When Was Elizabeth Taylor at her Most Beautiful? What's Your Favorite Liz Movie or Life Moment?

Did Elizabeth Taylor ever pass through Walnut Creek? Do I have reason to write about her on what should be a hyper-local news site? 

Well, I'm very sad about her death today. As my husband said, it's a bit of a shock hearing that she died because you, well, always expect Elizabeth Taylor to be there.

I can say that the voluptuous, violet-eyed beauty certainly entered my Walnut Creek home growing up--via all her movies I watched on  TV--and not just Lassie Come Home (1943) and National Velvet but Father of the Bride (1950), A Place in the Sun (1951) Giant (1956),  Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958) Suddenly, Last Summer (1959), Butterfield 8 (1960), and, notoriously, Cleopatra (1963).  

My friend Roger and I have a theory that the world of celebrity is divided into two time periods: Before Cleopatra and After Cleopatra.

After Taylor, then the biggest female star in the world, refused to star in the Egyptian queen biopic unless she was paid a then-unheard of $1 million, she and her co-star Richard Burton (who played Marc Antony) went on to make tabloid history.  The two embarked on what was probably the most famous Hollywood affair ever (before Brad and Angelina came along). The paparazzi--then a relatively new phenomenon of entertainment journalism--followed and photographed their every move. 

At the time, Taylor was married to crooner Eddie Fisher. Taylor had stolen him from Hollywood sweetheart Debbie Reynolds, but the public sort of forgave Taylor and Fisher, because they only fell in love after Taylor's husband no. 3, producer Mike Todd and the so-called "love of her life," was killed in a plane crash in 1958. Fisher, Todd's best friend, was only just consoling Taylor.  Right.

But poor Eddie. For him, the choice between Debbie Reynolds and Elizabeth Taylor was probably not unlike Brad Pitt's choice between Jennifer Aniston and Angelina Jolie: If you're a regular, red-blooded dude, who would you rather fall in love/lust with? 

In the end, after Taylor and Burton married in 1964, he bought her some very big, famous diamonds, and they made some really good and bad movies together. If you love movies that are so bad they are good, check out Boom (1968). 

I loved Edward Albee's play Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, and did a scene from it for a high school drama class. I tried to watch the 1966 film starring Taylor, as the chubby, shrewish, drunken wife of a beleagured college professor (played by Burton), but it's a long movie of mind games. Great acting, great dialogue, but it's like a long night of hanging out with dysfunctional family as they drink and air all their grievances. Still, Taylor deserved her second Oscar (she won for playing a call girl in Butterfield 8), and Burton should have won, too. 

Anyway, Taylor's later life was marked by greatness when she stuck by her good friend and one-time Hollywood hunk Rock Hudson after he came out as gay and as dying of AIDS. Her AIDS organization AMFAR raised $83 million in the 12 years following its creation in 1985, according to IMDB. 

My two favorite Taylor films are A Place in the Sun and Giant, both directed by George Stevens.  Actually, A Place in the Sun is probably in my top 10 favorite movies of all time. I can always watch it again and again--and not just because both Taylor and co-star Montgomery Clift are at the height of their beauty in this film and have amazing chemistry.

It's just a beautifully made film, adapted from the Theodor Dreiser novel An American Tragedy, which in turn is based on a true-life love triangle and murder that occurred at an upstate New York lake resort in the early 1900s.

Both A Place in the Sun and An American Tragedy offer a psychologically brilliant and sensitive examination of a man's guilty conscious after committing a crime he may or may not have intended to commit. 

Taylor is heartbreakingly lovely as the beautiful young society girl, the object of Clift's desire. Her Angela Vickers is so desirable and so represents what Clift's George Eastman wants in life that he goes so far as to set it up so that his frumpy, working-class pregnant fiance (played by Shelley Winters in her Academy Award-winning role) dies in a boating accident.  

Taylor's Angela hearing from Clift's George Eastman that he loves her, as they dance at a party? Taylor coming to see Clift as he's on death row, minutes from his execution?  Some of the most romantic, beautiful and tragic moments in film.