Elizabeth Taylor’s 20 best performances – ranked!
20. Ash Wednesday (1973)
Liz tries to rescue her failing marriage by getting cosmetic surgery at a Swiss clinic before testing her restored fabulousness on Helmut Berger in a Eurotrash hotel. This facelift infomercial is the opposite of feminism, but the turbans and fur-trimmed outfits (hello, Edith Head!) save the day.
19. Night Watch (1973)
The nearest Taylor came to hagsploitation was as a neurotic wife who keeps seeing dead people, in this British psychothriller. Is she being gaslit? With Liz matronly but magnificent in her Valentino muu-muus, this really needed an Italian giallo director to punch up the mise-en-scène. But the ending is peachy.
18. Cleopatra (1963)
As Queen of the Nile, Taylor smashed records with 65 costume changes and a million-dollar payday. This troubled mega-production is dramatically and visually inert, but the wigs are stunning, and it launched one of showbiz’s most celebrated romances; Richard Burton (her Mark Antony) proposed to her with a Bulgari emerald.
17. The VIPs (1963)
An all-star cast percolates with a Terence Rattigan screenplay in the departure lounge at fogbound London airport, yielding glossy bilge of the first order. Taylor plays an actress (big stretch!) who is planning to leave her husband (Burton) because he gives her diamond bracelets instead of love. The swine.
16. Hammersmith is Out (1972)
With a traditional Doctor Faustus (1967) already in the bag, the TaylorBurtons teamed up with director Peter Ustinov for a wacky satirical version. Burton plays a sinister inmate who bribes an orderly to help him escape from a Texas asylum; Liz whoops it up as a promiscuous waitress who strikes her own Mephistophelean deal.
15. Zee & Co (1972)
Screenwriter Edna O’Brien disowned the finished film, a London-set ménage à trois in which Taylor plays the bawdy wife of Michael Caine’s architect. He embarks on an affair with Susannah York’s soft-spoken widow, the antithesis of Liz’s tantrum-throwing termagant. A must for fans; non-believers should probably abstain.
14. The Taming of the Shrew (1967)
Liz flaunts cleavage aplenty as she and Dick channel the love-hate chemistry into their own co-production of one of Shakespeare’s most problematic plays. Director Franco Zeffirelli piles on the colourful 17th-century Italianate roistering, and it’s all about as much fun as slapstick misogyny can be.
13. National Velvet (1944)
Set in Sussex, but filmed in California, MGM’s adaptation of Enid Bagnold’s yarn about a teenage girl who wins the Grand National wasn’t Taylor’s debut, but the 12-year-old’s sweet performance propelled her to stardom. Alas, she broke her back falling off a horse during production, and would suffer spinal problems for the rest of her life.
12. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958)
How can Paul Newman resist the creamy voluptuousness of Taylor’s Maggie the Cat? The gay subtext has been watered down so much it’s a mystery. Tennessee Williams fans will enjoy watching the cast explore Acting with a capital A; the rest of us wish these windbags would shut up so we can bask in the gorgeousness of its two stars.
11. Giant (1956)
Rock Hudson plays a stiff-necked cattle-baron whose bride (Taylor) has trouble adjusting to ranch life. This well-meaning but ponderous family melodrama spans two generations of Texans, and is best known as James Dean’s last film. Liz, of course, forged close friendships with both leading men; it was Hudson’s death in 1985 that spurred her Aids activism.
10. The Mirror Crack’d (1980)
Liz tops the all-star cast of the Agatha Christie whodunit as a highly strung Hollywood has-been filming a movie about Mary, Queen of Scots in an English village, circa 1950s. But someone’s trying to poison her! Could it be bitchy rival Kim Novak? A sprained ankle can’t stop Miss Marple (Angela Lansbury) from investigating. Splendid stuff.
9. Boom! (1968)
Taylor is too young for her role as a dying dowager with tons of jewellery (some of it Liz’s own), and Burton too old as the drifter who washes up at her Mediterranean island mansion. But check out that kabuki headdress, and Noël Coward as “The Witch of Capri”! John Waters called this Tennessee Williams kitschfest “atrocious” and “perfect”. And so it is.
8. Secret Ceremony (1968)
After Boom!, director Joseph Losey reteamed with Taylor for their second arthouse flop of 1968, a flawed Gothicky melodrama rescued by its three stars. She plays a sex worker sequestered in a London mansion as a surrogate mother to a disturbed young woman (Mia Farrow). Their weird idyll is disrupted when Robert Mitchum rolls up as Mia’s creepy uncle.
7. Suddenly, Last Summer (1959)
Like most Tennessee Williams adaptations, this is too talky to be truly shocking, but it’s still a tasty morsel of southern gothic. Katharine Hepburn wants Dr Montgomery Clift to perform a lobotomy on her traumatised niece (Taylor) to prevent her from spilling the
beans about her cousin’s lurid death. Williams thought Liz was miscast, but her neurotic tremulousness is second to none.
6. The Driver’s Seat (1974)
Taylor’s oddball 1970s films, when her buxotic beauty and star persona were out of step with prevailing trends, are often braver and more interesting than the hits of her earlier heyday. This Italian adaptation of Muriel Stark’s novel, about a spinster flying to Rome in search of her own murderer, is as uncanny and unsettling as its source material.
5. The Sandpiper (1965)
Liz lets her hair down as a free-spirited boho painter who lives in a shack at Big Sur in this romantic drama with a famous theme tune. As an unapologetic single mother, who retreats from society, she must have seemed a radical character for 1960s Hollywood. Naturally, she is temptation incarnate for the married headteacher of an Episcopal boys’ school. No prizes for guessing the actor who plays him!
4. A Place in the Sun (1951)
It’s hard not to sympathise with Montgomery Clift’s factory worker when he falls for Taylor’s radiant socialite, at least until he tries to dump his pregnant girlfriend for her. George Stevens’ acclaimed film of Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy now feels dated, but Taylor and Clift, who became close friends, share sizzling onscreen chemistry.
3. Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967)
Once again, Taylor is cast as a sensuous broad married to a repressed homosexual – Marlon Brando as a US army major obsessed with a soldier who likes to ride horses naked. John Huston’s ripe slice of southern gothic, adapted from Carson McCullers’ novel, also features Brando getting his face whipped by Liz, decked out like a Greek goddess in white gown and updo.
2. BUtterfield 8 (1960)
Movie star masterclass alert, as Taylor’s callgirl, Gloria Wandrous, wakes up in her married lover’s apartment, brushes her teeth with bourbon and scrawls in lipstick on the mirror. Taylor is on Oscar-winning form in this deliciously sleazy adaptation of John O’Hara’s novel. All Gloria wants is respect, but she’s not getting it from Laurence Harvey, and it all goes a bit JG Ballard.
1. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966)
The Liz and Dick Show reaches its apotheosis, as drunken campus couple Martha and George go at it hammer and tongs in Mike Nichols’ directing debut, adapted from the Tony winner by Edward Albee. Like many films of prestigious stage plays, it involves a lot of telling and very little showing, but this hits the spot thanks to cracking chemistry between the two leads and Taylor’s endearing attempt to look drab, which won her a second Oscar.