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We love to graft Big Ideas onto Big Stars. John Wayne is America, Elvis Presley is The King, Marlon Brando is The Rebel, Bob Dylan is The Prophet.
Elizabeth Taylor is so big we keep adding ideas onto her. She's been The Beauty, The Star, The Great Actress, The Husband Collector.
But The Feminist?
So argues M.G. Lord, in "The Accidental Feminist: How Elizabeth Taylor Raised Our Consciousness and We Were Too Distracted by Her Beauty to Notice."
There's an interesting idea lurking here, but it's obscured by insights that are simultaneously thin and overreaching. Which is kind of a shame, since anything that gets you past the glitter and into Taylor's movies isn't a bad thing.
Lord has Taylor carrying that banner from childhood. "National Velvet," Lord says, is based on a fierce, gender-bending polemic of a children's novel, with Taylor - all of 12 years old at the time - taking a stand for equality by posing as a male jockey to win the big race.
The 1944 movie helped make Taylor a star,...