![Umschlagbild für Elizabeth [electronic resource] : The Life of Elizabeth Taylor](https://images.yourcloudlibrary.com/delivery/img?type=DOCUMENTIMAGE&documentID=ermdhg9&token=nobody "Umschlagbild für Elizabeth [electronic resource] : The Life of Elizabeth Taylor")
Zusammenfassung
Zusammenfassung
A serious and in-depth look at one of the great legends of Hollywood by the London film critic and author of Audrey: Her Real Story .
Elizabeth Taylor was perhaps the most "public" of the great stars: an Oscar-winning actress who lived her entire life in the glare of the spotlights. Much has been written about her, but now--with the readability, sensitivity, and thoroughness that have made his previous biographies bestsellers--Alexander Walker explores the roots of Taylor's extraordinary personality and extraordinary life.
Here is a life to rival the very movies she played in, told with immense candor, wit, and sympathy: from her privileged London childhood, the enormous influence of her strong-willed mother, and her swift rise to stardom in such films as National Velvet , A Place in the Sun , and the catastrophe-ridden Cleopatra ; to her six husbands, her desperate need to love and be loved, her obsession with jewelry, and the amazing resilience that helped her weather not only condemnation for "the most public adultery in history," but also dramatic illnesses that brought her to the verge of death--and, according to her, beyond.
Using scores of unpublished documents and interviews with those who knew Taylor best, as well as his own meetings with her over thirty years, Alexander Walker recreates the comedies and tragedies in the life of a woman whose rewards and scandals have become the stuff of legend.
Rezensionen (3)
Publisher's Weekly-Rezension
Film critic for the London Evening Standard , Walker presents one of the world's most chronicled women, whose turbulent life has been eerily reflected, or anticipated, in her movies and plays: from National Velvet and Cleopatra (on the set of which she fell in love with Richard Burton) to Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Private Lives. Walker shows how Taylor has indulged her passions, re-created herself in the image of each new lover, husband or project, and in due course flourished after rounds of combat with the public, the press, her weight and illness. Unfortunately, Walker repeats himself and reaches unsuccessfully--and unnecessarily--for dramatic effect. For example, referring to Taylor's fourth husband, Eddie Fisher, a protege of her third husband, Mike Todd--who died in a plane crash in 1958--Walker writes: ``He stepped into Todd's shoes, and ultimately into his bed.'' Photos not seen by PW. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus-Rezension
Some stories never die, certainly not Elizabeth Taylor's. Here, Walker (the above-average Garbo, Dietrich, Vivien, and Joan Crawford bios) does a lot of new interviewing and digging through the MGM files for a fresh look at Taylor (Taylor herself always lets book people sink or swim on their own). While the results have bloom, they aren't as disarming as Melvin Bragg's Richard Burton (1989) and rarely have the dangerous literary edge of Burton's diary entries (quoted so freely by Bragg). Walker's theme throughout is that Taylor's life is so interwoven with the make-believe of movies that her early films prefigure her life, her middle films record her life, and her later films recycle her life. Taylor, so early a child of film and separated from real life by her celebrity, grew up on movie dialogue and came to think of it as a kind of wisdom. Walker shows also the curious work of the media in shaping and urging Taylor's life into outrageous modes of conduct, with the media pushing her into the LIZ STEALS EDDIE FROM DEBBIE mad headlines. By the time of Cleopatra, writer-director Joseph Manckiewicz sucks the LIZ STEALS DICK FROM SYBIL sensation into the daily materials of a script written the night before: ""The director's screenplay and the media's scenario had a common source in the conduct of the stars."" Film by film, Walker makes his theme stick, while Liz and Dick go through ten years of marriage, 11 movies, and $30 million. In a darker picture that Walker slights, the reader sees Taylor's voracity, fueled by movies and alcohol and painkillers, as that of a black widow feeding on a willing victim lured by money into her web, a voracity still at work when Washington politician John Warner marries her celebrity and power. Dark forces, million-dollar parties and Oscars, brutal widowhood, huge jewels for her old age, and tragedy upon tragedy. What a life--and with her 95-year-old mother still alive, it's not over yet. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal-Rezension
Walker, British film critic and biographer of stars, will hardly have the last word on Elizabeth Taylor, not as long as there's a tabloid press. His bio is breezy but not too light, colorful but not too gossipy, critical but not too bitchy. Its first half is its better half, detailing Liz's early years at MGM and her marriages to Nicky Hilton and Michael Wilding. Once Richard Burton enters the picture, Walker seems to lose steam and interest. Their most public antics now seem silly and boring, and since her Oscar-winning performance in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? , Taylor's career has been in free fall. Still, a decent addition to the Taylor archives.-- Thomas Wiener, formerly with ``American Film,'' Washington, D.C. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
