She was a true Hollywood icon. Made some great movies as well. http://movies.msn.com/movies/article.aspx?news=636902>1=28101
R.I.P. ELIZABETH TAYLOR Perhaps the most famous actress ever, and a famously "good person" by all accounts. A tip of the cap to a Real American.[video=youtube;NyHa4NSmTkk]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NyHa4NSmTkk[/video] http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000072/
Re: R.I.P. ELIZABETH TAYLOR I was pretty upset when she airballed those back to back 3s in the 97 playoffs.
Re: R.I.P. ELIZABETH TAYLOR but seriously, R.I.P. the voice of maggie simpson. only thing I've seen her in.
Re: R.I.P. ELIZABETH TAYLOR Her fame peaked in 1963-64. While making "Cleopatra," she and Richard Burton had a very, very famous affair. I watched my mother ask her mother about it, everyone had an opinion. Later both divorced their spouses (Eddie Fisher had 11 Top-5 songs in the 50s) so they could get married, which took the luster off the affair. Just as the traditional story is great because it unified Western Civilization's old and new empires in sexual love (Egypt's Pharaoh Cleopatra with Rome's Caesar Marc Antony, symbolizing the transfer of power from the Middle East to Europe), the movie unified the American audience (Taylor) and the British audience (Lionel Barrymore died, Laurence Olivier was getting old, so Burton was now the top young actor there). The highly-publicized affair was "tailor"-made to sell tickets in both countries. I figured out why critics were disappointed when I was older. In the then-most expensive movie of all time, her version of the Pharaoh wasn't all horny for the Caesar as in the much more enjoyable 1934 Cleopatra movie. Watch them on TV and you'll prefer Claudette Colbert to the snitty, bourgeois American housewife Elizabeth Taylor portrayal. The story had traditionally intersected romanticism with world affairs, but the movie is a creature of its 1964 post-McCarthy conservative time.
Re: R.I.P. ELIZABETH TAYLOR I heard on NPR today while driving over to Bend that Cleopatra cost Warner Bros. $44 million in 1962 dollars. It almost bankrupt the studio, and was effectively the end of Liz Taylor's A-list days as an actress. It's right up there with Avatar in terms of cost of making at the time of the production.
Re: R.I.P. ELIZABETH TAYLOR The 1934 version was popular due to Claudette Colbert's lusting and fawning over the Caesar. So in the remake 30 years later, they gambled everything on it. But...given the times, they left out the lusting and fawning. The powers had decided that the ideology to strengthen America was to display a complaining model of womanhood. The 1934 movie was made just in time before the conservatives (think, J. Edgar Hoover) got the Hays Code passed. So it was popular because by the time people saw it, it had no competition anymore in the department of lusting and fawning. It was the last great dirty American movie. Taylor's version had a hard act to follow. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/06/AR2009040602212.html "In 1934 the Hays code had just taken effect, so DeMille got away with using more risque imagery than he would be able to in his later productions. He opens the film with a naked, strategically lit slavegirl holding up incense burners as the title appears on screen." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleopatra_(1934_film) Oh yeah, I forgot part of the story. Claudette's Cleopatra also did Julius Caesar (she was after all the men), who was assassinated on the Ides of March, in part, because the guys lost respect for him, for doing it with the other superpower's leader. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0024991/ Man, Elizabeth Taylor's version sucked. She just started arguments with Caesar and acted all huffy and puffy. Here is dialogue of Colbert seducing Marc Antony. Many links in a search engine, so I'll stop. http://www.filmsite.org/cleo.html
Re: R.I.P. ELIZABETH TAYLOR I thought that was her best role. In fact, I can't think of an actress who could have played that part as she did.
