Elizabeth Taylor Leaves Lasting Impression

February 26, 2011

I was standing in the kitchen taking a break from the dishes with a little television when my 16-year-old son peeked over my shoulder and asked, “Who is that!??”

“That’s Elizabeth Taylor,” I answered. He had caught me taking part in one of my favorite guilty pleasures, watching old movies. This time, I was catching the end of Suddenly Last Summer, the 1959 classic starring Taylor, Montgomery Clift and Katharine Hepburn.

“That’s Elizabeth Taylor? She’s… wow,” he said stunned, stopping just short of using the word “hot” in front of his mother.

We stood there as Montgomery Clift, playing a New Orleans psychiatrist who specializes in lobotomies, coaxes the truth out of a deeply disturbed Elizabeth Taylor about what really happened to her cousin, Sebastian, last summer.

Suddenly Last Summer features a post- National Velvet and pre- Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Elizabeth Taylor. Dressed all in black and perfectly coiffed, Taylor is something we don’t see much in Hollywood movies anymore. She’s a star.

“How old is she?” my son asked quietly starring at the television.

“I don’t know, late 70s,” I answered not taking my eyes off the screen.

“No, how old was she then?”

“I don’t know, 20 something.”

“Oh… wow.”

If you’d like to see Elizabeth Taylor in all her “wow”-ness, the Mid-Continent Public Library has a number her films in our collection, including Suddenly Last Summer, Giant, Raintree County and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

Sara P.D.
Kearney Branch