:( Truly end of an era.. :( Godspeed...

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What presence she had...so beautiful too.

She was an icon...one of my favorite photos of her...

R.I.P. Ms Taylor...they don't make them like you anymore :(

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1300915760.jpg

I was 10. We lived in the coastal mountains near Hidden Valley, outside of Newbury Park, CA. My Grandfather would spend a few weeks with us every summer, down from the Bay Area. He was an exceptional golfer, shot his age in his late 70's, early 80's.

Mid week, we head to the Thousand Oaks Country Club. I ride in the cart with Pappy, my Dad walks.

The starter pairs us up, no kidding, with Hackett and a friend of his.

Buddy is just the nicest guy, and a fairly good golfer. His friend, not so much.

After the friend skulls his fourth or fifth tee shot, he starts stomping off the box, pissed.

Buddy winks at my Grandfather and then deadpans, "Joe, where ya goin'...you forgot your lucky tee!"

Much mirth and cussing.

RIP, Liz.

Yup. Great Film.


Salon carried a good interview about Taylor with Camille Paglia. She makes some nice points I think are worth sharing here:

Quote

"She wields the sexual power that feminism cannot explain and has tried to destroy. Through stars like Taylor, we sense the world-disordering impact of legendary women like Delilah, Salome, and Helen of Troy. Feminism has tried to dismiss the femme fatale as a misogynist libel, a hoary cliche. But the femme fatale expresses women's ancient and eternal control of the sexual realm....


To me, Elizabeth Taylor's importance as an actress was that she represented a kind of womanliness that is now completely impossible to find on the U.S. or U.K. screen. It was rooted in hormonal reality -- the vitality of nature. She was single-handedly a living rebuke to postmodernism and post-structuralism, which maintain that gender is merely a social construct....


[Taylor vs Meryl Streep]

Cinematic acting is extremely understated. The slightest little flick of an eyelid says an enormous amount, and that's where Elizabeth Taylor was far superior to Meryl Streep. Streep is always cranking it and cranking it, working it and working it, demanding that the audience bow down and "See what I"m going through! See what I'm doing for you!" Streep is an intelligent, good actress, but she doesn't come anywhere near Elizabeth Taylor on the screen. Because she wasn't a trained stage actress like Streep, Taylor has vocal weaknesses -- at high pitch, she can get a bit screechy -- which is perfect for Martha in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" but not so good for Cleopatra. But she was like a luscious, opulent, ripe fruit. She enjoyed life to the max. She loved to eat and drink, she loved baubles, and she had a terrific sense of humor -- people would say they could hear her raucously laughing from a mile away. She was a basic, down-to-earth gal who could play queens when she had to.


[Butterfield 8]

"Butterfield 8" was my Bible. She didn't want to make that film. She hated it her whole life. But "Butterfield 8" meant everything to me as an adolescent. It formed so many of my ideas about the pagan tradition descending to us from Babylon and surviving the Christian onslaught of the Middle Ages. The first time you see her in the film, in that tight, white, sewed-on slip, it's so amazing. Her dress is ripped on the floor, she brushes her teeth with scotch, and she goes up to the mirror and angrily writes "No sale!" on it in lipstick! To me she represented the ultimate power of the sexual woman.

There was a long feminist attack on the Hollywood sex symbol as a sex object, a commodified thing, passive to the male gaze, and it's such a crock! "Butterfield 8" really shows it. There's that incredible moment in the bar where she's wearing a svelte black dress and she and Laurence Harvey are fighting. He grabs her by the arm, and she grinds her stiletto heel into his elegant shoe. It's male vs. female -- a ferocious equal match. He's strong, but she's strong too! That scene shows the power and intensity of heterosexuality, with all its tensions and conflicts. It also shows how terrible current Hollywood filmmaking is -- how false and manufactured sex has become. There's no real eroticism anymore. "Butterfield 8" sizzles with eroticism, because of the psychological distance and animal attraction between male and female. The businessmen in that film are all in their uniforms, their black suits. They're like a horde of identical and characterless myrmidons or clones. They have wealth, they have power, but they're nothing compared to her! The film truly captures the complexities and struggles of sexuality -- all of which have been lost in our period of easy gender-bending. Everything's become so bland and boring now.

Unquote

****

CP got it right about Elizabeth Taylor. Sometimes her writing is not quite this on-target, IMO. Some trivia: No one who ever knew her called her, (or referred to her as), "Liz". She hated that one.

Just the hottest Liz picture ever.

^^^^ WOW...

Like I said before; they just don't make them like that anymore...:(

R.I.P. Liz...say hi to my Dad for me.

Oddly enough she had "Liz Taylor" painted in gold script just underneath the driver's side window of her white XKE. Next to a gold Pegasus.

Musta stuck in your craw when she married Larry Fortensky.....

Larry, Schmarry. It made her more human.

Most of us have had our own Larry Fortensky. Mine was called "Adele" , my first wife, and if I could do it all over again I would take her out—just like I did the night I met her at a Tennesse Williams lecture—but instead of buying her Surf & Turf and a bucket of Champagne at Hy's afterwards, I would take her out to the back-alley and shoot her like the rabid dog that she was. That would have saved a lot of people much grief.

Life's a crap shoot.

Rent the DVD of "Night of the Iguana". Great flick w/ Richard Burton and the dvd special feature is a filmette of the making of the film in Mexico with John Huston, Tennesee Williams, Ava Gardner, Deborah Kerr, Elizabeth Taylor and Burton just hanging out. Taylor was not in the film but had just fallen in love with Burton on Cleopatra and they were inseperable. It may be better than the main film and that won a lot of Oscars.

Take away her looks and there was nothing in her life or character to admire.
An ultimately selfish, hypochondriac alcoholic drug addict attention-whore who only wanted what other had especially when it came to her friend's husbands.

Oh wait, too soon?

except for this one

Intimate portrait of Liz Taylor at 24 seen for the first time | Mail Online

Truely a beauty that will be missed.