Wednesday, March 23, 2011

Elizabeth Taylor (R.I.P.) as Katherine in The Taming of the Shrew

The Taming of the Shrew. Dir. Franco Zeffirelli. Perf. Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. 1967. DVD. Sony, 1999.

Today, 23 March 2011, Elizabeth Taylor died. Her Katherine was magnificent, as was the Helen of Troy she played in the Doctor Faustus directed by Richard Burton.

I'm out of town, so I can't cull a clip right now, but her version of Katherine's "I am ashamed that women are so simple" speech is remarkable. She plays it absolutely straight, leaving it up to us to determine just how much of it Katherine embraces and how much is merely a façade.

The face (or the eyes?) that launched a thousand ships (and seven or eight marriages, depending on whether you count Richard Burton once or twice) has departed from the world, but she has left a marvelous legacy behind her.

Links: The Film at IMDB.

Click below to purchase the two films mentioned above
from amazon.com
(and to support Bardfilm as you do so).

2 comments:

Duane Morin said...

I got your back:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AcQudMqwqpQ

Duane Morin said...

You know, upon watching it let's make sure to give credit to Petruchio's "WTF is going on??" stare through the whole thing. That, if anything, shows me that she was playing him.

Bardfilm is normally written as one word, though it can also be found under a search for "Bard Film Blog." Bardfilm is a Shakespeare blog (admittedly, one of many Shakespeare blogs), and it is dedicated to commentary on films (Shakespeare movies, The Shakespeare Movie, Shakespeare on television, Shakespeare at the cinema), plays, and other matter related to Shakespeare (allusions to Shakespeare in pop culture, quotes from Shakespeare in popular culture, quotations that come from Shakespeare, et cetera).

Unless otherwise indicated, quotations from Shakespeare's works are from the following edition:
Shakespeare, William. The Riverside Shakespeare. 2nd ed. Gen. ed. G. Blakemore Evans. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997.
All material original to this blog is copyrighted: Copyright 2008-2039 (and into perpetuity thereafter) by Keith Jones.

The very instant that I saw you did / My heart fly to your service; there resides, / To make me slave to it; and, for your sake, / Am I this patient [b]log-man.

—The Tempest