Elizabeth Taylor The grit & glamour of an icon

Review by Booklist Review

From childhood, Elizabeth Taylor's face was her fortune. Beginning with Lassie Come Home and National Velvet, the camera devoured Taylor's classic youthful beauty and amplified it as she morphed from teen innocence to sultry womanhood. In this first authorized biography of the last of the great Hollywood studio-system stars, Brower mines previously unpublished interviews, personal letters, and diary entries as well as input from hundreds of friends and family to offer a comprehensive and intimate biography of a true icon. Taylor, she contends, was both a dame and a broad, as notorious for her boulder-sized bling as for her longshoreman-like language. As her tabloid-enriching romantic life revealed, Taylor was a strong woman attracted to even stronger men yet repeatedly fell prey to physical maladies and emotional insecurities. From her Oscar-winning movies to her numerous marriages, devastating addictions, and pioneering AIDS activism, Taylor's tumultuous life unfolds in Brower's portrait like one of her own epic screen adventures. A must-read for Taylor's legions of fans and all who savor well-told and well-documented tales of Old Hollywood.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Journalist Brower (Team of Five: The Presidents Club in the Age of Trump) captures in this glowing portrait the larger-than-life story of British American actress Elizabeth Taylor (1932--2011), who "defined twentieth-century Hollywood for a global audience." Taylor shot to stardom at age 12 with her role as Velvet Brown in the 1944 film National Velvet, and she really came into her own with her portrayal of Angela Vickers in the 1951 melodrama A Place in the Sun. "I was bitten, and I loved the possibility of acting," Taylor said in an unpublished interview at the time. Brower meticulously details Taylor's stormy romantic relationships, from marrying hotel heir Nicky Hilton as a "means of escape"from her parents to her tumultuous two marriages to actor Richard Burton, who called their relationship "Le Scandale." In her later years, Taylor became an AIDS activist and humanitarian. Brower convincingly depicts Taylor as a complex woman whose glamour, even today, is "intoxicating." The result is a mesmerizing appreciation of a legendary star. Agent: Howard Yoon, Ross Yoon Agency. (Dec.)

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Review by Library Journal Review

Elizabeth Taylor may well be the last great star of the classic Hollywood era. In the days before social media and the internet, Taylor stopped the presses with her larger-than-life persona and extravagant lifestyle. In writing this biography, journalist Brower (Team of Five: The Presidents Club in the Age of Trump) was supported by Taylor's family, who granted interviews and provided access to Taylor's unpublished letters and diaries. The resulting work contains little detail about her films or professional accomplishments, but there is a plethora of juicy details about the events that kept her in the spotlight--her eight marriages, adulterous affairs, numerous illnesses, and near-death episodes, not to mention her vast jewelry collection, which warrants its own chapter. Much attention is given to her passionate and volatile relationship with Richard Burton, which began during the filming of Cleopatra and would continue through two marriages. Beneath her hard-edged exterior, Taylor treated people with respect and was passionate about rooting for the underdog and for those who were discriminated against, as evidenced by her stalwart activism around AIDS. VERDICT Eleanor Caudill's perspicuous narration will compel listeners forward and gives Taylor's frequent ballsy quotes appropriate rendering. An engrossing, gossipy listen.--Phillip Oliver

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

A celebrity life marked by booze, men, and incomparable fame. Journalist Brower draws on the capacious archives of actor and philanthropist Elizabeth Taylor (1932-2011)--7,358 letters, diary entries, articles, and personal notes and 10,271 photographs--as well as interviews with her friends and family, to produce an appreciative biography of the iconic celebrity. "Elizabeth," Brower writes, "led the most glamorous and colorful life of any movie star in the world," appearing in 56 films and 10 TV movies. After a small part in Lassie Come Home, in 1943, she was cast as the star of National Velvet, leading to a long-term contract with MGM. Taylor chafed under an exploitative, controlling studio system as well as her controlling mother, who was "singularly obsessed with making her daughter a star." She escaped her family by getting married, at 18, to Nicky Hilton, son of Conrad, who turned out to be an abusive drunk. The marriage lasted less than a year. Although Brower portrays Taylor as an intelligent, feisty woman with a dry wit and photographic memory, she was also hard-drinking and shockingly foulmouthed. She made disastrous choices in husbands and seemed to thrive on volatility--but coveted the jewels men gave her, a massive collection that included a 69-carat diamond ring. She showered motherly attention on tormented men like Montgomery Clift and Michael Jackson but not on her own children, relegated to nannies and boarding schools. Brower chronicles Taylor's career, illnesses, marriages, affairs, and notoriously lavish lifestyle: "In 1992, for her sixtieth birthday, Disneyland closed for the night and a thousand of her friends were invited to celebrate." By the 1980s, her dependency on tranquilizers, sleeping pills, painkillers, street drugs, and alcohol led to two stays at the Betty Ford Center. Brower sees the "single most defining chapter" of Taylor's life as her decadeslong work as an AIDS activist and fundraiser. A well-researched, gossipy portrait of a star. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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