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experience about her. The casting director who had dropped her said, "Her eyes are too old. She doesn't have the face of a kid." It is a quality which has persisted, a major part of the excitement she creates, though now the eyes give the illusion not of age but of ageless womanly wisdom.
In the forties and fifties Elizabeth Taylor endured, though it could not be said that she prevailed. She began to hate the Hollywood that had robbed her of her childhood, sullenly played her parts with no more than rudimentary grace. She could not act, she could only give the illusion of existence. Cast as a willful child-woman, the natural development of the womanly child she had been, she was adequate, but it was her perfect beauty that kept her steadily, uninterestingly, before the cameras.
Then came her marriage to Mike Todd. "More than anyone realizes, Mike was responsible for the intellectual and emotional awakening of this girl," director Joseph Mankiewicz said. "For all his flamboyance, he was a man of an infinite variety of interests . . . she had been a sort of Sleeping Beauty in an isolated castle. Mike took her through the cobweb to the other world. . . ."
In touch with reality of a sort, Elizabeth Taylor began to add new dimensions to her screen presence. Her roles were very much in the mode that had become customary for her, but now they were touched by life — especially after the deeply felt tragedy of Todd's death in a plane crash. The rest is current history — the loss of public affection when she broke up the Eddie Fisher— Debbie Reynolds marriage, the regaining of that affection (and an Academy Award) in the sentimental orgy surrounding her near death in London, the epochal off-screen romance during the making of Cleopatra and the ending of her marriage to Fisher. In her work she may now be able to touch reality as never before. But her life itself, that curious compound of legend and unreality, will never seem anything but a fantasy, an inextricable tangle of the real and the unreal which she, least of all, seems capable of sorting out.
In a sense, Elizabeth Taylor is a reversion to the superromantic stars of the silent screen, deliberately out of touch with common mortality. If that is true, then there will never be another movie star like her, for the system that produced them and, in its dying hours, produced Elizabeth Taylor, is now gone forever.
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