The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (412 page)

The marriage to Burton may have unsettled her, showing her how simple her own dramatic taste was. Once a presence, she became an actress. Not a bad actress, but one unable to regain the shallow clarity of
Butterfield 8
. In the event, she reduced the brittle respectability in Burton to her level—that of boasting of diamonds. Martha in
Virginia Woolf
was an “ugly” woman, something the Taylor of the 1950s would never have been allowed to take on, and a part fundamentally offensive to her view of herself. Later, she tried to look like her former self, as witness the neurotic wealth of costume in
Divorce His, Divorce Hers
(73, Waris Hussein), the TV film released ghoulishly as she and Burton broke up.

She was evacuated to America during the war and made her debut in
There’s One Born Every Minute
(42, Harold Young) before finding her place at MGM as a rapturous face in a collie’s mane:
Lassie Come Home
(43, Fred M. Wilcox). In her next film,
Jane Eyre
(44, Robert Stevenson), she was like a young Lizzie Siddall as the child who dies. She was a child still in
The White Cliffs of Dover
(44, Clarence Brown), a big hit in
National Velvet
(44, Brown), and
Life with Father
(47, Michael Curtiz). Her teenage period was happily brief:
A Date with Judy
(48, Richard Thorpe);
Julia Misbehaves
(48, Jack Conway);
Little Women
(49, Mervyn Le Roy);
Conspirator
(49, Victor Saville); and
The Big Hangover
(50, Norman Krasna).

It was Vincente Minnelli and the parental guidance of Spencer Tracy and Joan Bennett that ushered in her maturity in
Father of the Bride
(50) and
Father’s Little Dividend
(51). But her first really striking part was away from MGM as the rich girl in love with Montgomery Clift in
A Place in the Sun
(51, Stevens). That film not only established her own black-haired beauty, but set a popular standard for a decade. In the fifty years since, has any movie actress been so blatant about extraordinary beauty? Julia Roberts in
Pretty Woman
is the only case that I can think of.

It also showed how unlucky she was to be the property of MGM, still dealing in Thalberg’s innocuous glamour. In the next few years she was wasted on insubstantial romances and genteel adventure pictures: indeed, her Rebecca in
Ivanhoe
(52, Thorpe) had something of the splendor of the silent screen. Otherwise she tended to sigh and dilate her violet eyes:
Love Is Better Than Ever
(51, Stanley Donen);
The Girl Who Had Everything
(53, Thorpe);
Rhapsody
(54, Charles Vidor); replacing Vivien Leigh in
Elephant Walk
(54, William Dieterle);
Beau Brummel
(54, Curtis Bernhardt); and
The Last Time I Saw Paris
(54, Brooks). But
Giant
was an improvement and signaled a special responsiveness to the naturalistic care of George Stevens. As if to prove her aptitude for saga romance, she was as atmospheric as a fading camellia in
Raintree County
(57, Edward Dmytryk), as a Southern girl who goes mad with love. These were her best years, leading to the Oscar for
Butterfield 8
and the brimming explicitness of her beach bait for young men in
Suddenly, Last Summer
(59, Mankiewicz).

After
Cleopatra
, she clung to Burton to prove fidelity and professionalism:
The VIPs
(63, Anthony Asquith); the risible
The Sandpiper
(65, Minnelli);
The Taming of the Shrew
(67, Franco Zeffirelli); as Helen of Troy in
Doctor Faustus
(67, Neville Coghill and Burton);
The Comedians
(67, Peter Glenville);
Boom!
(68, Joseph Losey); and
Hammersmith Is Out
(72, Peter Ustinov). She was much more deeply stirred in
Secret Ceremony
(68, Losey), where she seems to catch the sense of sexual instability, and in
Reflections in a Golden Eye
(67, John Huston). But she was restored to former melodrama in
The Only Game in Town
(69, Stevens),
Zee & Co
(71, Brian G. Hutton),
Night Watch
(73, Hutton), and
Ash Wednesday
(73, Larry Peerce), shameless movies, but enough to reprise her brooding self-belief. She rediscovered dignity in
A Little Night Music
(78, Harold Prince).

