A portrait of the period, used for Japanese print
Cementing her fame at Grauman’s Chinese Theater, a star honor granted after her performance in Giant. Rock Hudson was on hand.
By the time Giant premiered, Elizabeth had separated from Michael Wilding. Mike Todd escorted her to the opening.
Raintree County
METRO-GOLDWYN-MAYER
CAST
Montgomery Clift John Shawnessy
Elizabeth Taylor Susanna Drake
Eva Marie Saint Nell Gaither
Nigel Patrick Professor Jerusalem Webster Stiles
Lee Marvin Orville “Flash” Perkins
Rod Taylor Garwood B. Jones
Agnes Moorehead Ellen Shawnessy
Walter Abel T. D. Shawnessy
Jarma Lewis Barbara Drake
Tom Drake Bobby Drake
CREDITS
David Lewis (producer); Edward Dmytryk (director); Millard Kaufman (associate producer and screenplay), based on novel by Ross Lockridge, Jr.; Robert Surtees (photography); Johnny Green (music); William Horning, Urie McCleary (art directors); Edwin B. Willis, Hugh Hunt (set decorations); Wesley C. Miller (sound); John Dunning (editor); Walter Plunkett (costumes); Sydney Guilaroff (hairstylist); William Tuttle (makeup)
RELEASE DATE: December 20, 1957
RUN TIME: 188 minutes, color
As New Orleans belle Susanna Drake
SUMMARY: Belle of New Orleans Susanna Drake visits Indiana’s Raintree County and falls for John Shawnessy, who is already engaged to his sweetheart of years, Nell Gaither. Susanna proves irresistible to John, but she makes her hold on him official by telling John, falsely, that she is pregnant with his child. Marrying Susanna is a pleasure for John because he loves her. John’s love for Susanna comes without truly knowing her, though; he is unaware of the demons locked within her mind—or the secrets behind the death of her parents and Henrietta, the nanny Susanna so dearly loved. When the Civil War breaks out, abolitionist John joins the Union Army, putting him and Susanna on opposing sides of the political struggle. Susanna is ever more tortured by her dark childhood, eventually landing in an asylum. At war’s end John assists in Susanna’s recovery and considers a run for Congress. Susanna sees a bright future ahead for her husband in politics, but believes Nell would make a better wife by his side. What Susanna does to achieve her vision for John’s happiness is a shock to all of Raintree County.
The stars of Raintree County, at center: Eva Marie Saint, Montgomery Clift, and Elizabeth, flanked by, from left: NAME TK, director Edward Dmytryk, MGM studio chief Dore Schary, and NAME TK
Walter Plunkett’s costumes for the film earned him an Oscar nomination.
MGM had star power with Elizabeth in the female lead and Montgomery Clift as her costar.
Arriving with Clift in Kentucky for location filming
Ready to film a scene with Clift
Movie talk between the stars and director Edward Dmytryk
REVIEWS
“Millard Kaufman’s screenplay is a formless amoeba of a thing, and therein lies the fatal weakness of this costly, ambitious film. The people here are vaporous creatures, without clear personalities or drives, pasted together out of patches of literary clichés and poetic sentiments. What is more, the natures of their problems are too sketchily presented to bring them out. . . . Miss Taylor’s daughter of the Deep South is a vain, posey, shallow young thing whose only asset is her beauty.”
—The New York Times (Bosley Crowther)
“To say that it moves at a snail’s pace is to insult the snail. Director Edward Dmytryk could not have made a more sluggish drama if he projected magic lantern slides on the screen. . . . Elizabeth Taylor, as the frightened and pathetic wife, is the best of the actors.”
—New York Herald Tribune (William K. Zinsser)
The stars between takes
With one of her best friends, “Monty” Clift
Candid shot with Clift
The two friends comforted each other through their respective dramas during filming.
notes
MGM HAD ASPIRATIONS OF MOUNTING A PRODUCTION ON THE scale of Gone with the Wind with their screen adaptation of Raintree County, Ross Lockridge, Jr.’s novel of the Civil War–era South. The book was one of the bestsellers of 1948 and MGM quickly snapped up the film rights. Screenwriters tackled the assignment of producing a suitable script over the course of six years. The task was completed by Millard Kaufman, and Raintree County was finally ready to go before the cameras in April 1956. Cast and crew went on location to Kentucky and Tennessee, though the story was set in Indiana and New Orleans.
One innovation selected at the outset was that Raintree County would be photographed in a new widescreen process called Camera 65, which presented audiences with a wider-than-ever aspect ratio of 2.76:1. However, theaters were not equipped for the format and technical difficulties involving the audio ultimately caused it to be released in standard CinemaScope, familiar to audiences and theaters since 1953.
