ELIZABETH TAYLOR - I WROTE THIS IN 1995.

ELIZABETH

Elizabeth Rosamond Taylor was signed by MGM in 1942. Or rather, her parents signed for her as she was ten at the time. The Yanks were about to enter the War, Garbo had stepped down from the shimmering silver screen and begun the wanderings only death would still - forty-eight years later.

Elizabeth Taylor has never stopped making films.

She was born of American parents in England, returning to the States in 1939 when it became impossible to deny that Hitler really meant it. Her mother, who had been an actress until she married Elizabeth's art dealer father, Francis Taylor, first signed Elizabeth with Universal Studios where her daughter appeared briefly in two films.

At MGM Elizabeth immediately established herself in Lassie Come Home during the making of which her way with horses was noted and she was duly signed for the film version of Enid Bagnold's superb and highly original book National Velvet. Mickey Rooney was wonderful as the groom Mi, Angela Lansbury played the sister 'Dwina and Anne Revere was memorable as Mrs Brown who sacrifices the gold sovereigns she got for swimming the English Channel so that her daughter Velvet can do the impossible and ride in the English Derby. Taylor is unforgettable as Velvet Brown. The horse playing The Piebald, according to legend, threw Taylor thus beginning the lifetime's back pain which is one of the various physical ills Elizabeth Taylor has had to contend with.

So Elizabeth Taylor was almost immediately a star and a star at the very end of the era when the Great Stars still shone. She is one of them and she still shines. Very, very few of the others are still alive.

Through the rest of the forties Taylor maintained a reputation for giving creditable performances. At the age of seventeen she played Robert Taylor's wife in Conspirator. Mr Taylor had played Armand to Garbo's Camille in 1937. By this stage Elizabeth Taylor had acted with Irene Dunne, William Powell, Mary Astor, Wallace Beery, Jane Powell, Zasu Pitts, Carmen Miranda, Greer Garson, Walter Pigeon ... To come were: Dame Margaret Rutherford, Rex Harrison, Marlon Brando, Shelley Winters, Fernando Lamas, Peter Finch, Robert Morely, Eva Gabor, Kim Novak, Rock Hudson, Ava Gardner, Warren Beatty, Paul Newman, Mia Farrow, Katherine Hepburn, Maggie Smith, Noel Coward, Robert Mitchum, Henry Fonda etc. There are more yet to come. I think a claim could be made that if you haven't acted in a film with Elizabeth Taylor, you're not a real film star.

She also acted with Laurence Harvey, James Dean and the divine Montgomery Clift.

Shortly after graduating from University High, Los Angeles, Elizabeth Taylor married Nicky Hilton (of the hotels). They were both very young and the marriage lasted six months. Elizabeth sustained longer relationships with rather more complicated young men, young men she had probably got to know at school and on the set. Such as James Dean whose death in a car accident towards the end of the shooting of Giant caused the already sick Taylor to become hysterical. Two days later she was back on the set and giving a performance she has no need to be ashamed of (nor would Dean have, nor Rock Hudson who also had a demanding role in this film).

It was after a night out with Elizabeth and her new husband, the worldly bon vivant, Mike Wilding, that Montgomery Clift smashed his car and his face and began the slow descent via alcohol and pills which terminated in a fatal heart attack. Taylor and Clift made the very successful Raintree County together. The famous still of the pair kissing - Taylor's eyes lit by wonder and lust - comes from this film. Giant brought her an Academy Award nomination.

The fifties and Tennessee Williams. Williams gave expression to a queen's hysteria - the unendurable recognition that one is, to use the phrase from a wonderful story by Peter Wells, `one of them'. Only in Williams' plays it is women who brood with and try to shrug off with anything - booze, pills, paradoxically sex itself - the lust that crawls all over them. Elizabeth Taylor played Maggie the Cat to Paul Newman's pyjama-clad, leg in plaster, impotent hometown football hero, Brick. You can keep your bananas. Newman phewman. Taylor matched him in an Edith Head gown - strapless white and not so much fitted as coiled. All over the world they came in their cinema seats. (Burl Ives was Big Daddy, Judith Anderson Big Mama, an assortment of children played `Them no neck monsters'). Notch up another Oscar nomination for Elizabeth Taylor.

Another Williams` play, Suddenly Last Summer, was moved to the screen via a script by Gore Vidal. It was not a happy set. Montgomery Clift played the psychiatrist given the task by Mrs Venables (played by Katherine Hepburn) of making sure her niece gets what she deserves (a lobotomy) for being witness to her son Sebastian's death at the hands of the Caribbean rough trade he'd been in the habit of cavorting with. Not a happy set, not a happy subject but what a film! Sensational stuff for the fifties.

Before the fifties were over Elizabeth Taylor was to be hated - as the woman who took Eddie Fisher away from the woman responsible for all the Debbies, sweet (genuinely and toughly and she's still going very strong too) Ms Reynolds.

