There’s no successor to Elizabeth Taylor. No contemporary actress possesses anything like her fame. That’s a consequence of the changing nature of celebrity and the fragmentation of popular culture. The movies got small and so did the stars.
But the sensational aspects of the Taylor-Burton saga makes it easy to forget that their celebrity was initially founded upon their brilliance as actors. The work fed a celebrity which would help undermine the validity of the work, and did so right from the beginning in the overblown mess that was Cleopatra. But Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, stagey and overdone itself, remains an extraordinary piece of work: a harrowing, almost grotesque, public-private feud in which real-life and fiction merge in dizzying counterpoint.
The glamour remains, however. Not just in terms of excitement but also in the old Scots meaning of the word: something enchanting or magical and with more than just a hint of danger too.
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