An enduring STAR Fizzles onto the night -LIZ taylor

I first notice her when i was a kid watching "Cleopatra"

The violet eyes framed (because of a miraculous mutation) with double lashes;
 the bone-china skin and purplish-black hair; the dangerous curves, 
the “dark, unyielding largesse.....

She had the sublime arrogance of a queen, and the hard pragmatism of 
someone who knew that power is infinitely more desirable than beauty.

Remember, this is the self-titled “Mother Courage” who bore five 
children, who married eight times, burying one husband (producer Mike Todd), 
and who befriended a series of beautiful, deeply damaged men – friendships
 that would lead, on one level, to her seminal and utterly critical work with
 AIDS charities and education.














In 1956, she became a confidante to James Dean (her co-star in Giant): 

Also in 1956, she would run to the side of her closeted gay, drug-addicted and
 tragic friend Montgomery Clift when he smashed his car into a telephone pole
 after leaving a party at her house. She held his broken head in her hands;
 she gathered his bloody teeth until help arrived. And she remained his friend
 throughout his turbulent life.

As she did with Rock Hudson, when rumours of his being gay 
and HIV-positive roared through the industry and press. Since he had 
just kissed Linda Evans on Dynasty, the tabloids were filled with repugnant 
speculation by her and other cast members, who feared that they had
 caught AIDS by talking to him, it would appear.








Michael Jackson was her last anterior husband, so to speak 
(the lusty Taylor always had a romantic partner and close gay
 or sexually inscrutable friend – and he was always damaged,
 yet touched by her truly maternal warmth).






like the loyal-to-a-fault Egyptian queen she famously portrayed,
 Taylor used her nine lives to showcase her beauty and deploy the
 power it gave her.

Elizabeth Taylor’s life is too big beyond daily comprehension and gorgeous too to apprehend. So we must have faith that she used her time here very well, and that the lifelong star, whose “first memory is of pain,” is, at long last, whole and secure in the firmament – her altar.

    

Long Live Cleopatra