Yeah, it's probably Taylor...
John Wayne had incredibly consistent box office for half-a-century. So has Tom Cruise, almost as long... But I'm really not sure that the title of "ultimate movie star" could be bestowed on
a man. I mean, what did they need, those men? A horse and a closet.
The status of Ultimate Movie Star would seem to
have to be placed upon a woman, if not a lady.
Bette Davis was granted the moniker "first lady of the American screen" because her films received consistent critical and commercial success in the late-'30s and early-'40s (at the very center of The Golden Age). Kate Hepburn was respected for her diligent "class and taste," but audiences found her a bit too aloof and lofty until she somehow
enlarged in the 1960s and beyond, Kate's tortoise to Bette's hare, Hepburn surpassing Davis as No. 1 on AFI's list of the most important "classic era" female stars (that list appearing as the twenty-first century dawned). Joan Crawford has been
called "the ultimate movie star," but that's said somewhat patronizingly, an acknowledgement of all the infrastructure and narcissistic accoutrement involved in Being Joan Crawford... Meryl Streep has had a half-century career in her own right, starring in an endless slew of repeat performances of
Most Versatile Actress Ever and doing a good job at it.
Who was it who observed that a woman is made larger by acting stardom while a man is diminished?
So, yes, it's gotta be a woman.
For all the big, big female movie stars who came down the pike and may have lasted a long time -- and there are several -- it's hard to think of one who quite had what Elizabeth Taylor had... I mean, she could sell a barge-load of magazines by appearing on their covers even when her film career was in the dumper, and had been for quite a while. She was arguably
the platinum standard for celebrity-stardom ever (and she even managed to leave behind a decent filmography). And she ruddered her Richard Burton romance, unstealthily but effectively, which remains entertainment's most celebrated and infamous.
She had the right attitude, she had the right look, the right luck, the right era(s) and she had the right level of perseverance...
And then there's this:
I once said this about Elizabeth Taylor, and I guess I still would:
Not every role or every performance works, to be sure. And her fishwife elocution, something she was well aware of, didn't help. And while she's goodish in CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF, her delivery of the film's title sounds as scripted as it is (she needs to hesitate on an adjective or something, and she doesn't). She once said: "I don't like the way I look, I don't like the way I speak, I don't like the way I move, I don't like the way I act..."
But nobody does wistful, determined soliloquy heartbreak like Elizabeth Taylor.
Even Katharine Hepburn told her biographer that she felt Taylor was "more interested in being a movie star than an actress," and added, "but make no mistake -- Elizabeth Taylor is a
brilliant actress." Joan Crawford admitted in a 1966 interview that she shouldn't have previously made some of the public assessments she had about how Taylor conducted her personal life, confessing that it was "none of my business" and conceding that she herself "wasn't Goldilocks," adding that Taylor had recently given some of the finest performances she'd ever seen... But then Kate may have felt generously towards an actress from whom she felt no threat, just as Hepburn praised Julia Roberts while dismissing the talents of Meryl Streep and Glenn Close. And Crawford, of course, would simply have been mesmerized by the fame and notoriety and crazed success and sheer melodrama of The Liz Taylor Train as it barreled out of control, swallowing up and spitting out everything in its path.
She was, in THE LAST TIME I SAW PARIS, the most beautiful 21-year-old I ever saw. She's great in GIANT, decent in SUDDENLY, LAST SUMMER, better than she thought as the hooker who accepts no money in BUTTERFIELD 8, better than I'd like to admit in CLEOPATRA, positively terrific doing Shakespeare with hubby in TAMING OF THE SHREW, and flawless as the obsessive neurotic in perhaps her most underrated film, NIGHT WATCH... And, as a child actress, luminous in several films... Although I'd always prefer to see the Bette Davis/James Mason version of VIRGINIA WOOLF that Edward Albee envisioned, one that would have been "deeper and less showy" than the Taylor/Burton film.
As a celebrity -- arguably the greatest star Hollywood ever produced, she knew how to do the right things, and when to do the wrong things.
At the very least, she was a clever, intelligent woman. And she instinctively knew exactly the right blend of good taste and bad taste that makes an icon -- vulnerable and brassy, regal yet accessible, polished but vulgar, generous and egoistic, an "erotic vagrant" yet un-promiscuous, preternaturally gorgeous and sometimes even downright haggish.
Some people loved her, and the people who hated her
loved to hate her. (My mother used to rail on about Taylor, her "ticky-tacky prettiness" and, in comparing Taylor to her pal Natalie Wood, Mom angrily sniped that Wood "had no idea what class is -- I think Elizabeth Taylor knows what class is, but she
just doesn't give a damn!")
At the very least, you couldn't really ignore Elizabeth Taylor, on-screen or off.
And no one else has ever quite struck the correct balance of all of that.
