Elizabeth Taylor, RIP: A farewell to the most fleshly of all actresses.

Elizabeth Rosemond Taylor, who died this morning at age 79, was the most fleshly of actresses. Not fleshy?though there were periods when her gloriously abundant, ever-changing body qualified for that adjective, too?but fleshly, vibrantly incarnate. Unlike many great onscreen beauties, who seem like nervous guardians of the treasure nature has bestowed upon them, Elizabeth Taylor (she hated "Liz," using it only as an ironic nickname for the tabloid cartoon she'd become) reveled in her pulchritude. She was at her best playing characters who inhabited their own bodies with a confident, careless pleasure: the precociously gifted jockey Velvet Brown in National Velvet (1944) or the duplicitous, sex-starved Maggie Pollitt in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958). "That girl's got life in her, all right," says Maggie's brother-in-law Gooper (Jack Carson) at the end of that film. Within the context of the story, he's wrong?Maggie's claim that she's pregnant with her impotent husband's child is a lie?but from a critical perspective, Gooper nails it. Even in her lowest moments onscreen and off, Elizabeth Taylor was always bursting to excess with life.

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