Elizabeth Taylor

Both of Elizabeth Taylor's best-known roles are women who carry their being trapped out loud. In Cat on a Hot Tin Roof of 1958, Maggie Pollitt describes the anger she has stored up as being like a cat on a hot tin roof, and Brick coolly advises her to find herself a lover; Barbara Bel Geddes had opened that same part on Broadway, in the play Elia Kazan directed. Taylor was nominated for the film at the thirty-first ceremony in 1959, and it was Susan Hayward who took it that year. In Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? of 1966 she was Martha, who hides her fragility and her disappointment behind a noisy vulgarity and has invented an imaginary son, a fiction her husband George joins in with on his own account. She won the actress Oscar for that part at the thirty-ninth ceremony, held in 1967. In 1951, in A Place in the Sun, she had played Angela Vickers, the society girl whose beauty strikes George Eastman. The Berlinale's records for 1972 say she took the Silver Bear for actress for her part in Hammersmith Is Out.