Though the Camera 65 gimmick proved disappointing, MGM had star power with Elizabeth in the female lead and Montgomery Clift as her costar. Elizabeth had not worked with her friend since A Place in the Sun, when he inspired her to want to become a truly fine actress and not just a decorative one. Elizabeth had never had any formal training. “If I have learned anything about acting,” she later said, “I learned it from my peers and the director.” Clift was certainly among those who taught her what it meant to push herself further when it came to acting: “Monty was the most emotional actor I have ever worked with, and it is contagious.”
The joy of working with Clift again turned to tragedy in the midst of filming when, driving home from a party at Elizabeth’s, groggy from mixing alcohol and prescription drugs, Clift was in a car crash just off of Elizabeth’s property. She ran to his aid, got in the car, and consoled him until the paramedics arrived. Clift was hospitalized and had to undergo reconstructive surgery on his face. The production of Raintree County was halted until Clift was ready to return to work. He did come back, but it was as a changed man, emotionally and physically marred. Elizabeth comforted her friend as best she could and got him through the rest of filming. He was commendable in Raintree County, but the change in him was evident.
Signing autographs for fans on the set
On the set with son Michael
Behind the scenes with Lee Marvin
A southern belle with a delicate grip on reality
Elizabeth needed comforting herself during production. Her marriage to Michael Wilding was ending, not through any great difference between them but mostly through sheer boredom. Elizabeth said, “After a while, we had nothing to talk about but what happened at the studio that day.” Enter film producer Mike Todd, bringing excitement into her life. He was a dynamo in the industry and in his private life, known for his larger-than-life personality. Elizabeth was enthralled by him almost from the start. During the making of his colossal all-star production Around the World in 80 Days in 1955, he wooed Elizabeth with diamonds and charm. Twenty-five years her senior and with a high-profile image of his own to maintain, he was not threatened by Elizabeth’s fame, as past boyfriends and husbands had been. He was also an earthy, worldly man with whom twenty-four-year-old Elizabeth could learn and mature. Friend and producer Joe Mankiewicz observed, “More than anyone realizes, Mike was responsible for the intellectual and emotional awakening of this girl.”
“If I have learned anything about acting, I learned it from my peers and the director.”
— ELIZABETH TAYLOR
Elaborate costuming was required for this period drama.
A makeup test shot
Stepping out of her dressing room for a wardrobe test
Between Montgomery Clift’s injuries, the failure of her second marriage, and the transformative courtship with Mike Todd, young Elizabeth had many more emotional experiences from which to draw in her work. Conscious of this or not, Elizabeth’s acting was improvi
ng with each performance, and as Susanna Drake in Raintree County she earned her first Academy Award nomination as Best Actress. She lost to Joanne Woodward in The Three Faces of Eve, but Elizabeth was honored by the recognition from the industry.
As Susanna Drake in Raintree County she earned her first Academy Award nomination as Best Actress.
When all was said and done, Raintree County took a massive job to edit down to a manageable length. MGM made versions of varying lengths available to theaters of the day, but the official extended cut (the version available today) was 188 minutes. The movie was produced on what was at that time a staggering budget of $5 million. It made a profit of $1 million, which was on the plus side but not approaching the success of some of Elizabeth’s prior films.
After making Raintree County Elizabeth took over a year off from movies and got her first taste of the jet-setting lifestyle for which she would later be known, by traveling to far-off places with Mike Todd. She married him on February 2, 1957. More time off was necessary before and after the birth of their daughter, Liza Todd, born August 6, 1957.
Elizabeth at a press conference
At the film’s premiere with Mike Todd. They were married by then.
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
METRO-GOLDWYN-MAYER/AVON PRODUCTIONS
CAST
Elizabeth Taylor Maggie
Paul Newman Brick Pollitt
Burl Ives Big Daddy
Jack Carson Gooper
Judith Anderson Big Momma
Madeleine Sherwood Mae
Larry Gates Dr. Baugh
Vaughn Taylor Deacon Davis
Deborah Miller Trixie
CREDITS
Lawrence Weingarten (producer); Richard Brooks (director); Richard Brooks, James Poe (screenplay), based on play by Tennessee Williams; William Daniels (photography); William A. Horning, Urie McCleary (art directors); Henry Grace, Robert Priestly (set decorations); Dr. Wesley C. Miller (sound); William Shanks (assistant director); Ferris Webster (editor); Helen Rose (costumes); William Tuttle (makeup); Sydney Guilaroff (hairstylist)
RELEASE DATE: September 20, 1958
RUN TIME: 108 minutes, color
SUMMARY: The Pollitt family gathers in New Orleans to celebrate Big Daddy’s sixty-fifth birthday. All except Big Daddy know that his health is precarious. When he will die, either of his sons, Brick or Gooper, stand to see the bulk of a vast inheritance. Big Daddy favors Brick and his wife, Maggie, to Gooper and his tribe of “no-neck monsters,” but the behavior of Brick, an ex–football hero with an inexplicable aversion to the sultry Maggie, gives Big Daddy pause. Maggie tries as best she can to make Brick desire her, and to decipher the true nature of Brick’s relationship with his best friend Skipper. Gooper and family tumble over themselves to get into Big Daddy’s good graces while Maggie can achieve that with just a smile. Greed, sexual tension, love, and deception all collide in a birthday blowout.
