Elizabeth Taylor: Myth Made and Remade

Once at the apex of the Hollywood film industry, Elizabeth Taylor was not only a symbol of female beauty during her acting career, she also became a symbol of American cultural-political power, writes Prof. Gloria Shin.

In the Elizabeth Taylor filmography, few critics, if any, point to “The Elephant Walk” as a mythmaking vehicle for the raven-haired beauty.

“Pachyderm stampede climax comes none too soon,” the critic Leonard Maltin bemoaned after viewing the 1954 drama, in which Taylor, opposite Dana Andrews and Peter Finch, plays the lonely mistress of a Ceylon tea plantation at the end of World War II. 

The work, however, gave Gloria Shin, who teaches film and television media studies in the LMU School of Film and Television, a new lens through which to view Tayor, a two-time Oscar-winning best actress for “Butterfield 8” and “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” 

Shin wrote “Elizabeth Taylor: Icon of American Empire,” which presents the actress as a singular exemplar of both American cultural-political power and a standard of female beauty that prioritized whiteness in the 1950s and 1960s, a time when the United States was undergoing unprecedented economic growth, social shifts and political turmoil.

In “The Elephant Walk,” Taylor’s star was rising; she, moreover, was an “allegorical figure who represented the height of American power,” Shin says. “She was the most beautiful woman in the world, the most famous person in the world, and the most powerful film actress in the world.

“She’s someone who really stands in for American empire in so many ways that audiences can access,” Shin adds. “I was thinking about her image and American imperialism in fascinating ways that I don’t think anyone anticipated.”

“The Elephant Walk” was one of a series of 1950s Hollywood plantation movies that included “The Naked Jungle” and “The Long, Hot Summer.” Collectively, the films offered idealized views of slavery and oppression, while also using plantation settings to question social hierarchies. 

Taylor, it would turn out, was as much an activist as an actress. Shin’s students often know little of Taylor, who died in 2011, and whose film career was largely behind her by the 1970s. If anything, they know the actress through her AIDS activism; she co-founded amfAR (The Foundation for AIDS Research) in 1985, and the Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation in 1991.

Shin hopes her book provides new insights into the artist, who often was tabloid fodder for her eight marriages and her perceived superficiality. 

“She was doing a lot of things in the last decades of her life to reauthor her image,” Shin adds. “She really cared about helping people with AIDS and humanizing them, and she understood that this was a war against a group of people who were demonized simply for having sex, and yet they were dying in such a devastating way.”

Shin’s affinity for Taylor started as a young girl growing up in Southern California. Local station KTLA-TV routinely aired classic movies, including Taylor’s epic “Cleopatra.” 

“The movie is four hours long, and it’s even longer with commercials,” she says.

But the appeal transcends bathroom breaks. It’s also personal. As a Korean-American and a child of immigrants, Shin feels a unique connection to the screen icon. 

“Elizabeth Taylor had dark hair like me,” she says of the jet-setting actress. “That’s no small thing. She seemed to have a global perspective, and that was powerful for people outside the mainstream.”

In the end, there are legacies to consider. In Taylor’s day, it was enough to be beautiful. Today, A-list actresses such as Charlize Theron, Margot Robbie, Reese Witherspoon, and Eva Longoria exercise their agency by buying studio rights to develop, produce, direct, and star in projects. 

Taylor does provide an antecedent: She and former husband Richard Burton created Taybur Productions, which produced “Taming of the Shrew.” The couple generated half of the film industry’s $200 million in revenues in 1967. 

“Elizabeth Taylor proved to so many that women are bankable stars,” Shin says.

Andrew Faught is a freelance writer based in Fresno, Calif. He has covered politics, education, and human interest stories for newspapers in California and Arizona. He has also written for Dartmouth Alumni Magazine, Smith College magazine, and Occidental magazine. He previously wrote about the research of Demian Willette, professor of biology, for LMU Magazine.