Fifteen years later, the update could list the continuing marital career—but no one cares now. It should mention
The Mirror Crack’d
(80, Guy Hamilton) and
Young Toscanini
(88, Zeffirelli) in theatres, as well as several TV movies:
Between Friends
(83, Lou Antonio); a juicy Louella Parsons in
Malice in Wonderland
(85, Gus Trikonis); as a star who comes out of a mental hospital to make a comeback in
There Must Be a Pony
(86, Joseph Sargent); running a Western brothel in
Poker Alice
(87, Arthur Allan Seidelman); and with Mark Harmon in
Sweet Bird of Youth
(89, Nicolas Roeg).

Yet the work of which she is probably most proud is her feisty, eloquent, and quite implacable resolve to have people talk and know about AIDS.

It is somehow fitting that her astonishing strength and durability should now be given so generously to the vulnerable, and in 1993 she received the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award for this service.

Over the years, there have been jokes about Elizabeth Taylor—more than that, she was for a decade or so a roaring comedy of disaster. Yet at the tender age of seventy, she is one of those stars whose mere look or voice brings back so many memories. Her worthless movies of the seventies and eighties are not really held against her. It is to be hoped that she may yet give us a few sensational old ladies—something better than her role in
The Flintstones
(94, Brian Levant).

Nothing yet, except for
These Old Broads
(01, Matthew Diamond).

Robert Taylor
(Spangler Arlington Brugh) (1911–69), b. Filley, Nebraska
There can be no argument that Taylor was at best a journeyman player, and yet in the late 1930s he was immensely popular. Despite the publicity endorsement of the ideal romantic man, MGM actually emasculated all of its male stars except Gable and Tracy. Taylor was the handsome, inoffensive young smiler that an exceptionally solicitous studio could allow to take its daughters to the dance. Taylor’s history is like that of Tyrone Power: of hollow, gorgeous youth dwindling into anxiety. But in Taylor’s case, there is something touching in the decline. For he became not plainer, but harsher: churlish, peeved, disagreeable—no more than that, never enough to make him an absorbing villain. Perhaps it was the slow inroad of the cancer that eventually killed him. Perhaps the petulant residue of a man who never quite recovered from being called Spangler Arlington Brugh.

He studied as a cellist, and then went to drama school. Goldwyn gave him a screen test but MGM contracted him—and kept him for twenty-five years, long after he had outlived his usefulness. The studio loaned him out first, to Fox for
Handy Andy
(34, David Butler), but then cast him in George B. Seitz’s
Buried Loot
(34). After a few small parts and B-picture leads—
Society Doctor
(35, Seitz) and
Times Square Lady
(35, Seitz)—Taylor made his name dancing with Eleanor Powell in
Broadway Melody of 1936
(35, Roy del Ruth) and at Universal opposite Irene Dunne in John Stahl’s classic weepie,
Magnificent Obsession
(35).

He was very popular as a romantic lead and played in
Small Town Girl
(36, William Wellman) and
The Gorgeous Hussy
(36, Clarence Brown), opposite Joan Crawford, and in
His Brother’s Wife
(36, W. S. Van Dyke), opposite Barbara Stanwyck, before throbbing at Garbo’s cough in
Camille
(36, George Cukor) and gazing with inappropriate fondness at Jean Harlow in
Personal Property
(37, Van Dyke). Now at his peak, he appeared again opposite his wife-to-be, Stanwyck, in
This Is My Affair
(37, William A. Seiter) and went to Britain to make
A Yank at Oxford
(38, Jack Conway). He was in Frank Borzage’s
Three Comrades
(38);
Lady of the Tropics
(39, Conway);
Remember?
(39, Norman Z. McLeod);
Lucky Night
(39, Norman Taurog); and made his first Western,
Stand Up and Fight
(39, Van Dyke).

