Elizabeth Taylor, Queen of Hollywood

It would be hard to conceive of a world without Elizabeth Taylor, that most iconic of film stars, who will be 70 on Wednesday. But her career wasn't the most illustrious. So what is it about her, asks David Thomson, that still captivates us?

If you look back at the many volumes of press cuttings that are the history of Elizabeth Taylor, you could persuade yourself that in the Fifties and early Sixties she had not just enemies, but people ready to preach against her and her terrible example. It was a more innocent age. Not just the general public, but Hollywood itself, felt shocked that she (or anyone) should be paid $1m for a single movie. That's what she was awarded on Cleopatra, long before that ponderous barge drifted upon the rocks. By then, she had not only wooed Eddie Fisher (a crooner once, very popular, and still alive somewhere) away from that darling Debbie Reynolds. Far worse, Liz had seduced Richard Burton from a long-suffering wife, the code of the Welsh valleys and the noble tradition of reciting Shakespeare. She would, before long, lead the poor lad into multiple marriages, a deepening bog of drink, many works mocked for their trashiness, and the kind of self-destructive end for which, clearly, he yearned.

Divorce then was a more damaging career move, and Elizabeth Taylor had shrugged off three husbands (the hotel magnate Nicky Hilton; the actor Michael Wilding; and Fisher) by the time she was 27, and lost a fourth (Mike Todd) in a plane crash. Hollywood could not honestly, or even deviously, blame her for Cleopatra. That somnolent epic had been horribly ill-planned; it said far more about studio pretension and ineptness than it did about star salaries. And, in fact, the picture was saved from complete ruin by the daft public infatuation with the long-running melodrama of Burton and Taylor. She deserved at least $2m for her assiduous creation of scandalous publicity materials.

For newspapers, magazines, paparazzi and that infant genre, the television coverage of show business, Cleopatra actually made a fortune. No honest journalist (not even those compelled to pen moral diatribes against her) could fail to give Liz a wink as they spanked her bottom. It was entirely merited that Andy Warhol would adopt her as one of his icons for the new age (also referred to as "I Con Everyone"), for Liz Taylor had flowed voluptuously over the banks of fact and history. She was myth; she was legend; she was camp, before such possibilities were widely grasped. When she won her second Oscar, for a rousing performance as Martha in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, she was a mere 34, and so gorgeous still that she could afford to dress up like a witch as Martha.

Yes, it is true: your own young (teenagers even) may look up and wonder who Elizabeth Taylor is. For 20 years now, she has done very little in the way of acting "work'', and nothing that needs trouble the scorer. I regret that, for I suspect that she might be capable of high comedy – if such a thing were being written. On the other hand, she has not been well (she never really was, though, and some people very fond of her suspected a kind of delicacy or hypochondria that could carry her close to 100). She has battled with her own weight, and with her desire for soporifics and alleviants, and she may be wise to let the old image – the violet eyes, the raven-black hair, the small, very curved body – become the look on her stamp. So few of us forgive the growing old in others, especially those we have loved.

I kept that word out of the piece as long as I could, but really, there are limits. And as she celebrates her 70th birthday, next Wednesday it has to be said that over the decades there have been so many ways of loving Elizabeth Taylor. Let me add this: that it still seems hard to believe she is only 70, inasmuch as for so many of us, she has always been there. It is still a good party game to remind people that when they made Giant together, Liz was a year younger than James Dean. And while it was his third picture (and last), she was up to 25 already.

Of course, she was a child star, and there were those who claimed – in her most chaotic years – that the disarray of her life surely reflected the terrible damage done to all children when they are made public figures in show business. It is part of that litany that such creatures cannot tell reality from illusion, that they are spoilt, selfish, lying, immature etc. Well, I once had lunch with the lady, and I'm bound to say that she was scathingly honest, observant, salty, funny, smart and thoroughly good company. She acted like a grown up, which is often more than one can say for the legions of people who didn't make it in the movies.

