We lost Liz yesterday. She was iconic, both as a movie star and in her personal life.
She won two Oscars, one for her role as a prostitute in Butterfield 8, and the other for her work as the embittered wife of a faculty member in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf. I was never crazy about Butterfield 8, so I can't really address her work there. However, she was extraordinary as the bitchy, drunk, aggressive, dissatisfied wife of a professor (played by her real-life hubby, Richard Burton) in the latter film.
Liz rose to fame, I believe, because she was so darn beautiful. Check out the photo above. Her looks matched, or perhaps surpassed, all other beauties of her day. Hollywood back then did not promote females unless they were drop-dead gorgeous, and Liz filled the bill.
I remember her for her troubled private life. So many marriages. So much misery. The relationships followed a strange progression: She went with Eddie Fisher while he was married, and he left Debbie Reynolds for her. Then she took up with Richard Burton while she was married to Eddie Fisher, and Burton left his wife for her. It was like a game of marital tag: If Liz was involved, lovers would become spouses, and marriages would crumble.
In my view, the best way to pay homage to great actors is to go back and look at their best work. I advised viewers to see Hud when Patricia Neal and Paul Newman passed. I now advise readers to see Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf. In the film, Liz was in top form.
Liz did great work to raise money for AIDS in her later years. Strangely, she was a close friend of Michael Jackson. I'd prefer to forget Liz as an elderly wheelchair patient and recall her as she once was: a powerful actress with looks beyond belief.
A lovely and fitting tribute. Thank you.
ReplyDeleteI saw Liz a few months ago in "The Last Time I Saw Paris" (on Mom's recommendation) and was knocked over by her beauty. And by beauty I don't mean a superficial, purely aesthetic thing - she had a magnetism, and features that were ideal and ideally positioned (all of them!). I just wanted to keep watching the movie to simply LOOK at her.
ReplyDeleteShe had the kind of beauty that was rightly heralded in her heyday, and hard to find now among the tanned, toned or willowy bodies of Hollywood: a full kind of beauty, milky and soft and truly womanly.
And who else do we know with VIOLET eyes?
ReplyDeleteCorrection: whom else
ReplyDeleteJenna, I agree. Liz was beauty personified. Just look at her face in Cleopatra. Interestingly, she did not do that many really good films. As I mentioned, V Woolf was the highlight.
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