Elizabeth Taylor

'A Private Life' offers a rich and illuminating reassessment, invigorating the somewhat lackluster discourse about the iconic movie star. Although there are at least 10 biographies of Elizabeth Taylor, Cashmore’s lively study provides a compelling interpretation and bridges the many gaps between Taylor’s impact on the American zeitgeist and her alluring, infamous life. -- Nathan Smith * The Washington Post *
[Cashmore] examines Taylor with all the thoroughness of a jeweller with a loupe, holding every facet of her public persona to the light. He shows how she was the herald of the curious intimacies that now exist between audience and celebrity, a one-woman rolling news channel long before social media. * The Sunday Times *
In the cigar-chomping Hollywood of the Fifties ... how did Taylor manage to call the shots? Ellis Cashmore's book is an impressive answer ... [His] thesis ... [on the effects of Taylor's unfailing ability to merge art and life is what] makes his book compelling. * The Daily Telegraph *
Ellis Cashmore details the way in which Taylor 'consciously made herself into a living narrative', allowing the dramas of her life to supersede, refract and monetize the dramas she enacted on screen ... [A] book which catalogues what seems like not just every detail of her career, but also every detail of the lives of her supporting cast. * Times Literary Supplement *
Cashmore (Beyond Black: Celebrity and Race in Obama’s America) combines broad research and personal observations in this lively study examining how Elizabeth Taylor transformed our perception of modern celebrity. * Publishers Weekly *
[Taylor's] extraordinary life and career ... is pored over and unpicked in painstaking detail ... [Cashmore's] efforts in tackling the Taylor brand are prodigious. * Sight & Sound *
Internet-age approach to a Golden Age movie star. * The Chronicle Herald *
This was simply a great book. It had so much information about not only Elizabeth Taylor but also of all the other people that she came into contact with. It was wonderfully written and told a tale that I hadn't read before. I think that Elizabeth would have approved. * Bookschellves.com *
Was [Elizabeth Taylor] a feminist influence, as some claim? Did she deliberately set out to make herself controversial, in the manner of Madonna? … [Ellis Cashmore] intelligently and dramatically addresses these questions and subjects. -- Liz Smith * New York Social Diary *
In prose that is engaging and enlightening, Ellis Cashmore shows how Elizabeth Taylor changed everything we presently know about celebrity and the way it works. As a child actress who never left the limelight and for decades reigned as one the world’s most famous and most scandalous moviestars, Elizabeth Taylor’s greatest role was playing herself. Cashmore here shows how a disintegration of the private that now seems commonplace was condensed in and through the figure of Elizabeth Taylor, the first modern celebrity. * Brenda R. Weber, Professor and Chair of the Department of Gender Studies, Indiana University, USA *
Elizabeth Taylor is a conversational yet meticulously researched account of this pathbreaking star’s storied and often controversial life. Cashmore’s wide ranging volume maps Taylor’s trajectory against major developments in the history of the twentieth century, often adopting a philosophical tone to emphasize that her singularity nevertheless resonated with wider cultural trends. Cashmore convinces that, bar none, Taylor was a force with which to be reckoned. * Suzanne Leonard, Associate Professor of Cinema and Media Studies, Simmons College, USA *
Elizabeth Taylor: A Private Life for Public Consumption (Bloomsbury) by Ellis Cashmore is a lively study not only of the iconic movie star's sometimes stormy life but of how she changed our ideas about celebrity as well as entering the business and political arenas. -- Colette Bancroft * Tampa Bay Times *