Cleopatra

Tuesday

December 20, 2022

A definitive biography of Liz and Dick, Hollywood’s most controversial and glamorous couple

What is it about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor that still hooks us in, thirty-nine years after his death and twelve years after hers? In his magnificent, definitive double biography, Roger Lewis nails down the answer. Liz Taylor was the last great Hollywood movie star, starting in the golden age in National Velvet (1944), aged twelve. As Lewis puts it, her origins were in the magazines and movies of the Forties: “the era of Bing and Bob, Big Bands, such as Glenn Miller, Bogie...Tom and Jerry, Disney.

Art Tavana

Cleopatra still dazzles sixty years later

It’s a dazzlingly staged event that evokes the ancient theater, Italian operas, elaborately choreographed Busby Berkeley films and an open-air spectacle on par with WrestleMania at Caesar’s Palace. I’ve watched it knowing that as a small boy, I tugged on my mother’s blue jeans and asked a question informed purely by cinema: “Is Cleopatra the most beautifulest woman in history?” “No,” replied mother, with a cigarette stuck between her clenched teeth. “Elizabeth Taylor is.” I was, of course, picturing Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra. The event I’m referring to isn’t mere cinematic overindulgence; it is a monumental moment — six decades after moviegoers first saw it — which transforms a movie star into a deity.

Monday

July 17, 2023

Peter Wood

Shakespeare in black and white

Sarah Karim-Cooper first came to public attention at the cosmetics counter. Her book on makeup in Renaissance theater, Cosmetics in Shakespearean and Renaissance Drama, was published in 2006. Its enduring popularity is not so much a testament to her scholarly insights on powdered hogs’ bones mixed with poppy oil — the old stage recipe for pale skin — or Shakespeare’s sardonic references to the kind of beauty “purchased by the weight” in The Merchant of Venice, as to Karim-Cooper’s celebrity: for more than a decade she’s been one of the leading racializers of Shakespeare’s work. Perhaps the key moment in her rise to fame was her 2018 curation of the Globe Theatre’s first “Shakespeare and Race Festival,” now held annually.