ava-et-liz reblogged
Elizabeth Taylor by Mark Shaw, 1956
Elizabeth Taylor photographed in 1956.
"As movie stars go, Dame Elizabeth was the gold standard. She was always a creature of paradoxes: possessed of exquisite beauty, she loved to curse like a longshoreman. She lived her life out loud and in public, yet she ensured her four children and ten grandchildren a private life, which they enjoy to this day. Raised in relative luxury by an art dealer and an actress, she loved the company of working men and women, made friends with the crews of all her films, and embraced Richard Burton’s Welsh coal mining family. She was comfortable with vulgarity. She ate and drank to her heart’s content. Her lust for life informed everything she did, and everything she did was outsized: her eight marriages (two of them to Burton, the love of her life); her six decades’ worth of films; her two Academy awards; her astonishing jewels, including the 33.19-carat Krupp diamond and the 69.42-carat Taylor-Burton Diamond. The English called her “The Wife of Bath.” She was made a Dame of the Realm in 2003. She knew how to be a movie star and, in truth, her stardom and her fabled personal life eclipsed her real gifts as an actress—gifts that most dazzled in A Place in the Sun, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Suddenly Last Summer, Butterfield 8, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and The Taming of the Shrew. She taught the theatrically trained Burton how to act for the camera: he praised her quality of stillness, and learned from it. But off-stage, and in the third act of her life—when Richard was gone, when her marriages to John Warner and Larry Fortensky were over, when her late-career forays into acting on film, onstage, and in television ended—she was anything but still. Some might say her third act was her greatest, and her most fearless. Like Maggie the Cat, she seemed to have nine lives, as she survived a brain tumor, a broken back, the scoliosis she’d had since birth, hip replacements, and heart surgery. In the early 1990s, she took on the daunting cause of raising awareness of and finding a cure for AIDS, by founding the Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Fund—at a time when mainstream America was still recoiling from the disease, and from gay America." — Vanity Fair. Photo of Elizabeth at the premiere of "Moby Dick" in Los Angeles, 1956.
"In Stevens's Giant, she was a Virginia bloom transported as the yellow rose of Texas; in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Suddenly Last Summer, a Tennessee Williams heroine exorcizing the demons of men's desires; in Butterfield 8, a chic call girl digging her stiletto heel into the cowhide of Laurence Harvey's thick skin. Taylor was exploring a wider, smarter, grander dramatic range: a dream of womanly invitation who could escalate without warning into arias of sexual confession or recrimination. In each role she found the starting point for a creative journey at the crossroads of modern femininity, or proto-feminism, and ageless star quality." — Richard Corliss.
Photo by Bert Six, 1956.
Elizabeth Taylor on the beach on Malibu, 1956.
Before filming began on “Giant”, Elizabeth Taylor invited Rock Hudson and wife Phyllis Gates to her house to get acquainted.
“Let’s get acquainted,” she said. “We’re going to be playing husband and wife for the next six months.” They ate and drank and when Rock was smashed, he said to Elizabeth, “How can you stand being so beautiful?” Beautiful? Beautiful! I’m Minnie Mouse.” She went to her bedroom, pinned her hair back and put on a little red skirt and black pumps. When she came back into the living room, Rock said, ‘”t was true! There stood Minnie Mouse.” They stayed up drinking and laughing until four in the morning, and Rock and Elizabeth had to be at the studio two hours later, at 6 A.M. They had to shoot the wedding scene, where Elizabeth has to run home to Virginia and is matron of honor at her sister’s wedding. Rock arrives, and without saying a word, goes and stands behind Elizabeth until she becomes aware of his presence, turns, and runs into his arms. It would become one of the most powerful scenes in the film. When Rock screened the movie for friends, he would stop the projector and explain: “In between takes, Elizabeth and I were running out and throwing up. We were both so hung over we couldn’t speak. That’s what made the scene.”
— Excerpt from Rock Hudson: His Story by Sarah Davidson
“Oh, how to define Elizabeth… My God. I think the best way to describe her is she’s an earth mother, and she cares for everybody and everything. She cares, she bleeds for people.” --- Rock Hudson talking about Elizabeth Taylor on The Paul Ryan Show, 1982. Photo of the duo in “Giant” (1956.)
Elizabeth Taylor and James Dean in “Giant” (1956.)
ava-et-liz reblogged
Ava Gardner
Source: sourvix
ava-et-liz reblogged
George Hoyningen-Huene: Ava Gardner, 1956
Elizabeth Taylor on the beach in Malibu, 1956.