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Demeter

(85,373 posts)
17. Child actress / Adolescent star
Fri Apr 20, 2012, 08:15 PM
Apr 2012


Soon after settling in Los Angeles, Taylor's mother discovered that Hollywood people "habitually saw a movie future for every pretty face." Some of her mother's friends, and even total strangers, urged her to have Taylor screen tested for the role of Bonnie Blue, Scarlett's child in Gone with the Wind, then being filmed. Her mother refused the idea, as a child actress in film was alien to her. And in any regard, they would return to England after the war.

Hollywood columnist Hedda Hopper introduced the Taylors to Andrea Berens, the fiancée of John Cheever Cowdin, chairman and major stockholder of Universal Pictures. Berens insisted that Sara take Taylor to see Cowden who, she assured, would be dazzled by her breathtaking beauty. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer also became interested in Taylor, and MGM head Louis B. Mayer reportedly told his producer, "Sign her up, sign her up! What are you waiting for?" As a result, she soon had both Universal and MGM willing to place her under contract. When Universal learned that MGM was equally interested, however, Cowden telephoned Universal from New York: "Sign her up, he ordered, don't even wait for the screen test." Universal then gave her a seven-year contract.

Taylor appeared in her first motion picture at the age of nine in There's One Born Every Minute (1942), her only film for Universal. After less than a year, however, the studio fired Taylor for unknown reasons. Some speculate that she did not live up to Cowden's promise. Walker believes that Taylor's intuition told her "she wasn't really welcome at Universal." She learned, for instance, that her casting director complained, "The kid has nothing," after a test. Even her beautiful eyes—they were a deep blue that appeared violet and stunned those who met her in person, with a mutation that gave Taylor double eyelashes—did not impress him: "Her eyes are too old, she doesn't have the face of a child," he said. But Walker admits that "this was not so far off the mark as it may appear now." He explains:

There was something slightly odd about Elizabeth's looks, even at this age – an expression that sometimes made people think she was older than she was. She already had her mother's air of concentration. Later on, it would prove an invaluable asset. At the time, it disconcerted people who compared her unfavorably with Shirley Temple's cute bubbling innocence or Judy Garland's plainer and more vulnerable juvenile appeal.


Taylor herself remembers that when she was a child in England, adults used to describe her as having an "old soul," because, as she says, "I was totally direct." She also recognized similar traits in her baby daughter:

I saw my daughter as a baby, before she was a year old, look at people, steadily, with those eyes of hers, and see people start to fidget, and drop things out of their pockets and finally, unable to stand the heat, get out of the room.


Taylor's father served as an air raid warden with MGM producer Sam Marx, and learned that the studio was searching for an English actress for a Lassie film. Taylor received the role and was offered a long-term contract at the beginning of 1943. She chose MGM because "the people there had been nicer to her when she went to audition," Taylor recalled. MGM's production chief, Benny Thau, was to remain the "only MGM executive" she fully trusted during subsequent years, because, writes Walker, "he had, out of kindly habit, made the gesture that showed her she was loved." Thau remembered her as a "little dark-haired beauty...[with] those strange and lovely eyes that gave the face its central focus, oddly powerful in someone so young." MGM, in addition, was considered a "glamorous studio," boasting that it had "more stars than there are in heaven." Before Taylor's mother would sign the contract, however, she sought certainty that Taylor had a "God-given talent" to become an actress. Walker describes how they came to a decision:

Mrs. Taylor wanted a final sign of revelation...Was there a divine plan for her? Mrs. Taylor took her old script for The Fool, in which she had played the scene of the girl whose faith is answered by a miracle cure. Now she asked Elizabeth to read her own part, while she read the lines of the leading man. She confessed to weeping openly. She said, 'There sat my daughter playing perfectly the part of the child as I, a grown woman, had tried to do it. It seemed that she must have been in my head all those years I was acting'.



