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thatcrazycajunOne of the last bona fide Hollywood screen legends of the studio-system era is gone...and HIV/AIDS activists have lost a true and strong ally. Actress and activist Elizabeth Taylor died on Wednesday this past, 23 March, of congestive heart failure at 79. She passed away at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, CA after being admitted weeks earlier, and was interred the next day in a private ceremony at the world-famous Forest Lawn Cemetery in the same city. (Newsweek magazine reports that, by Ms. Taylor's final request, her funeral did not actually begin until 15 minutes after its announced starting time; she wanted to be fashionably late even for her own burial! My father always used to say, "When the Man Upstairs calls your name, that's one time you will not be late!"; seems that Liz proved him wrong.)
I don't know what else I can add about this grand lady that hasn't already been said or written much better elsewhere (starting with here)...except that one of the brightest stars in the show-business firmament has finally fallen. I prefer not to dwell on the controversy and scandal that often surrounded her personal life, or the physical deterioration of her later years, but to remember her youth and impossible beauty, her many gifted performances (two of which won her Academy Awards), and her tireless work to de-stigmatize and properly fund research into a deadly disease that has since ravaged half a continent in Africa (as my Songbird, who worked 2.5 years there to help reduce the death toll, can attest) and has taken far too many lives here and elsewhere as well. Liz was one of the first, if not the first, of her industry colleagues to risk her career and fandom for the cause, at a time when "the gay cancer" was still an illness that not even a star of her longtime friend Rock Hudson's caliber and popularity could afford to publicly admit having until it was too late to save him...and opened the floodgates for more of them to do likewise.
In one of her most famous roles, in Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's film adaptation of Tennessee Williams' play Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, La Liz cried defiantly, "Maggie the Cat is alive!" So she is...and always will be, on screen and in hearts the world over. Now those famous violet eyes have closed forever...and her husbands, children and other family, her friends, fans and colleagues have my deepest sympathies. Thank you, dear lady, and sleep sweet; you damned well earned it.
I don't know what else I can add about this grand lady that hasn't already been said or written much better elsewhere (starting with here)...except that one of the brightest stars in the show-business firmament has finally fallen. I prefer not to dwell on the controversy and scandal that often surrounded her personal life, or the physical deterioration of her later years, but to remember her youth and impossible beauty, her many gifted performances (two of which won her Academy Awards), and her tireless work to de-stigmatize and properly fund research into a deadly disease that has since ravaged half a continent in Africa (as my Songbird, who worked 2.5 years there to help reduce the death toll, can attest) and has taken far too many lives here and elsewhere as well. Liz was one of the first, if not the first, of her industry colleagues to risk her career and fandom for the cause, at a time when "the gay cancer" was still an illness that not even a star of her longtime friend Rock Hudson's caliber and popularity could afford to publicly admit having until it was too late to save him...and opened the floodgates for more of them to do likewise.
In one of her most famous roles, in Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's film adaptation of Tennessee Williams' play Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, La Liz cried defiantly, "Maggie the Cat is alive!" So she is...and always will be, on screen and in hearts the world over. Now those famous violet eyes have closed forever...and her husbands, children and other family, her friends, fans and colleagues have my deepest sympathies. Thank you, dear lady, and sleep sweet; you damned well earned it.
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Date: 2011-03-26 10:20 am (UTC)Of course, That Song has now been running in my head ever since.
no subject
Date: 2011-03-26 11:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-03-27 12:28 pm (UTC)Just out of curiosity...
Date: 2011-04-21 03:07 am (UTC)Re: Just out of curiosity...
Date: 2011-04-21 10:30 am (UTC)Re: Just out of curiosity...
Date: 2011-04-21 01:59 pm (UTC)Re: Just out of curiosity...
Date: 2011-04-21 04:41 pm (UTC)I confuse Lehrer's output with Denver's quite frequently.
It's easy to do.
Re: Just out of curiosity...
Date: 2011-04-22 12:02 am (UTC)