WHEN YOU hear the name Elizabeth Taylor, if you have seen about half a dozen of her films from the 1950s and 60s, you may immediately think of beauty, fashion, glamour, society, and wealth; but also audacity, individual freedom, sophistication, neurotic behaviour, and especially cultured erudition.

This is quite a diverse and contradictory impression to leave from one’s screen roles. But with a closer, serious look at such a complex series of screen roles, it becomes apparent that what makes Elizabeth Taylor one of the last great Hollywood actresses (still alive, though not very professionally active) is her profound dramatic exploration of human character as the root, the origin of both social behaviour and social change.

From the start, Taylor’s real-life background and subsequent film career challenged any convenient stereotype of the person of wealthy, sophisticated, educated, or even bourgeois background, as the predestined defender of such roots.
In real life, Taylor came from well-to-do cultured and sophisticated American parents who lived in London, where she was born, before they returned to the USA, where she grew up and at age 10, appeared in her first film.

By seventeen, Taylor, who already had a few child and adolescent screen roles to her credit due to the professional circles her parents mixed in, entered her first marriage, and to date has passed through about eight such contracts.

Does such a life translate into screen roles of relevance to people in general? Elizabeth Taylor’s perennial importance as an actress or screen star is her consistent and urgently accurate exploration of human characters undefined by their social circumstances. The significant focus of Taylor’s roles defiantly refute the stereotype that humans are defined by class, or class consciousness…unless we regard an individual rebuttal of class definitions as the paradoxical evidence of its influence. 

Depth and authenticity

The depth and authenticity of Elizabeth Taylor as a leading Hollywood actress began to emerge since 1950 with even simple cameo roles in films like ‘QUO VADIS’, as a young woman in antique Roman times, and  ‘IVANHOE’ of 1952, another  stunning Hollywood colour film (such colour does not exist in Hollywood colour films today) about medieval Saxon/Scottish chivalry.

Both films starred the famous heroic actor of adventure films, Robert Taylor. The cameo, or brief noticeable screen part, is comparable to what the short story, or vignette is to the novel, and it is not the same as being an ‘extra’, because it offers the chance for seriously developing stage or screen actors to quickly make a lasting impression in the brief time at their disposal. Think of Dorothy Malone in ‘THE BIG SLEEP’ of 1946, in that unforgettable stylish cameo as the coy librarian Humphrey Bogart chats up; or John Huston as the white-suited American expatriate in Mexico, in ‘TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE’ of 1948, whom bummed-out Humphrey Bogart keeps running into on the Mexican streets, begs and receives a hefty American silver dollar from each time, (which is ironic indeed, since Huston was also his employer and the director of the film).

But  Taylor’s early cameo-type appearances in ‘QUO VADIS’ and ‘IVANHOE’ also indicated  — after she had completed a number of roles by the end of the 50s and early 60s —  a theme she was beginning to develop and master, whether consciously or subconsciously.

That theme was the exploration of ‘woman’ as prize, as an appendage to social prestige for the man; an archetype which goes all the way back to primitive lifestyles (and their mythological extension today) when women were captured, subjugated, dominated as a symbol of man’s possession and power over the world, and his future image in it. This is a central social and class value which comes into conflict with Taylor’s constant roles as the sensual adventurous, often bohemian woman, who likes men but defines, pursues, and expresses her own mentality, viewpoint, and behaviour in the world.

First major role

However, it was actually between the making of ‘Quo Vadis’ and ‘Ivanhoe’ that Elizabeth Taylor appeared in her first major role which explored the possible personal and social repercussions of an upper-class privileged lifestyle; this was in the emotionally needling Hollywood classic, ‘A PLACE IN THE SUN’ of 1951, directed by George Stevens, whom she would work under again in ‘GIANT’ of 1956, starring Montgomery  Clift, easily one of Hollywood’s greatest actors to date, with whom she would also develops a special lifelong friendship and appear with in two other outstanding films: ‘RAINTREE COUNTY’ (1957), and ‘SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER’ (1959.

Taylor’s  role in ‘A PLACE IN THE SUN’ stunningly reveals a criticism of social class barriers, not by conscious rebellion against it, but by being the naïve victim of its affordable freedoms.

In the film, her open heart allows her to develop a serious love affair with a quiet, competent, and stylishly gifted young man of the working class (Clift) employed in her father’s enormously successful factory, and who becomes love-smitten with her. When his prior relationship with a girl (Shelley Winters) of his own working class status turns sour, and she is accidentally drowned in a row-boat outing with him, both his romantic relationships are exaggeratingly dug up in court by a sinister prosecutor as evidence slanted towards a social motive for the murder of his poor pregnant girlfriend, which would now free him towards  upward mobility with Taylor.

So as though to satisfy the archetype of stereotypical class barriers, Clift is condemned to the electric chair, while Taylor is returned to the social security of her family/class as the innocent pawn who had merely been the intended stepping stone to a better social life by a conniving social opportunist.
The film packed a wallop, no doubt for  audiences as well as young 19-year-old Taylor, and Clift, so it made sense to see her in a completely vivacious role as the artistically aware bohemian daughter of a delightful liberal father  of an American expatriate family enjoying  post-war Paris during its cultural fame, in ‘THE LAST TIME I SAW PARIS’ of 1954, a much better film than the languid tropical romantic intrigue of ‘ELEPHANT WALK’, made earlier in the same year. ‘The Last Time I Saw Paris’ returned Taylor to the theme of social pressure contrasted with personal freedom and development, implied by her role as the lover of a struggling expatriate American writer in Paris, played so-so by Van Johnson. Because of her own
desire to grow as a person, she cannot deliver all the committed relational support he needs in his uphill career struggle.

Vital creative quality

The film’s theme of the struggling creative writer was no mere peripheral topic for Taylor’s role; it reflected an actual vital creative quality which suggests her interest and choice in fiction, novels, plays, of the highest order, on which most of her subsequent films will be based.

This  generic interest is one of the most original and serious social and educational values Elizabeth Taylor’s films have bequeathed to today’s women and men;  personal development strengthened by good reading and by the input of literary excellence via the process of her film dramatizations of outstanding novels and plays

Elizabeth Taylor’s acting draws its convincing intensity from the intention of the original fictional work by the writer, not simply the adapted screenplay of the film. This perhaps is one of the important differences between Hollywood’s great contemporary film features of the 50s and 60s, and today’s often fabricated, disposable process films built on generalised deductions about our complex human identity, and made to provoke exaggerated emotional and physical reactions from audiences, rather than explorations of their everyday real lives.