Liz: The Elizabeth Taylor Story. The Television Miniseries

LIZ: THE ELIZABETH TAYLOR STORY

Dame Elizabeth Taylor simply hated the nickname "Liz". She especially hated when she and her fifth and sixth husband Richard Burton were referred to as "Liz and Dick". Such a detail would not matter to the production crew of Liz: The Elizabeth Taylor Story. While the lead performance is effective, Liz fails to capture the full scope of her stardom and genuine talent.

Young Elizabeth Taylor is set on being an actress and not a movie star. Her mother Sara (Christine Healy) has a powerful ally in movie gossip queen Hedda Hopper (Katharine Helmond). It is Hopper that brings Taylor to MGM. While Elizabeth is American by citizenship, she was born and spent her early years in the United Kingdom. As such, Elizabeth speaks with a British accent, which is perfect for the role of an English girl in National Velvet. Her violet eyes and elegant manner help too. 

Soon, Taylor (Sherilyn Fenn) blossoms into a glorious, ravishing beauty. She becomes good friends with two other young actors. One is the sweet-natured Debbie Reynolds (Judith Jones). The other is brooding and gloriously ravishing beauty Montgomery Clift (William McNamara). Monty loves Liz, but only platonically. She is slightly disappointed but accepts him for himself. She also listens and studies his acting methods. 

I do not think that Clift ever gave her marriage advise. If he did, it did not work. We go through two marriages in Liz quickly. The first is to young Hilton heir Conrad "Nicky" Hilton (Eric Gustavson), a bullying and abusive drunk. The second is the older English actor Michael Wilding (Nigel Havers). He is steady but a bit dull. He also is convinced that Taylor is getting too close to her Giant costar Rock Hudson (Dan McVicar). 

Now on her second divorce, third time seems the charm with outrageous film and theater producer Mike Todd (Ray Wise). Sadly, Todd leaves her a widow. For comfort, she turns to "that Fisher man" as Mama Sara calls him. Eddie Fisher (Cory Parker) comforts the Widow Todd a little too intimately and slips from Debbie Reynolds' first husband to Elizabeth Taylor's fourth.

Now comes Husband Number Five: Richard Burton (Angus MacFayden). This lusty lush Welshman wins her during the filming of Cleopatra. Their extramarital affair became the greatest public scandal of the age. As the Battling Burtons boozed their way through life, something eventually had to give. A few more marriages, a few stints in rehab, and a new mission as an AIDS activist all conclude our story.

I genuinely do not know if Liz: The Elizabeth Taylor Story can be called "the Elizabeth Taylor Story". I say this because so much of Liz is really about Liz and Dick. Husband Number Seven, Senator John Warner, gets pretty much ignored. Granted, we do see their relationship. However, the end of it came from seeing a newspaper headline. Come to think of it, her second divorce from Richard Burton, I think, also came via headline. 

Taylor's first marriage to Conrad "Nicky" Hilton also went pretty fast in Liz. It went from marriage to spousal abuse to divorce probably within ten minutes if that. 

As I think more on Liz, I think that the film did Dame Elizabeth a terrible disservice. There is so much focus on her myriad marriages that one forgets that Taylor was more than her many romantic escapades. I figure that there was a reason why director Kevin Connor and screenwriter Burr Douglas opted not to touch on Taylor's screen performances. Taylor remained a star for decades. However, I do not think we got a hint of any of her performances. We saw her in costume for Giant, Cleopatra and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? but apart from that, Liz was all about glitz. We never saw her actually act save for perhaps a bit of Cleopatra. Even that was just set-up for the Burton-Taylor affair. 

Liz does not make a case for what exactly made Elizabeth Taylor such a legendary figure within her own lifetime. We never did get what made Taylor tick. What we got was beautiful people wearing beautiful costumes and sometimes making spectacles of themselves. 

