"Actress Elizabeth Taylor dies at age 79" by Ty Burr, Globe Staff / March 23, 2011
Elizabeth Taylor, the last of the great Hollywood studio stars and the first of the modern mega-celebrities, died of congestive heart failure Wednesday morning at Los Angeles' Cedars-Sinai Hospital. Although seemingly ageless, she was in fact 79.
How I will always remember her:
Miss Taylor began her career as a child actress and rose to fame in the movies, but it was as herself -- or a melodramatic projection of herself the media dubbed "Liz" (a nickname she detested) -- that she captured the often outraged attention of the world.
She was nominated for five Oscars and won twice, for "Butterfield 8" (1961) and "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" (1967). She married eight times, twice to Richard Burton. She was denounced by the Vatican for "erotic vagrancy." She stole husbands only to abandon them and became an ever larger object of fascination as a result.
In her final decades, as her stardom outgrew the need for movies, Miss Taylor sailed on in a state of perpetual celebrity buoyed by personalized perfumes, a diet book, pioneering AIDS charity work, illnesses, and romance, always romance. Her final husband was a construction worker she had met in rehab....
We will not see her like again.....
It was "National Velvet" (1944) that turned the young actress into a household name....
Producer Walter Wanger offering Miss Taylor the part of Cleopatra. Thinking it was a joke, the actress responded, "Sure, tell him I'll do it for a million dollars." She thus became the first star to earn a million for a single film.
"Cleopatra" was three years in the making, and Miss Taylor's illness shut down production and sent director Rouben Mamoulian and stars Peter Finch and Stephen Boyd off to other projects. Writer-director Joseph L. Mankiewicz took over behind the camera, with Rex Harrison replacing Finch as Julius Caesar, and, stepping into Boyd's Marc Antony sandals, a handsome Welsh actor named Richard Burton....
The two met on the "Cleopatra" set and their affair swiftly became public knowledge....
"Cleopatra" finally came out in 1963, a sprawling four-hour dud that, adjusted for inflation, remains the most expensive film ever made (it did eventually turn a profit).....
A dud?!!
You call one of my favorite movies of all time a dud?
