From start to finish, she had presence

Elizabeth Taylor was all of 18 when she went to work for director George Stevens on A Place in the Sun, slipping into the role of Angela Vickers, the object of beauty and desire for Montgomery Clift's doomed schmo - and, as it turned out, an object of beauty and desire for millions of moviegoers, too.

The storm-tossed 1951 tragedy, about love and class, rapture and ill-advised rowboat outings, stands among Taylor's best work. But even when the movies were bad - and Taylor was in more than her share (watch her Southern belle-gone-mad in Raintree County, also with Clift) - the actress owned the screen. Taylor, who died Wednesday at 79 following a long string of illnesses, had that intangible but essential screen commodity: presence.

From her lead-role debut, as Velvet Brown in 1944's girl-and-her-horse weepie National Velvet, to the raging Katharina in the 1967 production of The Taming of the Shrew with her then-husband and coproducer, Richard Burton - and even in her dodgier screen endeavors (ending, ingloriously, with 1994's live-action flop The Flintstones) - Taylor embodied the words motion picture star. And sure it's a cliche, but screen goddess she was.

Born in England (her parents were Americans, living in London), Taylor was taken to the States, and to Hollywood, at the outset of World War II. She made her professional bow at age 10, in the otherwise unnoteworthy 1942 black-and-white comedy There's One Born Every Minute. But her second picture, Lassie Come Home (opposite her lifelong-friend-to-be Roddy McDowall), was shot in Technicolor. And if ever there was an actress made for the screen's lush palette, it was Taylor, with her dark tresses and violet eyes and cupid's lips. In the postwar years, audiences around the world followed Taylor as she made the seemingly seamless transition from child star to ingenue to glamour icon.

She was, of course, as famous for her tumultuous private life as for her professional one, and the two often intersected. Of her eight marriages, five were with men in show business: Michael Wilding, the English actor (20 years her elder); Michael Todd, the producer; Eddie Fisher, the Philly singer and showman; and Richard Burton, the Welsh thespian, who was married, divorced, and married again to Taylor over a 12-year span.

In the 1960s, the Burtons were moviedom's reigning twosome - the Brangelina of their day. They made 11 films together, including the marital shoutfest Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and the aforementioned Franco Zeffirelli adaptation of Shakespeare's Shrew. It was Liz and Dick's first collaboration - 1963's hugely expensive Egypto-kitsch spectacle Cleopatra - that busted Taylor's marriage to Fisher. Movie magazines and gossip columnists deforested half the planet as they printed one they're-having-an-affair story after another, with photographers stalking the celebrity duo everywhere they went.

There's a wonderful featurette that can be found on YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dVsqp9FWjuI) of Taylor and Burton seated at a table discussing the making of The Taming of the Shrew (and Taylor's trepidation at doing the Bard with a bunch of classically trained Brits). It's more than just cheap movie-shilling: The humor, warmth, and competitive spark between the two are much in evidence. Taylor fiddles distractedly with Burton's fingers, while he casts admiring glances her way, puffing on a cigarette.

In her later years, Taylor used her fame to lobby for AIDS research and gay rights, political, social and charitable causes. Her friendship with Michael Jackson was no doubt rooted in their common bond as child stars, thrown into the public spotlight and into an unreal world of wealth and isolation.

And maybe, in the sum of things, it was Taylor's public persona - the decades of media attention, the magazine covers, TV interviews, the controversies and hospital check-ins and messy romantic entanglements - that imprinted itself in our collective consciousness.

But it's her face - and that compact, va-va-vavoom body - that has been captured for all time on screen. Maggie in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof; Leslie the socialite wed to Rock Hudson in the Lone Star family saga Giant; a hard Manhattan prostitute in Butterfield 8; Leonora, another prostitute, and one shaken by the appearance of a young woman (Mia Farrow) resembling her dead daughter in the roiling '60s psycho-thriller Secret Ceremony; and the boozy, blowsy college professor's wife in Virginia Woolf - these are women who are impossible to forget.

Sex was certainly part of the equation, but so was her beauty. The beauty in her face, and the beauty in her soul.