Curiously, Liz is an adaptation of C. David Heymann's biography Liz: An Intimate Biography of Elizabeth Taylor. I say "curiously" because Liz left off some vital moments. During Cleopatra's long production, Taylor came dangerously close to dying when a viral infection turned into pneumonia. A last-minute tracheotomy saved her life. Yet I do not remember that being part of Liz. It might have been mentioned. However, if it was, it left little impression.

As stated, so much of Liz revolves around Burton and Taylor that one is surprised Liz just didn't stick with that. Two other television biopics were built entirely around the Burton-Taylor marriages: one being good, the other being dreadful. Liz is somewhere in the middle. Nowhere near as tawdry and laughable as Liz & Dick yet not as intelligent as Burton and Taylor. 

In terms of acting, Liz is all over the place. I have long considered Sherilynn Fenn one of the most beautiful women that I have ever seen. She is simply gorgeous as Elizabeth Taylor. Fenn astonishes the viewer with her beauty and grace on screen. Her Elizabeth Taylor comes across as both strong and vulnerable, a woman carried by passion. She also has a moral core despite her reputation as a black widow and femme fatale. 

Taylor early in her liaison with Burton says that she will willingly be his mistress. Later on, though, she is enraged when a still-married Burton proposes to her. "You can have a wife and a mistress. You cannot have a wife and a fiancée", she angrily tells him. Fenn as Taylor portrays a woman who comes into her own. A particularly surprising moment is when attempting to campaign for Warner, she takes offense at some of his positions. Taylor audibly boos his stump speech, shocking the donors. 

Sherilynn Fenn elevates Liz. Some of her fellow actors match her in acting. Some do not. William McNamara's role as Montgomery Clift is small. However, he does well even if McNamara does not look much like Monty. Nigel Havers' Michael Wilding was fine. He was not particularly great nor was he embarrassing himself. To be fair, there was an unintentionally amusing moment when Wilding storms onto the Marfa, Texas Giant location. He says that he flew in from El Paso to see what was going on between Taylor and Hudson. On his arrival, Havers' Wilding looks like a British butler.

Husband Number Three was played by Ray Wise. I found his take on Mike Todd to be really broad bordering on cartoonish. I give a little leeway in that Todd in real life was rather flashy. "You've been married to a kid and an old man", Todd tells Taylor when he first pushes himself into her life. I do not know if Liz intended to echo Rhett Butler's line to Scarlett O'Hara in Gone with the Wind. 

Wise at least was better than the actors who played Rock Hudson and James Dean. They did not look or sound like either of her Giant costars. They looked and sounded like random men that just wandered onto the Liz set and got thrown in there. 

And then there is Angus MacFayden's Richard Burton. As stated, the bulk of Liz centers around this notorious relationship. Therefore, MacFayden gets the lion's share of attention in the television miniseries.

MacFayden sounds fine, approximating Burton's luxurious Welsh tones. However, he also seemed to relish devouring the scenery at every single scene. There was no calmness to MacFayden's Burton. He was broad no matter what the situation. To be fair, Richard Burton could also devour the scenery with naked abandon both on screen and in real life. As such, I cannot fault Angus MacFayden for sometimes going over-the-top.

There was one moment when it looked unclear whether MacFayden and Fenn were playing their characters or the actors. It is during the section that covers the Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? production. MacFayden and Fenn are dressed as George and Martha from the film. However, Liz soon starts blending things to where one is unsure if they are attempting to rehearse Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? or actually live it out. It is interesting viewing. It is also a bit muddled.

"There's only one Elizabeth Taylor", her eighth and final husband Larry Fortensky observes at the end of Liz. Replies Taylor, "Thank heaven for that". Liz: The Elizabeth Taylor Story wanted to cover the breath of her life from her National Velvet appearance to 1992 (Taylor dying in 2011). With so much attention focused on her relationship with Richard Burton, something got lost in the miniseries. 

Elizabeth Taylor. 

1932-2011

5/10