“I’m a lady who likes to fight, and I think women would go into the trenches tomorrow if they could.”  –Elizabeth Taylor

In 1947, 15-year-old Elizabeth Taylor told off her boss, MGM head honcho Louis B. Mayer, arguably the most powerful man in Hollywood, for being mean to her mother.  She left the mogul’s office crying, fully convinced she was going to get fired.  It turned out she was wrong and after a few weeks the young actress recognized that she was a valuable commodity and by fighting she could get often get her way.

Early on Elizabeth realized her looks let her get away with a lot.  In her twenties she delighted in belching loudly in public knowing that others would think that there was no way such an uncouth noise could come from someone that beautiful. Another weapon in her arsenal washer use of maladies both real and imagined.  After playing a sickly teenager in the drama Cynthia (1947), people around her noticed if she found working conditions unfavorable she would become incapacitated. She came down with abdominal pains after her co-star James Dean shockingly died in a car crash during the filming of the western Giant (1955) and was hospitalized for two weeks.

Likewise when her lover and leading man Richard Burton announced he was reconciling with his long suffering wife Sybil while making Cleopatra (1963) Elizabeth reportedly took an overdose of sleeping pills.  Her bosses fumed, production was shut down, and then she recovered and eventually landed her man. Elizabeth had little sympathy for studio executives; after charging Jack Warner $1,000,000 for starring in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1966), she nearly fired her agent for agreeing to a contract that required her to show up at work before 10am (it was renegotiated to her liking), and then asked the startled Warner for an expensive diamond brooch on top of her salary (he found her request brazen and unwarranted but eventually complied). 

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The bright lights never seem to fade on Hollywood’s stars. Even at her memorial service, Elizabeth Taylor left instructions that she arrive 15 minutes late to make an entrance.  Friends and family remembered Taylor before she was finally laid to rest in the same cemetery where her longtime friend Michael Jackson is buried.  Well documented in the press, the relationship between Ms. Taylor and the King of Pop remains an enigma of sorts.  Twice, she stood by Jackson as he endured accusations of child abuse.  When the singer turned to prescription drugs to dull his pain, it was Taylor who convinced him to go to rehab.

No stranger to the perils of drug abuse herself, Taylor knew firsthand Jackson could indeed turn his life around.  After her own rehab stint made headlines in the early 1980s, Taylor was in a unique position to speak out to celebrities who abuse drugs to cope with fame and its pitfalls.  While Jackson eventually passed away, allegedly from a powerful prescription drug, there is something to be learned from the lives of both the King of Pop and Hollywood’s golden girl.

Even when she struggled with health problems, weight issues, and alcohol, the public maintained its fond fascination for Taylor, and she emerged from those challenges fully supported.  Then, she became one of the most active humanitarians in show business; utilizing her stardom to raise funds for AIDS research throughout the 1980s, which continued for several decades until her passing.  Unfortunately, the feel-good chapter at the end of Taylor’s story – one marked by altruism and charity – is uncommon for Hollywood’s brightest stars, who often fade as fast as they shine.

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Boy, things sure have changed in Hollywood… Not completely, though, thank heaven.

Via JTA:

Elizabeth Taylor Offered to Be Hostage, Dinitz Discloses
June 16, 1977
LOS ANGELES (JTA) — Movie actress Elizabeth Taylor offered herself as a hostage for the more than 100 Air France hijack victims held by terrorists at Entebbe Airport in Uganda during the tense days before the Israeli rescue raid last July 4. That disclosure was made here by Israel’s Ambassador to the United States, Simcha Dinitz, at a Jewish National Fund gala honoring Ms. Taylor and her husband, John W. Warner, for their devotion to the land reclamation work of the JNF and other humanitarian causes.

Dinitz, who presented the couple with a certificate for a forest to be planted in their names within the American National Bicentennial Park near Jerusalem, said that Ms. Taylor’s offer was “appreciated” and “the Jewish people will always remember it.”

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It’s impossible for me to hate these people more than I already do, so let me just say that I would sure like to be there when Jesus throws Fred Phelps and his followers out of his office and into the pit of Hell.

The Wrap:

The fiercely anti-gay [Westboro Baptist Church] — which has generated controversy by protesting at funerals of service members — announced its intentions to picket Taylor’s memorial service on Wednesday.

While the group didn’t say exactly why they planned to disrupt the funeral of the actress, who passed away at 79 on Wednesday, it’s a safe bet that Taylor’s activism for AIDS patients has something to do with it. Margie Phelps, daughter of WBC leader Fred Phelps, tweeted about the planned picket on Wednesday, referring to Taylor as a “serial-adulterous f– hag.”

