Elizabeth Taylor was one of the most beautiful women in film period. When I look again at "A Place in the Sun" you can see why Montgomery Clift wanted to kill for her. Taylor represented to me an unattainable beauty most men could only dream of. It wasn't just her beauty, she was a knock-out actress as well, in her glory days, it was as if no one could touch her. She was nominated for the Academy award five times, winning twice, once as a call-girl in "Butterfield 8", and again in Mike Nichols' adaption of "Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf". In that film, she was almost completely unrecognizable.
She got her start as a child actress making her debut as a childhood friend in "Jane Eyre" which starred Joan Fontaine and Orson Welles. The same year, she was in "Lassie Come Home". She made a splash as in "National Velvet", and "Father of the Bride", usually playing ingenues. It was in George Stevens' "A Place in the Sun" opposite her life long friend Montgomery Clift, where she really showed some acting chops. She played a high society girl who falls for Clift's character, a man trapped between high and low society where murder seems like the only option.
Stevens would use Taylor again in the epic Texas soap opera "Giant", this time getting in the middle of Rock Hudson's oil tycoon and his rival played by James Dean.
She received Oscar nominations for a couple of Tennesse Williams adaptions "Suddenly Last Summer", where she played with a hammy Katherine Hepburn and a subdued Montgomery Clift, and "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" where she was the neglected wife of Paul Newman. It must've been hard for Newman to resist her for that film.
Around this time, Taylor became probably the biggest movie actress in the world. Her personal life could sometimes overshadow her talent, she was married twice to Richard Burton, I even got to see their vacation spot down in Mexico which was purchased when Burton was film "Night of the Iguana".
But besides her high profile love life, Taylor was one of the great movie queens, she made an indelible mark on Hollywood films and it's sad once again to think that another classic star has faded.
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