Elizabeth Taylor

The first volume to examine the iconic Elizabeth Taylor in this light, Elizabeth Taylor: A Public Life for Private Consumption paints Taylor as the seminal representation of “celebrity.” A figure of enormous charisma and cultural sway, she intrigued a global audience with her marriages and extra-marital improprieties, as well as her extravagant jewelry, her never-ending illnesses, her dependency on alcohol, and her perplexing friendship with Michael Jackson. Despite her continued world-renown, however, most people would be hard-pressed to name even three of her films, though she made over seventy.

Ellis Cashmore traces our modern, hyperactive celebrity culture back to a single instant in Taylor's life: the publicizing of her scandalous affair with Richard Burton by photographer Marcelo Geppetti in 1962, which announced the arrival of a new generation of predatory photojournalists and, along with them, a strange conflation between the public and private lives of celebrities. Taylor's life and public reception, Cashmore reveals, epitomizes the modern phenomenon of “celebrity.”

"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

“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. Cashmere 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