I hasten to add that, away from a sensible lunch-time chat, this does not mean that she yielded to anyone in throwing actressy tantrums, making impossible demands, bringing an entire film set and its crew to their knees and her whim, and getting whatever she wanted, but don't we expect such things in faces that are about to be made as large as a five-storey building and then sent all over the world? Isn't one reason why we love the idea of Elizabeth Taylor the notion that she could be a tyrant, an empress – dare I say it – a Cleopatra?

That child's career began in Hollywood with a film called There's One Born Every Minute, made when she was aged 10. But most of Britain knows, and treasures, what went first: that she was born in London (to American parents), that she was raised and educated in this country; that her parents were strong, well-to-do and caring, and that they took the girl back to the United States as the Second World War started. It could be argued that Britain might have disapproved of her because of that, but it never seems to have been the case. Rather, the British enjoy the accent she has kept and esteem the "sensible'' influence of an English education.

There's no need to be sentimental, and I suspect the parents meant more than the place, but it's true that London in the Thirties was a good deal more educational than, say, Los Angeles, and far closer to important things going on in the world. At MGM, Taylor fell in with a gang of child actors who were all more experienced than she was – Judy Garland, Mickey Rooney, Freddie Bartholomew and Margaret O'Brien – but all knowing less about the real world.

She had her moments: she is very beautiful in Jane Eyre (1944), but it was only in National Velvet (also from 1944) that she seemed capable of having star personality. For a few years, she made undistinguished teenage films, including two – Father of the Bride and Father's Little Dividend – in which she was Spencer Tracy's ideal daughter. Then George Stevens cast her as a young socialite in A Place in the Sun, adapted from the Theodore Dreiser novel, An American Tragedy. Her co-star was Montgomery Clift, who was 11 years older than she was. Something clicked. The film is a tragic love story and a sombre study in bad luck. All of a sudden, Taylor discovered her own emotional depth, not least because she fell wildly in love with Clift, only to discover his own sexual ambivalence.

I suspect she never got over Clift. That she loved Burton more is very plausible. But her feeling for Clift was lovelorn: it couldn't quite work. Or take conventional form. In part, therefore, she was in the position of sister to a very troubled man. A few years later they made another film together, Raintree County. After a dinner party one night, Clift suffered a serious car crash in which his famously fragile face was knocked out of shape. It was Taylor who held the shattered head in her lap, waiting for the ambulance.

This was a situation or a pose to be repeated over the years: Clift died, far too young; Dean died so soon after working with Liz; of course, her third husband, Mike Todd, had been killed in a plane crash. Then, decades later, she attempted to come to the rescue of Rock Hudson (another co-star from Giant) in what was the start of her long and current association with Aids research and relief. Equally, over the years, she has been the loyal and nearly maternal friend to Michael Jackson in his many public difficulties. Above all, she was one of the people who tried to cure Richard Burton of drinking, even if at other times she seemed like a goad and scold who put the bottle in his hands.

One of the keys to understanding Liz Taylor, I think, is that she reigned over cinema in the last, tight age of censorship. That's how and why she seemed ready to burst out of her clothes, or break out in sexual talk and actions. The films were often poor: in the dreadful Butterfield 8, she played a hooker who lolled around in a slip; in her version of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (with Paul Newman), she was again in her underwear; and in the risible Suddenly Last Summer she was nothing less than sexual bait employed by her homosexual cousin.

Those are abiding images, and they were palpably erotic in the Fifties. But their acting is far less than Taylor's thoughtful portrait of an Eastern girl growing older and becoming Texan in Giant. That, A Place in the Sun and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? are the films to see. On the other hand, there are plenty that are forgettable: The Last Time I Saw Paris; The Sandpiper; The Only Game in Town (where she and Warren Beatty are very uneasy with each other). It's nowhere near as illustrious a career as that of Katharine Hepburn, Bette Davis, or many others.

But no one lived so clearly near the edge as Liz Taylor did for so long – and still survived. And it reassures us somehow about movie stars to think of the survival, just as it is important to our affection for Katharine Hepburn to know that she has made it to be a very old lady, waiting patiently for her end. Taylor may be less resolved still. She could live to see Aids vanquished – or to bury many more dear friends. She seems to have wearied of acting, and the ragged profile of celebrity. She is working away now, as steadily as if she were Queen Elizabeth.