Elizabeth Taylor’s working women

In the 1950s and 1960s, actress Elizabeth Taylor (1932-2011) was one of the most famous women on earth, someone to put alongside Queen Elizabeth II and Jackie Kennedy. Her complex marital history, many health crises, and love affairs were the stuff of front page headlines. She was, by any standard, the personification of the larger-than-life celebrity movie star. As a result, her long film career, for all its highs and lows, has not received the attention given to her private life.

When her career is unpacked, the results are surprising. Despite her long grip on media and public fascination, her acute business sense, native intelligence, and unflagging ambition, Taylor did not often play women of social or political power. In fact, her characters were rarely even employed. As the daughter of a well-connected Beverly Hills art dealer, Taylor was always privileged, and the public’s knowledge of that spilled into expectations of her film roles. Following her childhood stardom as plucky young heroines in such films as Lassie Come Home (1943) and National Velvet (1944), she blossomed into a young woman ready for suitors or husbands, if not careers, in Life with Father (1947), Julia Misbehaves (1948), Little Women (1949), and Father of the Bride (1950).

Taylor was a mere 17 when her home studio, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, cast her as a married woman in Conspirator (1949). She was heartachingly beautiful as a socialite in A Place in the Sun (1951) and as expatriated brides in Elephant Walk (1954) and The Last Time I Saw Paris (1954). Still she was somebody’s wife in many of her most acclaimed performances, including Giant (1956), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966). The trend continued, often accompanied by a neurosis or two, in Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967), The Comedians (1967), X Y & Zee (1972), and Ash Wednesday (1973).

None of this is to say Taylor’s characters were idle, housebound, or subservient. Her fiery spirit and tendency toward confrontation wouldn’t allow it. Her women usually or always found ways to maximize their power and self-determination in a society hellbent on their subjugation. As early as National Velvet she was gleefully breaking rules, even cross-dressing for the film’s climactic scenes, and audiences cheered her for it. In Conspirator, when she learns her husband is a spy, she brazenly taunts him for his ethical misconduct. She rolls up her sleeves and risks everything during a cholera outbreak in Elephant Walk. In Giant, she plays the wife of a wealthy rancher and sets about to reform all of Texas in the ways of sexism, racism, and classism, joking with her husband that he “knew what a frightful girl I was when you married me.” Taylor never made her characters self-righteous or smug, but rather wholly committed to fulfilling their beliefs. Even in Suddenly, Last Summer (1959), she plays a quite sane mental patient who exposes the insanity and avarice in others.

What, then, did Taylor’s “working women” actually do when they were getting paid? A quick survey is telling. She played a dance instructor in Love Is Better Than Ever (1952), patiently guiding her young pupils in the art of rhythm and motion. She was a painter-sculptor in The Sandpiper (1965), defiant against the prescriptions of a restrictive society. She played a chorus girl in The Only Game in Town (1970), a waitress in Hammersmith is Out (1972), and an opera singer in Young Toscanini (1988), the later role accompanied by the expected preening and ego flares.

Taylor won an Oscar as a prostitute in BUtterfield 8 (1960), though she refused money from her johns in an ultimately futile effort at autonomy. She again played prostitutes in Secret Ceremony (1968) and Under Milk Wood (1971), though both were more gothic and poetic than her rather more lurid turn in BUtterfield 8.

On at least six occasions she played an actress: The V.I.P.s (1963), singing “Send in the Clowns” in A Little Night Music (1977), The Mirror Crack’d (1980), There Must be a Pony (1986), and Sweet Bird of Youth (1989), the last two made for television. Something about performing and her unending role as celebrity made actresses a good fit for Taylor. In her amusing cameo in the political thriller Winter Kills (1979), she plays a brothel madam and an actress-movie star. 

Taylor’s eponymous epic Cleopatra (1963) was her one spectacular exception in a film that allowed her to negotiate and out-maneuver men on the highest level. But she is brought down by her fragile womanliness and her capacity to fall in love. “Without you, Antony, this is not a world I want to live in, much less conquer” she says soon before that fatal bite of an asp.

It’s remarkable that this protean actress and ultimate movie star so often played women lacking authority outside their domestic sphere. Yet Taylor’s film legacy includes a general memory of her characters’ ferocity, moral certainty, and sheer charisma. Many of her characters chafed at entrenched sexism and social inequities, but neither they nor Taylor herself were defeated by them.

_{Featured image of Elizabeth Taylor and Spencer Tracy in Father’s Little Dividend (1951). Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.}