AS SHE became increasingly involved with the character of Gloria Wandrous in ‘BUTTERFIELD 8’, Elizabeth Taylor transcended her initial disenchantment with the role of a pretentious call-girl. She saw the discipline acting it involved, to the extent that scenes were often redone at her request until she felt the inner silent predicament of Gloria wondrous had been captured, and Bingo! won her first Academy Award for ‘Butterfield 8’ in 1961.
It had been one of her early ambitions to prove her talent as an actress by one day convincing an Academy Award jury, but there was no predictable role through which such an ambition should, or could be achieved. Taylor’s experience filming ‘Butterfield 8’ revealed the creative lesson which strips an artist of his or her real-life prejudice against the characters they must deal with in their work, so that at the end of their creative task, a deeper human sympathy and understanding is felt and conveyed to an audience, perhaps helping to spread a more comprehensive, civilised social tolerance via such art.

Elizabeth Taylor is certainly not the only Hollywood actress to explore such a social value via acting; another special contemporary American actress, and a friend of Taylor’s, who explored similar themes in her own way was Grace Kelly. Both Taylor and Kelly had that valuable creative knack for projecting female characters who criticise and refute the stereotype of wealth or ‘class’ as being a selfish prejudicial preoccupation, and this peculiar quality is a genuine interest of theirs, since both these actresses come from refined, cultured social backgrounds, which are not defended or idealized as exclusive class structures in the films they make.

If we ever ask ourselves (and we should) what actual, real contribution to human understanding in human relations all these screen-roles of Taylor’s offer us, any accurate answer could not omit the intense feeling of self-consciousness and conscientiousness her roles are based on. A high percentage of the female identity is always conveyed, in the sense that emotional truth is a major part of most female personalities; whereas male reactions and responses to problems in life often present an egotistical front of knowing all the answers, solutions, and reasons for human and social behaviour by generalized impersonal formulas and deductions.

Ability to adapt
Elizabeth Taylor, in her screen-roles, transforms herself into a microcosm of human and social problems by maximising the presence of her feminine persona as a sensitive receptacle of cause and effect. Personal change and social change become one and the same in characters she acts out. This perhaps is the bottom-line or root remedy attached to all human problems which infect the social and political structures which administer our lives.

In a film like ‘RAINTREE COUNTY’, one of Taylor’s most intense and socially sensitive roles, her disagreement over the abolition of slavery in the South with her progressive abolitionist/teacher husband, played by Montgomery Clift, is revealed to be not simply a social/political issue as the film progresses, and we come to realise her procrastination and resentment towards the loosening of customary black servility is really based on her own impure creole ancestry, which she had stubbornly denied, and which destroys her marriage and leads her towards mental instability and destitution.

The role is so intensely presented that despite being centered on a female character, it has the power to transfer Taylor’s psychological predicament to that of any conscientious female or male viewer of ‘Raintree Country.’

The Elizabeth Taylor role produces an awareness of a pressing human problem for each film viewer, and proceeds to interrogate and explore each viewer’s emotional and rational response to it. Within each film itself, her role always involves an acute relationship with relatives, friends and other persons in society. Her character’s individual personality also brings out, or reflects, the personality or character traits of others encountered. This sort of human/social friction is not only hysterically demonstrated at times, but also quite funny and colourfully erudite.

Films like ‘GIANT’, ‘CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF’, ‘SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER’, ‘Butterfield 8’, ‘CLEOPATRA’, ‘WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF’, and ‘THE COMEDIANS’ offer the best examples of such qualities. However, the power of each of the original plays or novels most of these films are conceived from is never erased by their cinematic transformation. This is especially true when the film is based on a play; for instance, ‘Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf’ of 1966, where entire scenes and dialogue are largely kept by the film script, because the gap or difference between plays and screenplays involves  minor changes via camera focus and detail.

‘Who’s Afraid…’ was a ‘tour de force’ by an original and quite daring avant-garde American playwright, Edward Albee, who achieved overnight fame and success (after relative obscurity) due to the serious response of cultured American readers and theatre-goers. Only an actress of genuine literary knowledge and skill could successfully tackle the role of Martha, the middle-aged wife of a literary academic, brilliantly played by Taylor’s then husband, Welch actor, Richard Burton.

The reference to that stunning English avant-garde novelist of the early 20th Century, Virginia Woolf, in the working title acts as a hint towards the play’s unique role of Martha, a person whose life has become like a quotation of influences from classic movies and literature. Taylor brought the role to life in a brilliant display of self-reflexive criticism peculiar to one of the main functions of modern literature, and won her second well-deserved Academy Award.

Sensitivity
Taylor’s sensitive roles in later films like ‘REFLECTIONS IN A GOLDEN EYE’ and ‘The Comedians’, also reflect her real life respect for the input of those dedicated homosexual professionals in Hollywood’s film industry, even though she maintained her own fair belief that one is free to pursue their own sexual lifestyle, but should not force others to share our sexual preferences, and penalize them when they do not. As the neglected wife of a homosexual military officer (Marlon Brando) who likes a young man, who, in turn likes her instead, Taylor’s role in ‘Reflections In A Golden Eye’ is sensitively humorous. The same goes for her role as another Martha in ‘The Comedians’ of 1967, where she plays the neglected wife of an Ambassador to dictatorial Haiti in the early 1960s, repeatedly fumbling to have an affair in hilarious episodes of unconsummated sex.

‘Cleopatra’ of 1963 was also an earlier film concerned with the world of today, as strange as that may sound. Primed up as a Box Office hit before release, it was a disappointment at first, then gradually recognised for what it really was under Joseph Mankiewicz’s semiotic direction, not some commercial historical epic drama, but a contemporary film with contemporary dialogue, about the role of women and romance in world affairs.

Taylor’s films make us aware of the now eroded international popularity and educational value of classic Hollywood films from the 1960s back, which were largely based on the then custom of purchasing the rights to novels, plays, short stories, even prose poems, for further classless familiarization via film productions.

American (and foreign) writers of the highest order, like Faulkner, Hemingway, Scott-Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, Horace McCoy, James M Cain, Cornell Woolrich/William Irish, John Cheever, James Jones, Irving Wallace, Sloan Wilson, Raymond Chandler, Dashiel Hammett, Jim Thompson, Truman Capote, etc, provided the vital connection between creative literature and the indispensable value of Hollywood’s relevance internationally.

Apart from professional involvement with such literature, Elizabeth Taylor, even in her private life, can be said to be socially aware in the most casual manner; her endless marriages and divorces not a scandal of immorality, but actually just an old-fashioned way of not being stingy with herself, her body; of legally sharing her romantic self and even her money with men she chose.

In evaluating her major films today, we are spared the premature ‘hype’ heard about so many recent ‘stars’ without the literary knowledge or dramatic achievements equal to hers.
With Elizabeth Taylor, what we have is a solid body of cinematic work culled from literary excellence. This is her gift to us from the miraculous spark of creativity. It is the self-sufficient proof of a film star’s genuine artistic success, for which it is a pleasure to say thank you.