Elizabeth Taylor died this morning and in no time flat the cable news shows- even TCM- were thawing out and running prepared obits.
This is nothing particularly new- my dad told me once the local paper sent him his obit for fact-checking.
But in the age of instant everything, it also came out that Taylor outlived her NYT obituarist by a number of years:
Taylor was an astonishingly beautiful woman and a modestly-talented actor. Mostly she was good in roles that required screaming and shrieking. Bowdlerized versions of Tennessee Williams plays were her forte' in the 1950s. She had a talent for comedy that was woefully underutilized. Cleopatra was full of sly bits of business, and a made for TV movie, Malice In Wonderland, featured her in a hilarious portrayal of Hollywood gossip columnist Louella Parsons.
She also made some howlingly bad movies. As with Jack Nicholson's last two decades or so, she became famous for playing herself- or herself as she was perceived by herself. One of her worst- another vehicle with Burton- was an incomprehensible fantasy called Boom! One review described it as a film that:
In the 1960s and '70s she scandalized decent people with her jewels the size of grapefruits and her serial marriages to Richard Burton. She and Burton became a sort of Lucy & Desi on acid, the plots of their hairpulling, boozy life overlapping with their hairpulling, boozy movies and scantily-clad romps on rafts in sunny tropical climes. In a three-network TV universe, the couple was inescapable. Among moralists, Taylor and Burton took up where Bergman and Rosellini left off.
After she married Virginia Senator John Warner, Taylor's career on film slowly petered out. She reinvented herself as a perfumier, and AIDS activist, and a person well known for being well known.But no one can deny that she had the ability to hold the public's attention- something she did, relentlessly, for nearly seventy years.
She was also a doting mother, grandmother and great-grandmother, survived by her offspring and several of her seven ex-husbands.
This is nothing particularly new- my dad told me once the local paper sent him his obit for fact-checking.
But in the age of instant everything, it also came out that Taylor outlived her NYT obituarist by a number of years:
This note appears at the end of the New York Times' obituary of Elizabeth Taylor:
Of course, newspapers keep files on hand of obituaries to run instantly upon their death. Gussow's obituary can be found here. It contains this only-in-New York correction:
Mel Gussow, the principal writer of this article, died in 2005. William McDonald and the Associated Press contributed updated reporting.
Because of an editing error, an obituary on Sunday and in some copies on Monday about Mel Gussow, a theater critic and reporter for The New York Times, referred incorrectly to the Greenwich Village house next to his that was destroyed in 1970 by explosives belonging to the radical political group the Weathermen. The building was a town house, not a brownstone.
Taylor was an astonishingly beautiful woman and a modestly-talented actor. Mostly she was good in roles that required screaming and shrieking. Bowdlerized versions of Tennessee Williams plays were her forte' in the 1950s. She had a talent for comedy that was woefully underutilized. Cleopatra was full of sly bits of business, and a made for TV movie, Malice In Wonderland, featured her in a hilarious portrayal of Hollywood gossip columnist Louella Parsons.
She also made some howlingly bad movies. As with Jack Nicholson's last two decades or so, she became famous for playing herself- or herself as she was perceived by herself. One of her worst- another vehicle with Burton- was an incomprehensible fantasy called Boom! One review described it as a film that:
Explores the confrontation between the woman who has everything, including emptiness, and a penniless poet who has nothing but the ability to fill a wealthy woman's needs.
From 1968's Boom!: Medusa, meet Noel Coward
After she married Virginia Senator John Warner, Taylor's career on film slowly petered out. She reinvented herself as a perfumier, and AIDS activist, and a person well known for being well known.But no one can deny that she had the ability to hold the public's attention- something she did, relentlessly, for nearly seventy years.
She was also a doting mother, grandmother and great-grandmother, survived by her offspring and several of her seven ex-husbands.
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