Elizabeth Taylor: A Private Life for Public Consumption

New
Illustrated
2016
$33.07

The first volume to examine the iconic Elizabeth Taylor in this light, Elizabeth Taylor: A Private Life for Public 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.

Synopsis

The first volume to examine the iconic Elizabeth Taylor in this light, Elizabeth Taylor: A Private Life for Public 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.

$33.07

Quantity

10 in stock

More Information

Format: Illustrated
Pages: 288
Edition: 01
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Published: 07 Apr 2016
ISBN 10: 1628920696
ISBN 13: 9781628920697
Book Overview: Uses the English-born Hollywood star as a lens through which to examine the social changes that have yielded what we now call celebrity culture.

Media Reviews

'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 *

Author Bio

Ellis Cashmore is the author of Beyond Black: Celebrity and Race in Obama's America and other books such as Martin Scorsese's America and Tyson: Nurture of the Beast. He is currently Visiting Professor of Sociology at Aston University, UK, having previously held positions at the University of Tampa, USA, and the University of Hong Kong.