dividend were Joan Bennett's last big movies before her "scandal," and she is enjoyable as always. Liz was 17 playing 20 in this, which is kind of unusual.

A Place in the Sun (1951): More noir-ish than I expected. Liz really glows. Montgomery Clift's problem is he falls in love too quickly.

Ivanhoe (1952): Not sure why she felt she was miscast in this role because she's fine and convincing playing the Jewish girl Rebecca (years before she converted irl). Robert Taylor perhaps too old to play Ivanhoe, but this is classic old school MGM.

Elephant Walk (1954): Certainly nice to look at. Very 1950s psychology with Peter Finch driven to madness trying to live up to the greatness of his deceased father. Liz wears awesome clothes. The film is generally nutty but it only gets truly laughable at the climax when the elephants take more control of things. This is the Rebecca plot essentially.