MGM cast Taylor in Lassie Come Home (1943) with child star Roddy McDowall, with whom she would share a lifelong friendship. He later recalled regarding her beauty, "who has double eyelashes except a girl who was absolutely born to be on the big screen?" The film received favorable attention for both actors, and MGM signed Taylor to a conventional seven-year contract starting at $100 a week and with regular raises. Her first assignment under her new contract was a loan-out to 20th Century Fox for the character of Helen Burns in a film version of the Charlotte Brontë novel Jane Eyre (1944). Taylor returned to England to appear in another McDowall picture for MGM, The White Cliffs of Dover (1944).

Taylor's persistence in seeking the role of Velvet Brown in MGM's National Velvet made her a star at the age of 12. Her character is a young girl who trains her beloved horse to win the Grand National. Velvet, which costarred fellow young actor Mickey Rooney and English newcomer Angela Lansbury, became a great success upon its release in December 1944. Many years later Taylor called it "the most exciting film" she had ever made, although the film caused many of her later back problems due to her falling off a horse during filming.

Viewers and critics "fell in love with Elizabeth Taylor when they saw her in it." Walker explains why the film was popular:

Its enormous popularity rubs off on to its heroine because she expresses, with the strength of an obsession, the aspirations of people—people who have never seen a girl on horseback, or maybe even a horse race for that matter—who believe that anything is possible...A philosophy of life, in other words...a film which...has acquired the status of a generational classic...


Velvet grossed over US$4 million and MGM signed Taylor to a new long-term contract. Because of the movie's success she was cast in another animal film, Courage of Lassie (1946), in which Bill the dog outsmarts the Nazis. The film's success led to another contract for Taylor paying her $750 per week. Her roles as Mary Skinner in a loan-out to Warner Brothers' Life With Father (1947), Cynthia Bishop in Cynthia (1947), Carol Pringle in A Date with Judy (1948), and Susan Prackett in Julia Misbehaves (1948) were all successful. Taylor received a reputation as a consistently successful adolescent actress, with a nickname of "One-Shot Liz" (referring to her ability to shoot a scene in one take) and a promising career. Taylor's portrayal of Amy in the American classic Little Women (1949) was her last adolescent role.

MGM studio provided schooling for its child stars with classrooms within the studio grounds. Taylor, however, came to dislike being cut off from typical schools with average students who were not treated like stars. She recalls her life before studio acting as a happier period in her childhood:

One of the few times I've ever really been happy in my life was when I was a kid before I started acting. With the other kids I'd make up games, play with dolls, pretend games. . . . As I got more famous—after National Velvet, when I was 12—I still wanted to be part of their lives, but I think in a way they began to regard me as a sort of an oddity, a freak.