From what I’ve read, the very reason Liz Taylor married so often was due to her desire not to cheat. So they might not even be hating her for the right reasons. Regardless, by all accounts Taylor was one of the most beloved and universally adored stars in the history of Hollywood. She also took up the righteous cause to fight AIDS long before red ribbons became Hollywood chic — which is probably the real motive behind this protest. Like the rest of us, Taylor undoubtedly had her moments of moral weakness, but there’s never been a moment in her life where she purposefully committed an act of outright evil like, say, picketing a funeral.

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Via the Hollywood Reporter, here’s the can’t-miss schedule. And if you haven’t already, run out and purchase a copy of George Stevens’ masterpiece, “A Place in the Sun.”

6 a.m. – Lassie Come Home (1943): Roddy McDowall and Edmund Gwenn.

7:30 a.m. – National Velvet (1944)  Mickey Rooney, Anne Revere and Angela Lansbury.

10 a.m. – Conspirator (1952): Robert Taylor and Robert Flemyng.

11:30 a.m. – Father of the Bride (1950): Spencer Tracy, Billie Burke, Joan Bennett.

1:15 p.m. – Father’s Little Dividend (1951): Spencer Tracy, Billie Burke, Joan Bennett.

2:45 p.m. – Raintree County (1957): Montgomery Clift, Eva Marie Saint, Lee Marvin, Rod Taylor.

6 p.m. – Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958): Paul Newman and Burl Ives.

8 p.m. – Butterfield 8 (1960): Laurence Harvey and Eddie Fisher.

10 p.m. – Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966): Richard Burton, George Segal.

12:30 a.m. – Giant (1956): with James Dean and Rock Hudson.

4 a.m. – Ivanhoe (1952): with Robert Taylor and Joan Fontaine.

The 2011 TCM Classic Film Festival in Hollywood also will feature a special 60th anniversary screening of her brilliant performance opposite Montgomery Clift in George Stevens’ A Place in the Sun (1951). The TCM Classic Film Festival takes place April 28-May 1.

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The New York Times:

Elizabeth Taylor, the actress who dazzled generations of moviegoers with her stunning beauty and whose name was synonymous with Hollywood glamour, died Wednesday in Los Angeles. She was 79.

The cause was congestive heart failure, her publicist, Sally Morrison, told The Associated Press.

In a world of flickering images, Ms. Taylor was a constant star. First appearing onscreen at age 9, she grew up there, never passing through an awkward age. It was one quick leap from “National Velvet” to “A Place in the Sun” and from there to “Cleopatra” as she was indelibly transformed from a vulnerable child actress into a voluptuous film queen.

In a career of more than 70 years and more than 50 films, she won two Academy Awards as best actress, for her performances as a call girl in “Butterfield 8” (in 1960) and as the acid-tongued Martha in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” (in 1966). Mike Nichols, who directed her in “Virginia Woolf,” said he considered her “one of the greatest cinema actresses.”

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“Comrade Karen?”

My wife gazes at me, and she’s like, “Huh?”

“Since I’m watching all these Russian themed movies I feel the need to get in character.”

“Robert…”

“Comrade Robert, if you please.”

My poor wife heaves a weary sigh.

“Comrade Robert, how long will this lunacy continue?”

“Counter-revolutionary! Saboteur! Trotskyite!”

Comrade Karen sternly points to the stairs, and I make my way to a Zhivago-like exile in the living room for the next few hours.

Oh, the sacrifices I make for my comrades at Big Hollywood.

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The star of Smokey and the Bandit was, of course, Burt Reynolds, a man of great passions, great flaws, and ultimately great loyalty to the people and place he came from. “I love the South,” he emphatically states to this very day. His is a career that — sometimes for worse but more often for better — stands as a testament to that simple heartfelt sentiment.

The man who would become one of the most popular movie stars of the last quarter century was born in 1936, the son of a small-town police chief in Florida. He grew up handsome and tough, randy and reckless — by fourteen, he had lost his virginity to a much older woman, and soon after knocked up the prom queen (his attempts to cajole her into marriage were rebuffed by the girl’s society-maven mother, who forced her daughter to abort the baby). Such antics were an early harbinger of both the charismatic charm and voracious, self-destructive appetites that would define (and sometimes decimate) his later career (a typical joke — Q: Why didn’t Burt Reynolds ever take Loni Anderson out to dinner? A: He made it a rule never to date married women.) (more…)

7:30am PST - A Place in the Sun (1951) – An ambitious young man wins an heiress’s heart but has to cope with his former girlfriend’s pregnancy. Cast: Montgomery Clift, Elizabeth Taylor, Shelley Winters, Anne Revere Dir: George Stevens BW-122 mins, TV-PG

When you hear the word “nuanced” from Hollywood today, dollars to donuts they mean “immoral,” as in, we’re going to appease some terrorists and sexualize young children and call it “sophisticated.” Whether they know it or not (and I think they do), those particular plot points don’t represent “subtle shades of meaning,” they represent appeasing terrorists and sexualizing young children. (more…)