After divorcing Hilton, then Wilding, Taylor had married producer Mike Todd. Reynolds was bridesmaid and Fisher best man at the Jewish ceremony in Mexico. The Taylor-Todds had a daughter, Liza. A few months later Mike Todd was killed piloting his own plane. Elizabeth had to complete Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. She converted to Judaism (in which she had already begun instruction while married to Todd). Fisher offered her comfort and support and they married.

All of this had happened within a couple of years. Elizabeth Taylor was scandal and news, news, news. She was forced by her contract with the Golden Lion into playing a call girl in Butterfield 8 (oh the frisson of the `type' casting) and won her first Oscar. Which they say was awarded in default for the one she should have received for work her work as Maggie the Cat.

Twentieth Century Fox had got wind of the fact that the Lion was losing it grip on the Last of the Great Stars and was making overtures which kept going up and up for Taylor to play Cleopatra.

The sixties were swirling in, Marilyn was the only other star who could touch Taylor when it came to all those things which make for stardom - glamour ... sure, scandal ... sure, tragedy, talent, beauty, work, work, work and perhaps some other ingredient of appeal both too ordinary and too complex to analyse but let's just call it a combination of audience identification and something that looks like type casting. Shirley McLain was doing well in musicals.

Taylor said,`Tell Fox I'll do it for a million.' This was an unheard of sum in those days. And she got it.

The set of Cleopatra was to provide Elizabeth Taylor's apotheosis. There was the scandal - suppressed and erupting - of her affair with Richard Burton and her near-death experience with pneumonia. All around the world there were regular broadcasts of the star's condition ... she was sinking, sinking, putting up a great battle but not expected to live. And then she rallied.

Can you imagine what it would have been like if Martina had won that last time at Wimbledon?

Her walk down that aisle at the Academy Award ceremony to collect her Oscar is an object lesson in stardom. Then she had to hand the heavy object to Best Actor Burt Lancaster (for Elmer Gantry) to hold as she had not yet regained her strength after the pneumonia. That was the 1960 Oscars.

Everyone went to see Cleopatra as much to get a glimpse of the tracheotomy scar as anything else.

They say the film's a dud. What do they know? Taylor/Cleopatra's entry into Rome is what Hollywood is all about - oh to hell with that, it's what film is about.

We hadn't drawn breath from that when the Richard Burton affair/fiasco began and went on and on. Elizabeth became Mrs Taylor-Burton. Their second marriage, for example, was in Botswana in 1975.

In 1965 Elizabeth Taylor had won another Oscar, for Whose Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. She thought Burton better deserved one for his performance in the film but this was not to be.

During this period she showed a willingness to try many different kinds of roles - from the fabulously wealthy reclusive consumptive in another Tennessee Williams piece, Boom! (from his play The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore) to Helen of Troy in a film of Marlowe's Dr Faustus, to Katharina the Shrew in The Taming of the ... (directed by Zefirelli) to the mature sultry southern belle Leonora Penderton opposite Marlon Brando's suppressed homosexual Major Penderton in the film of Carson McCullers' Reflections in a Golden Eye. She gets up to lesbianism with Mia Farrow in Secret Ceremony and with Susannah York in Edna O'Brien's X, Y and Zee, though not with much ideological soundness, it must be said. She played Rosie Probert in the film of Under Milkwood and with the ailing Laurence Harvey in Nightwatch. In the huge joint American/USSR production of Maeterlinck's The Blue Bird Elizabeth Taylor played the  Fairy Berylune and Light.

Taylor continues to make films which perhaps don't have much box office appeal but which stretch her, such as Identikit (based on a Muriel Spark novel) and A Little Night Music (in which she sings `Bring on the Clowns').

Her work is characterised by a shrewd sense of her public appeal and the repeated essaying of roles which it must be obvious won't be easy for her. She has repeatedly given good accounts of herself - in many scenes, if sometimes not always in the entire role. She has repeatedly been generous in working with other actors in need, for example the almost bankrupt Rock Hudson in The Mirror Crack'd.

She has continued to marry and even if Larry Kramer accuses her of not having done so soon enough, she was among the very first to make AIDS her cause. At some stages of her involvement she's had to face jeering activists, staring them down and saying things like,`I've been invited here tonight to address this audience and I'm going to.'

She has supported the frighteningly unworldly Michael Jackson through the terrible blundering of his publicity machine (surely it was always obvious the press were going to turn?).

If she has had her lapses (who even recalls the boozy, druggy, overweight Club 54 years these days?), if she is vain and foolish at times, she is no more so than you or I - it's just that her scope is different.

As a star it is her duty to be ostentatious; she is so with a great deal of style - she sent an enormous floral tribute to Laurence Olivier's funeral, on the attached card was the only word, `Adieu'.

The aura of legend does not hover around Elizabeth Taylor as it does around Marilyn, now long dead, and perhaps it never will but that Elizabeth Taylor is of very, very considerable significance cannot sensibly be doubted. Her career by now must surely outstrip that of Barbara Stanwyck whose career in film was of great duration. Further it cannot be said that she has been denied inspiration - her delivery of the long and difficult climactic speech in Suddenly Last Summer convinces, her Shrew was lively and moving.

Elizabeth Taylor is a valiant and generous human being and artist.

Her beauty requires no comment.