This article is taken from the October 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

If the definition of a movie star is an actor you’ll watch in anything, Elizabeth Taylor was the most stellar star of them all. In a career lasting more than half a century she made just one picture which would be worth watching were she not in it. As for the fifty-odd others, the bulk of them can be endured only because of Taylor’s beauteous, bestial presence. Even the most moribund of her films — The V.I.P.s, say, or The Only Game in Town — crackle to life whenever she enters the frame. She was a Klieg light on legs.

Not that her gams were great. As Taylor’s fifth (and sixth) husband, Richard Burton, rather ungallantly pointed out, “She has wonderful eyes, but she has a double-chin and an overdeveloped chest, and she’s rather short in the leg.” All the same, he looked up to her. Burton was one of the 20th century’s greatest tragedians — I’d sacrifice years of my life if I could be magicked back to 1964 to see his Hamlet on Broadway — but when it came to the silver screen, he was the first to admit he knew nothing next to Taylor.

“She’s not doing anything!” he would howl as he watched her on set. “What is she doing?” Answers came there several, when he watched the day’s rushes. “Things are happening behind [her] eyes,” Burton noted. “You have to try to get that same quality.” He never did. Burton was an intelligent and sensitive man, but he was too histrionic an actor ever to grasp the essential lesson of movie stardom, which isn’t merely that less is more, but that next to nothing is close to everything.

Not that Taylor had any kind of handle on her star power. As Matthew Kennedy makes clear in his guide to all things Liz, On Elizabeth Taylor, she was often nervous when working with trained actors who knew how to shape a performance, when to ask guidance from a director.

Taylor had no such training to fall back on. A movie star from the age of nine, she had precious little formal education in anything. “I stopped being a child the moment I started working in pictures,” Taylor would say, later adding that she had been left with “the emotions of a child in the body of a woman”. Even those of us who have suffered watching the young Liz smarm her way through her earliest movies (Lassie Come Home, in which she stars opposite a dog; National Velvet, in which she stars opposite a horse) have to acknowledge the dread in such self-knowledge.

Certainly there was something childlike about the way Taylor worked on instinct. Not for nothing was the dramatist whose work she was most frequently cast in Tennessee Williams. His florid, high-flown overwriting spoke both to and for Taylor’s need for melodrama. For all her claims to be nothing like her on-screen roles — “the Elizabeth Taylor who’s famous,” she said, “has no depth or meaning to me” — she never played anything but herself. She doesn’t so much redeem the trash she starred in as embody it.

There is no getting away from her trashiness. A chain-smoking spendaholic boozehound, Taylor made Princess Margaret look like Shirley Williams. In one of her last movies she played Fred Flintstone’s mother-in-law, Pearl Slaghoople. It was a nice gag, but John Goodman’s presence as Fred got you to thinking that Taylor really ought to have been his mother-in-law in Roseanne — the sitcom that made art of trash.

Not that Taylor was low-born. Far from it. She came into the world in Hampstead in 1932, the daughter of American parents (dad was an art dealer, mum a stage actress). It was a privileged childhood all but untouched by the Great Depression. Taught to sing and dance and ride horseback, aged just four she was giving dance recitals for the then Duchess of York (later, the Queen Mother).

A couple of years later, with Hitler on manoeuvres, the Taylors fled England for California, where mum set about getting what Kennedy properly calls “her unusually beautiful daughter” into the movies. By the time she was nine, she had a six-month contract with Universal. Two years later she won a long-term deal with MGM that paid $100 a week (more than twice the then national average wage).

Film by film, show by show, Kennedy takes us through the career that ensued. If only he had helped us keep tabs on Taylor’s private life in similar detail. Yet even though he provides a chronology at the start of the book, it soon becomes impossible to track the swerves and switchbacks of Liz’s love life.

In Kennedy’s quasi-modernist text, husbands appear and disappear like stooges in a magic show. Still, there can be no doubt that with its 12-year run, it was the marriage(s) to Richard Burton that lasted longest. For all their public feuds and fisticuffs, they turned out to be so alike.

Taylor’s hunger for money, for flashy gizmos (cars, yachts, jets fitted out like Regency drawing rooms) and flashier gewgaws (“Last night, as I lay reading in bed and E was around the corner of the room,” Burton once diarised, “I asked: ‘What are you doing, Lumpy?’ She said like a little girl and quite seriously: ‘Playing with my jewels’”) found its echo in Burton’s need to forsake the classics and play opposite his wife in junk.

Their trashiness is perfectly captured in the one good picture Taylor ever made. To watch Mike Nichols’ Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is to see Burton and Taylor’s already incandescent marriage combust. No movie ever made it more clear that stars are on fire.

Nobody could say the same of Matthew Kennedy. Though he can occasionally turn a phrase — “Casting Taylor with a Tennessee Williams script is like handing her a flamethrower” — solecisms are rather more his thing. Synopsising Taylor’s function in Edward Dmytryk’s Raintree Country, he argues, “Symbolically, she’s the wicked South contaminating the North with its flagrant racism”, a sentence that means the precise opposite of what he thinks it does.

Nor, for all his worship of Taylor’s work, is he to be trusted in his judgements. Calling Margaret Rutherford “tiresome” is to invoke Dr Johnson’s dictum about the man who is tired of London. Calling Katharine Hepburn’s uber-goth mansion in Suddenly Last Summer “vaguely sinister” is like calling Joe Biden vaguely sentient. The Burton/Taylor movie version of Marlowe’s Dr Faustus is neither “vacuously brilliant” nor “brilliantly vacuous”, though it might just be vacuously vacuous.

The really bad news for Kennedy is that, like line-fluffer Liz in The Taming of the Shrew, he has lousy timing. This year has already seen the publication of not only the best book on Elizabeth Taylor, but also the best book on Richard Burton, and the best book on movie stardom full stop.

I am talking of Roger Lewis’s Erotic Vagrancy: Everything About Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, a masterpiece of insight and imagination against which all future biographies of anyone and everyone shall be found wanting. With competition like that, Kennedy finds himself in the sorry position of all those wives from whom Taylor stole her husbands. He doesn’t stand a chance.