SHE was her own montage: seven husbands, eight marriages, diamonds beyond the counting, scandals like forgotten promises, two Oscars for films that showed the immense creative journey she could take, soaring as if on a single breath from the ridiculous Butterfield 8 (playing a hopelessly old-fashioned Hollywood “whore”) to Martha in Edward Albee's and Mike Nichols's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, a defiant wreck out of the true heartland of American tragedy. She had the range, nerve and instinct that only Bette Davis had had before — and like Davis, Taylor was monster and empress, sweetheart and scold, idiot and wise woman. We went in awe of her, but with one word or a knowing smile she assured us she was one of us. So beautiful, she could go crazy, too — and then move on. Those two Oscars were only six years apart, and it wasn't so much that they used a different Elizabeth Taylor (for she had always grasped the affinity of trash and class in her art and business). It was rather more that in that interval there had come the folly of Cleopatra, her first near-death in the London Clinic as they tried to film the Egyptian epic in Britain, and then the fateful meeting in Rome with Richard Burton, the Antony she carried into life as if at last the romantic actress had found her real passion.

She was in awe of Burton — his class, his Welshness, his reading, his literary ambition, his ruthless, pessimistic candour, to say nothing of his exceptional instinct and nature as an actor. There were plenty of people, especially in the London theatre, who predicted she would ruin him. And some of them asked, “What did anyone expect?” when Burton died too young and maybe with too few grand credits to his name (as well as no Oscar). But Burton was always in charge of his own demise and ruin, and he recognised that Liz was not just his equal as actor and self-destructive force, but much his superior at surviving. To read Melvyn Bragg's biography of Burton, which quotes extensively from his journals, is to see how passionate and turbulent their love was - to say nothing of their pioneering of the thing we now call celebrity. But Burton ached with respect for her. He had seen the real thing, the last star, and a camera actress who had been born knowing more than he could ever learn.

So she went from childhood, when her violet eyes were one of the touchstones for Technicolor, to being a devoted patron in her later years to those who were sicker than she was. She gave up acting because I think she knew that without her astonishing youthful glamour, she was in grave danger of betraying her own past (and her own dreams for herself). After all, to millions she had been the most beautiful woman on screen for a couple of decades, and when she was only 18, in A Place in the Sun, she had entered into one of movie's modest exquisite romantic auras, with her partner in that film, Montgomery Clift.

It's a film based on Dreiser's An American Tragedy, and in the book Taylor's character is the rather empty rich girl who takes the hero away from a first love (Shelley Winters in the movie). But as George Stevens made the film, Winters is a drab, whining figure — someone dreamers almost want to have removed ... and murdered. Liz and Monty are the prince and princess in an impossible love story that ends on Death Row. But thwarted love stories are the best, and at 18 Liz could look at Clift, the camera and us, and convey the magic words that inspired classic American cinema — “If only!”

Young people now may hardly know her, and it is hard today to conjure up the daring, the insolence of some women on screen in the 50s when the Production Code still prevailed. But to see Taylor filling a slip for the first part of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (that was 1958) was to lose track of Tennessee Williams and Paul Newman, and to dwell on the sheen, slipperiness and near-graspability of that flimsy notional garment. It may look a silly, over-talkative film now — and there are Taylor pictures where the sheer visual glory has dated comically — until you let the story melt away and just gaze at her: in Ivanhoe, say, or Beau Brummell, or The Sandpiper or The Last Time I Saw Paris. In truth, in those years just before she met Burton, Liz Taylor was doing whatever Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer told her and going nowhere. But in 1955, she was still only 23. She seemed to have been on screen for ever, with Lassie, National Velvet, Mickey Rooney and Roddy McDowall. Then she became the woman of the age.

I daresay the beauty got in her way, and men — nearly all of them unsuitable — lined up to marry her. She had always known she could act, and the more demanding parts and authors never troubled her, so long as they trusted her to hold the screen. But what she deserved was a more modern version of the dream. She had the well of feeling behind those eyes that could deliver anguish and trouble and real difficulties in growing up. That's what A Place in the Sun started, and it is still her authentic masterpiece, the most iconographic thing she ever did. The final telephoto close-ups of her and Clift in their last embrace speak to the entire hope of movie romance. --Dawn/Guardian News Service