Reviews
"'A Private Life' offers a rich and illuminating reassessment, invigorating the somewhat lackluster discourse about the iconic movie star. Although there are at least 10 biographies of Elizabeth Taylor, Cashmore's lively study provides a compelling interpretation and bridges the many gaps between Taylor's impact on the American zeitgeist and her alluring, infamous life." - The Washington Post "Cashmore ( Beyond Black: Celebrity and Race in Obama's America ) combines broad research and personal observations in this lively study examining how Elizabeth Taylor transformed our perception of modern celebrity." - Publishers Weekly, "'A Private Life' offers a rich and illuminating reassessment, invigorating the somewhat lackluster discourse about the iconic movie star. Although there are at least 10 biographies of Elizabeth Taylor, Cashmore's lively study provides a compelling interpretation and bridges the many gaps between Taylor's impact on the American zeitgeist and her alluring, infamous life." - The Washington Post "Cashmore ( Beyond Black: Celebrity and Race in Obama's America ) combines broad research and personal observations in this lively study examining how Elizabeth Taylor transformed our perception of modern celebrity." - Publishers Weekly " Elizabeth Taylor: A Private Life for Public Consumption (Bloomsbury) by Ellis Cashmore is a lively study not only of the iconic movie star's sometimes stormy life but of how she changed our ideas about celebrity as well as entering the business and political arenas." --Colette Bancroft, The Tampa Bay Times "This was simply a great book. It had so much information about, not only, Elizabeth Taylor but also of all the other people that she came into contact with. It was wonderfully written and told a tale that I hadn't read before. I think that Elizabeth would have approved." -- bookschellves " Internet-age approach to a Golden Age movie star." -- The Novascotian, "'A Private Life' offers a rich and illuminating reassessment, invigorating the somewhat lackluster discourse about the iconic movie star. Although there are at least 10 biographies of Elizabeth Taylor, Cashmore's lively study provides a compelling interpretation and bridges the many gaps between Taylor's impact on the American zeitgeist and her alluring, infamous life." - The Washington Post "Cashmore ( Beyond Black: Celebrity and Race in Obama's America ) combines broad research and personal observations in this lively study examining how Elizabeth Taylor transformed our perception of modern celebrity." - Publishers Weekly " Elizabeth Taylor: A Private Life for Public Consumption (Bloomsbury) by Ellis Cashmore is a lively study not only of the iconic movie star's sometimes stormy life but of how she changed our ideas about celebrity as well as entering the business and political arenas." --Colette Bancroft, The Tampa Bay Times "This was simply a great book. It had so much information about, not only, Elizabeth Taylor but also of all the other people that she came into contact with. It was wonderfully written and told a tale that I hadn't read before. I think that Elizabeth would have approved." -- bookschellves " Internet-age approach to a Golden Age movie star." -- The Chronicle Herald "Was [Elizabeth Taylor] a feminist influence, as some claim? Did she deliberately set out to make herself controversial, in the manner of Madonna? ... [Ellis Cashmore] intelligently and dramatically addresses these questions and subjects." -Liz Smith, New York Social Diary, "'A Private Life' offers a rich and illuminating reassessment, invigorating the somewhat lackluster discourse about the iconic movie star. Although there are at least 10 biographies of Elizabeth Taylor, Cashmore's lively study provides a compelling interpretation and bridges the many gaps between Taylor's impact on the American zeitgeist and her alluring, infamous life." - The Washington Post "Cashmore ( Beyond Black: Celebrity and Race in Obama's America ) combines broad research and personal observations in this lively study examining how Elizabeth Taylor transformed our perception of modern celebrity." - Publishers Weekly " Elizabeth Taylor: A Private Life for Public Consumption (Bloomsbury) by Ellis Cashmore is a lively study not only of the iconic movie star's sometimes stormy life but of how she changed our ideas about celebrity as well as entering the business and political arenas." --Colette Bancroft, The Tampa Bay Times "This was simply a great book. It had so much information about, not only, Elizabeth Taylor but also of all the other people that she came into contact with. It was wonderfully written and told a tale that I hadn't read before. I think that Elizabeth would have approved." -- bookschellves, In prose that is engaging and enlightening, Ellis Cashmore shows how Elizabeth Taylor changed everything we presently know about celebrity and the way it works. As a child actress who never left the limelight and for decades reigned as one the world's most famous and most scandalous moviestars, Elizabeth Taylor's greatest role was playing herself. Cashmere here shows how a disintegration of the private that now seems commonplace was condensed in and through the figure of Elizabeth Taylor, the first modern celebrity., "Cashmore ( Beyond Black: Celebrity and Race in Obama's America ) combines broad research and personal observations in this lively study examining how Elizabeth Taylor transformed our perception of modern celebrity." - Publishers Weekly, "'A Private Life' offers a rich and illuminating reassessment, invigorating the somewhat lackluster discourse about the iconic movie star. Although there are at least 10 biographies of Elizabeth Taylor, Cashmore's lively study provides a compelling interpretation and bridges the many gaps between Taylor's impact on the American zeitgeist and her alluring, infamous life." - The Washington Post "Cashmore ( Beyond Black: Celebrity and Race in Obama's America ) combines broad research and personal observations in this lively study examining how Elizabeth Taylor transformed our perception of modern celebrity." - Publishers Weekly " Elizabeth Taylor: A Private Life for Public Consumption (Bloomsbury) by Ellis Cashmore is a lively study not only of the iconic movie star's sometimes stormy life but of how she changed our ideas about celebrity as well as entering the business and political arenas." --Colette Bancroft, The Tampa Bay Times "This was simply a great book. It had so much information about, not only, Elizabeth Taylor but also of all the other people that she came into contact with. It was wonderfully written and told a tale that I hadn't read before. I think that Elizabeth would have approved." -- bookschellves " Internet-age approach to a Golden Age movie star." -- The Chronicle Herald
Synopsis
The first volume to examine the iconic Elizabeth Taylor in this light, Elizabeth Taylor: A Private Life for Public Consumption paints Taylor as the seminal representation of "celebrity." A figure of enormous charisma and cultural sway, she intrigued a global audience with her marriages and extra-marital improprieties, as well as her extravagant jewelry, her never-ending illnesses, her dependency on alcohol, and her perplexing friendship with Michael Jackson. Despite her continued world-renown, however, most people would be hard-pressed to name even three of her films, though she made over seventy. Ellis Cashmore traces our modern, hyperactive celebrity culture back to a single instant in Taylor's life: the publicizing of her scandalous affair with Richard Burton by photographer Marcelo Geppetti in 1962, which announced the arrival of a new generation of predatory photojournalists and, along with them, a strange conflation between the public and private lives of celebrities. Taylor's life and public reception, Cashmore reveals, epitomizes the modern phenomenon of "celebrity."
