If Elizabeth Taylor, who died Wednesday at age 79 , was both a great star and a wonderful actress, she was also the frequent object of gentle, or not so gentle, ridicule. She is survived not just by her children and friends, but by lots of old jokes about her vast collection of husbands and diamonds, by the Saturday Night Live parody of her super-soft-focus “White Diamonds” perfume ad, by the legacy of being one-half of a famous couple (twice!) that even the New York Times casually refers to as Dickenliz. How does an actress hang onto her own identity, with so many people appropriating bits of it for their own aims?
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In Praise of Elizabeth Taylor: Fierce in Her Very Softness