He was working hard to establish a tougher image and after playing a boxer in
The Crowd Roars
(38, Richard Thorpe), a mustachioed serviceman in
Waterloo Bridge
(40, Mervyn Le Roy), and escorting MGM’s dowager duchess, Norma Shearer, in
Escape
(40, Le Roy), he played
Billy the Kid
(41, David Miller)—the most innocuous attempt on that subject. Before navy service he made
When Ladies Meet
(41, Robert Z. Leonard);
Johnny Eager
(41, Le Roy);
Her Cardboard Lover
(42, Cukor), again with Norma Shearer;
Stand by for Action
(42, Leonard); and
Bataan
(43, Tay Garnett). During the war, Taylor began to slide and he was cast as the mentally disturbed villain—without much insight—in Minnelli’s
Undercurrent
(46). Compared with his former blandness, Taylor was now playing flawed and even corrupt men: he was a neurotic in Curtis Bernhardt’s
The High Wall
(48); remarkably successful as the doomed Indian in Anthony Mann’s
Devil’s Doorway
(50)—probably the best and most adventurous use of him throughout his career; the Hiroshima pilot in
Above and Beyond
(53, Melvin Frank and Norman Panama); as a
Rogue Cop
(54, Roy Rowland); the morose killer in Brooks’s
The Last Hunt
(56); a crooked lawyer, with a limp, in
Party Girl
(58, Nicholas Ray); and
The Hangman
(59, Michael Curtiz). Even in Westerns, he tended to nurse a past, to be ill-tempered or querulous—thus
Ambush
(49, Sam Wood),
Westward the Women
(51, Wellman), and
The Law and Jake Wade
(58, John Sturges). In terms of popularity, his last years at MGM were justified by schoolboy heroics:
Quo Vadis?
(51, Le Roy); and
Ivanhoe
(52),
Knights of the Round Table
(54), and
The Adventures of Quentin Durward
(56), all for Richard Thorpe. Only two other MGM films were worthwhile: Farrow’s
Ride, Vaquero!
(53) and Parrish’s
Saddle the Wind
(58). Taylor left MGM in 1959 and passed quickly into cheap Westerns and films made in England and Spain:
Killers of Kilimanjaro
(60, Thorpe); Tay Garnett’s
Cattle King
(63);
The Night Walker
(65, William Castle); Paul Wendkos’s
Johnny Tiger
(66); Hugo Fregonese’s
Savage Pampas
(66); and
Where Angels Go … Trouble Follows
(68, James Neilson).

André Téchiné
, b. Valence d’Agen, France, 1943
1969:
Paulina S’en Va
. 1975:
Souvenirs d’en France/French Provincial
. 1977:
Barocco
. 1979:
Les Soeurs Brontë/The Brontë Sisters
. 1981:
Hôtel des Amériques
. 1983:
La Matiouette, ou L’Arrière-Pays
. 1985:
Rendezvous
. 1986:
Le Lieu du Crime/Scene of the Crime
. 1987:
Les Innocents
. 1991:
J’Embrasse Pas
. 1993:
Ma Saison Préférée/My Favorite Season
. 1994:
Les Roseaux Sauvages/Wild Reeds
. 1996:
Les Voleurs/Thieves
. 1999:
Alice et Martin
. 2001:
Loin/Far Away
. 2003:
Les Égarés/Strayed
. 2004:
Les Temps Qui Changent/Changing Times
. 2007:
Les Témoins/ The Witnesses
. 2009:
La Fille du RER/The Girl on the Train
.

Téchiné has all the credentials:
Cahiers du Cinéma
and IDHEC; over thirty years as a director; an easy rapport with leading players (especially actresses); and a nice, economical way with small, complex stories, provincial settings, awkward young people, and rather solitary, eccentric leading characters. As such, he is a fairly reliable source of intelligent entertainment. But is he also, now, France’s leading director? Pretty close to it, I suppose. In which case, this record is not enough—and hardly promises radical departures, even if
Loin
concerns a long-distance trucker and the world of Tangier.

He made his name with
French Provincial
, a Jeanne Moreau vehicle, and the considerable ambition of
The Brontë Sisters
, starring Adjani, Huppert, and Pisier. But the latter showed too much taste and restraint, things Téchiné has never shrugged off—not even in the sultry and very stylish sex noir of
Rendezvous
and
Wild Reeds
(maybe his best study of youth).
Les Voleurs
is a good example of his limits—a clever story, good actors, such as Melville and even Chabrol might have broken your heart with. But the film is unduly academic—as if Téchiné had never seen how easy it is to photograph the mature Catherine Deneuve and still have her inner turmoil take over a picture.

Shirley Temple
, b. Santa Monica, California, 1928
It is a sidelong proof of how far Depression had inroaded confidence in the 1930s that it took Shirley Temple to reassure so many. She was not only the top boxoffice attraction from 1935–38, but the solace and inspiration for an essentially adult audience.
Heidi
(37, Allan Dwan), set nominally in the cockpit of Europe, offered family bliss as an example of reconciliation to a war-ready world.