I hated school—because it wasn't school. I wanted terribly to be with kids. On the set the teacher would take me by my ear and lead me into the schoolhouse. I would be infuriated; I was 16 and they weren't taking me seriously. Then after about 15 minutes I'd leave class to play a passionate love scene as Robert Taylor's wife.
7:30 AND ONE BANK DOWN Demeter Apr 2012 #1
Dame Elizabeth Rosemond Taylor, DBE Demeter Apr 2012 #2
MARK FIORE BREAKS ALL CONVENTIONS (why should Paul Ryan have all the fun?) Demeter Apr 2012 #3
Bipartisan Political Elite Implicated in For-Profit Education Fraud Demeter Apr 2012 #4
The Significance of Citigroup’s Shareholder Revolt By Robert Reich Demeter Apr 2012 #5
Barclays investors force tough bonus rules Demeter Apr 2012 #9
YPF move puts Eskenazi clan in debt bind Demeter Apr 2012 #6
Japan posts record annual trade deficit Demeter Apr 2012 #7
Moscow to bring charges against TNK-BP Demeter Apr 2012 #8
Goldman employee probed on links to scheme Demeter Apr 2012 #10
Qatari wealth fund adds 5% Tiffany stake Demeter Apr 2012 #11
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Bond trading surge boosts Wall Street banks Demeter Apr 2012 #13
BofA sees rebound in trading Demeter Apr 2012 #14
Bank of America, Focusing Less on Retail, Leans on Trading for Profit Demeter Apr 2012 #15
Good choice, Demeter -- and good advice Tansy_Gold Apr 2012 #16
I was beginning to wonder if this would be a monlogue Demeter Apr 2012 #18
Nope, I won't let it. Tansy_Gold Apr 2012 #22
Child actress / Adolescent star Demeter Apr 2012 #17
Self-Dealing and the War Service Industry, Part III: The Payoff Demeter Apr 2012 #19
Why the Rich Should Pay a Lot More on Tax Day By Richard (RJ) Eskow Demeter Apr 2012 #20
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Competition cuts down Medicare fraud Demeter Apr 2012 #23
Delevering in Europe Remains a Threat to World Economy Demeter Apr 2012 #24
Transition into adult roles Demeter Apr 2012 #25
Freedom from a Dead-End Life: True Liberty Means Defeating the RW's Nightmare Vision for America Demeter Apr 2012 #26
A Conspiracy of Whores By John Grant Demeter Apr 2012 #27
Iran threatens to cut oil to "whole Europe", claims to have alternative buyers Demeter Apr 2012 #28
TODAY'S QUOTE Demeter Apr 2012 #29
***sigh*** Miss Elizabeth Taylor xchrom Apr 2012 #30
Dream of Taxpayer Bailout Profit Is Just That xchrom Apr 2012 #31
AND...They'd Have License to Do It Forever Demeter Apr 2012 #33
Indeed. Nt xchrom Apr 2012 #34
Is Fukushima's Doomsday Machine About to Blow? By Mike Whitney Demeter Apr 2012 #32
CIA Claims Release of its History of the Bay of Pigs Debacle Would “Confuse the Public.” Demeter Apr 2012 #35
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New York City’s poverty rate broke record in 2010 Demeter Apr 2012 #38
Piers Morgan Has A Message For Police Officers Demeter Apr 2012 #39
Bill Moyers Essay: It Pays to Be Rich Demeter Apr 2012 #40
What Rich People Fear Most By Kenneth Rapoza Demeter Apr 2012 #42
On horseback bread_and_roses Apr 2012 #41
I've only ever seen Demeter Apr 2012 #44
Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolff? Tansy_Gold Apr 2012 #59
I think with Taylor, so much depended on the actors and the director Demeter Apr 2012 #60
Nice movie clip DemReadingDU Apr 2012 #50
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oh, that looks interesting, saving for later viewing DemReadingDU Apr 2012 #51
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"Formula For Fraud" How To Become A Billionaire WILLIAM K BLACK Demeter Apr 2012 #47
If you've gotten this far, I commend you! Demeter Apr 2012 #49
G20 doubles IMF war chest xchrom Apr 2012 #52
Chopra says IMF is pushing for more European support for Irish recovery xchrom Apr 2012 #53
Motorola Mobility CEO Jha's pay package triples to $47M hamerfan Apr 2012 #54
Ex-CEO Schmidt gets $101M pay package in new Google job hamerfan Apr 2012 #55
My kind of Dame! hamerfan Apr 2012 #56
"Dutch Austerity Talks Fail as Geithner Prods Europe" bread_and_roses Apr 2012 #57
Hey Tansy..This ones 4 u Po_d Mainiac Apr 2012 #58
1980–2003 / 2003–11 Demeter Apr 2012 #61
morning xchrom Apr 2012 #62
Europe's old wealth seeks new home in Asia xchrom Apr 2012 #63
Why the Euro Isn't Worth Saving xchrom Apr 2012 #64
I have been reading "Collapse" by Jared Diamond bread_and_roses Apr 2012 #65
"We need to forge a movement to save the planet and jobs at the same time" bread_and_roses Apr 2012 #66
I'm just finishing up "Vultures Picnic" by Greg Palast. Fuddnik Apr 2012 #67
I missed that one - bread_and_roses Apr 2012 #68
Palast mentions Perkins a couple of times in the book. Fuddnik Apr 2012 #70
Corruption is the system DemReadingDU Apr 2012 #69
Marriages, romances, and children Demeter Apr 2012 #71
There's so much more about this mysterious woman Demeter Apr 2012 #72
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