So. Farewell Then, Elizabeth Taylor

The late Elizabeth Taylor was the inspiration for what is, to An Spailpín’s mind, one of the great gallant comments about any woman. Richard Burton, the man with whom she would be associated more than any other, wrote in his diary that the first time he saw Taylor he wanted to laugh out loud. It seemed the only correct reaction to her staggering beauty. Wasn’t it a lovely thing to say?

Millions and millions of women wanted to be Liz Taylor. Maybe you should be careful what you wish for. Eight marriages, seven husbands, countless addictions, and all for what? Was Liz Taylor ever happy?

Liz Taylor was a child star. How many child stars have led happy and adjusted adult lives, if such things exist? Shirley Temple, maybe. Deanna Durbin. But both of those shunned the limelight once they grew up. For others, like Taylor, who lived their entire lives in its glare, it’s hard to know if it was every worth their while. Or if they even knew who they were when the light went out. Maybe the limelight itself was Taylor’s worst addiction.

Liz Taylor’s first marriage was to Nicky Hilton, when she was eighteen years old. The marriage lasted a year. Hilton was a drunk who used to beat his child bride. A woman so beautiful that Burton wanted to laugh out loud at the joy of her.

After Hilton, Taylor married a British actor called Michael Wilding, and then Mike Todd, who died in a plane clash. Eddie Fisher left his wife, Debbie Reynolds, to catch the grieving Taylor on the rebound only to get the elbow himself when Taylor hooked up with Richard Burton while they filmed Cleopatra.

Burton and Taylor were second only to John and Yoko as the iconic sixties couple. Mervyn Davies, the former Number 8 for London Welsh, Swansea, Wales and the British Lions remarked in his autobiography how odd it was to return to the London Welsh dressing room and see the most beautiful woman in the world going whiskey for whiskey at the bar with her husband.

Burton loved rugby, and Taylor too, in his way. They divorced, and remarried, and divorced again. Taylor didn’t attend Burton’s funeral in 1984. It would have been unfair on Sally Hay, Burton’s wife. Whom would the world identify as the widow?

Taylor married twice again, for reasons that are difficult to fathom. Or else painfully easy – the most beautiful woman in the world was lonely. Who wants to be Liz Taylor, really?

Her celebrity was greater than her career, although as an actress she had a considerably greater range than her only rival for the most beautiful woman in the world, Marilyn. She wasn’t funny, as Marilyn was, but Taylor could burn up the screen in an instant. Whatever it is, she had it.

Most of her pictures are dated now. She and Burton were directed by Franco Zefferilli in The Taming of the Shrew; twenty years later, the trailer to the film was used in English courses as an example as the crippling weight of the patriarchy. Neither director nor stars nor Shakespeare himself could get past the politburo in those days.

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf won Taylor her second Oscar but, while it’s by no means fashionable to say so, it’s a two hour episode of Eastenders, really.

An Spailpín’s dollar for Liz Taylor’s greatest performance must be as Maggie the Cat, the role she was born to play, in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. She was opposite Paul Newman, in one of his great roles. After all, it took an actor of stunning ability not to laugh out loud when Liz Taylor came into a room.

So. Farewell Then, Paul Newman

What made Paul Newman a great actor was not what made him a star. It is often thus. Jazzmen loved Sinatra for his phrasing; the masses wanted to hear him eat it up and spit it out. So it is with Newman.

Today’s obituaries speak of transcendent performances in Hud or Sweet Bird of Youth, but who watches those movies, really? They’re the definition of classics in that they are movies that are respected but never watched. Very few people say I put Hud on the DVD there last night again; God, you never get tired of it.

This does not mean that Paul Newman wasn’t a great actor. He was, and a very great actor. Just how great is expertly outlined by William Goldman in his book Adventures in the Screen Trade. In reminiscing on his time as the scriptwriter on Harper, Goldman remarks on Newman’s almost complete absence of ego. Even though he was a major Hollywood star, Newman was willing to work off-camera, to supply reactions in scenes for Robert Wagner, who was just starting out, and to up the ante if he saw Wagner was taking off. Most Hollywood stars hate and despise other actors getting any good lines at all, as they believe it takes from their own luminosity. Newman was bigger than that; Newman realised that movies are a collaborative art form, and hogging the limelight just doesn’t wash.

To An Spailpín’s mind, Paul Newman will be remembered for two roles above any others. The first of these is Luke – we never do find out his second name – in Cool Hand Luke. Cool Hand Luke is often seen as a rebel-against-the-system picture but it’s much more complex than that. It’s not The Wild One, for instance, a picture to which thy years have not been kind. The Christian allegory is striking and repeated throughout Cool Hand Luke – the camera pans back after the egg scene to show a loin-clothed, crucified Luke; Luke addresses God as “old man” in the church at the finale; Dragline is sitting slightly higher than his audience at the end of the picture, telling them about “that old Luke smile,” just as the teachers are often elevated in medieval and Renaissance religious paintings. There’s a lot going on in that movie, and there’s always something more to see.

But An Spailpín’s favourite Paul Newman movie is Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is often described as the progenitor of the buddy movie in Hollywood but Butch and Sundance isn’t a buddy movie at all - the Sundance Kid’s role is just as subservient to Butch’s as Robin’s was to Batman back in the day. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is about Butch Cassidy, and that means it’s about Newman’s performance. The only imbalance is that Sundance gets the girl, but the Raindrops scene is done with Katherine Ross and Newman, not Robert Redford. That’s not an accident.

Just a couple of years ago we got a glimpse of just how hard it is to make a movie like Butch and Sundance. Mr and Mrs Smith was a buddy movie, and it should have been ever better, because it starred the two most beautiful people in Hollywood at the time. But whereas Butch’s ending is sublime and magnificent, Mr and Mrs Smith’s was just a shameful copout that should have been lustily booed at every screening.

The ending is part of what makes Butch and Sundance great of course, but the centre is Butch himself, that most charming man. Butch Cassidy charms us the audience completely, just as he’s always charmed Sundance, the Hole in the Wall gang and even Woodcock, representative of EH Harriman of the Union Pacific Railroad. He is a man of vision in a world of bifocals, and his three minute scene on the bicycle with beautiful Katherine Ross is one of the most joyous scenes every committed to celluloid. Reader, remember Paul Newman this way. Ar dheis Dé go raibh a anam uasal.








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