OF ALL the marvelous objects - real or manufactured - that cinema has provided us, I don't know that any surpass the violet eyes of Elizabeth Taylor.
Taylor died yesterday at age 79, and while she left behind an insanely large and varied legacy as both an actress and storm-tossed celebrity, it was her made-for-technicolor, midcentury visage that comes to mind when you think of her.
"Without question one of the most beautiful women to ever grace the screen," wrote Leonard Maltin, adding, perhaps as an afterthought, that the two-time Oscar winner was a better actress than acknowledged. Taylor was just a kid, 12 years old, when she appeared with Mickey Rooney in the 1944 hit "National Velvet," and audiences were jolted by all that raven hair dancing around her purple irises.
Few child stars have the evolving looks, talent and fortitude to thrive on screen as they mature, to maintain their hold on the moviegoing public, but Taylor was one of the lucky, brassy ones.
She made a few movies, among them 1949's "Little Women," before Vincente Minnelli reintroduced her a year later to rapt moviegoers as the ingenue in "Father of the Bride," a stature that George Stevens deftly exploited in 1951's "A Place in the Sun" - Taylor as the ideal woman, somebody for whom Montgomery Clift is willing to kill.
Writes David Thomson: "That film not only established her own black-haired beauty, but set a popular standard for a decade. In the fifty years since, has any movie actress been so blatant about extraordinary beauty? Julia Roberts in 'Pretty Woman' is the only case that I can think of."
Stevens recaptured her five years later with "Giant," and by then she'd made so many movies, it was almost impossible to believe that she was younger than co-star James Dean.
She rose to the challenge of strong directors and writers: Edward Dmytryk's "Raintree County," "Suddenly Last Summer" for Joseph Mankiewicz in '59, and another Tennessee Williams adaptation with "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof." She won an Oscar as the original pretty woman in "Butterfield 8" (1960), playing a high-class hooker who wants to give up the life when she falls in love.
Meanwhile, her multiple marriages and health problems became a narrative as melodramatic as anything in a Williams yarn - she wed and shed a hotel scion, a producer, an actor, and singer Eddie Fisher.
Taylor's fame grew during the '50s as media evolved and Hollywood's ability to control a star's image eroded. A dangerous confluence of trends - in 1962 her various images as a sex symbol/movie star/notorious public figure combined and went thermonuclear on the set of "Cleopatra," the "Titanic" of its day (in terms of expense) and ground zero for a relentlessly reported scandal detailing her break from Fisher and dalliance with co-star Richard Burton.
She and Burton made a ton of money costarring in several movies together throughout the '60s, but the artistic payoff was negligible. When she startled audiences again - opposite Burton in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" in 1966 - she was a different woman: suddenly middle-aged, plump, vividly bitter, a transformation that won her a second Oscar.
And that was pretty much it.
Taylor kept working, but without many roles to reignite her interest in the craft - she was memorable in "A Little Night Music" (1977) and "The Mirror Crack'd" (1980).
Late in life, Taylor was most moved by her campaign to raise awareness about AIDS, and best known for her symbiotic friendship with Michael Jackson.
Post-boomers who know her as the old lady in "The Flintstones" would probably not believe she once dominated the popular imagination, or ignited a media fixation that lasted not just a news cycle, but a full decade. Or that she was one of the screen's indelible faces.
But she was, and she will always have her place in the sun.
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