With Paul Newman, as Brick and Maggie
An ensemble cast consisting of Burl Ives, Paul Newman, Judith Anderson, Elizabeth, Madeleine Sherwood, and Jack Carson
REVIEWS
“Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is not only a powerful film, it is a conscientious and honest expression of all that is most important in Tennessee Williams’ extraordinary play from which it is derived. There are some muffled areas, not unnaturally, but it remains a work of rare intensity in which one staggering domestic crisis follows another and underlying morality overflows into matters of universal significance. . . . [Miss Taylor] gives a great deal of conviction and contributes much to the movie’s basic reality.”
—New York Herald Tribune (Paul V. Beckley)
“An all-fired lot of high-powered acting is done in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Burl Ives, Paul Newman, Elizabeth Taylor, Judith Anderson, Jack Carson, and two or three more almost work and yell themselves to pieces making this drama of strife within a new-rich Southern family a ferocious and fascinating show. . . . As a straight exercise in spewing venom and flinging dirty linen on a line, this fine Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer production in color would be hard to beat. It is done by superior talents, under the driving direction of Richard Brooks, making even the driest scenes drip poison with that strong, juicy Williams dialogue. And before the tubs full of pent-up fury, suspicion, and hatred are drained, every major performer in the company has had a chance to play at least one bang-up scene.”
—The New York Times (Bosley Crowther)
“What is the victory of a cat on a hot tin roof?” . . .
“Just stayin’ on it, I guess. Long as she can.”
notes
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS’S PULITZER PRIZE–WINNING PLAY Cat on a Hot Tin Roof laid the groundwork for one of the most sizzling, passionate performances ever committed to the screen in Hollywood. The play had debuted on Broadway in March 1955, directed by Elia Kazan and starring Barbara Bel Geddes and Ben Gazzara as Maggie and Brick. When MGM purchased the rights, the studio hired Burl Ives and Madeleine Sherwood to re-create their original roles, but for the film adaptation MGM cast powerhouse stars Paul Newman and Elizabeth as the protagonists. With director Richard Brooks at the helm, the company began principal photography on March 6, 1958.
Elizabeth threw herself into work to take her mind off of the pain of losing Todd.
Elizabeth fell ill with bronchitis soon after, preventing her from accompanying her husband on a jaunt to New York two weeks into filming, when Todd was to receive an honor from the National Association of Theater Owners as “Showman of the Year.” She saw him off when he boarded his private plane, the Lucky Liz, on March 22, 1958, and never saw him again. The plane crashed in New Mexico, and Mike Todd was killed on impact. A devastated Elizabeth took to her bed and was inconsolable. Three weeks later, she worked up the determination to go back to work. Cast and crew were extremely supportive. People noticed she was not eating. When it came time to film the scene in which the family sits around an outdoor table eating, Richard Brooks insisted on filming the scene over and over again, so that Elizabeth would get her nourishment.
Elizabeth threw herself into work to take her mind off of the pain of losing Todd. “I was lucky I had someone else to become,” she later said. “When I was Maggie was the only time I could function. The rest of the time I was a robot.” Brooks observed that the tragedy “helped her grow up. . . . She was enough of a pro and enough of an actress to know this was something that you use—that you use honorably, because to be the best that you can every time you come to bat was part of her credo.” She immersed herself in the role and threw raw emotion into her performance. At times it was difficult. If she would get overly emotional Brooks would direct her to “Use it!”
Finding the look of Maggie “the cat,” seen in a series of hairstyle test shots
Grief-stricken widow, at Mike Todd’s funeral
A token from Big Daddy, Burl Ives
Richard Brooks was floored by how much Elizabeth had grown as an actress. “What brought it about,” he said, “was life, pain, the necessity to work under adverse conditions as an artist and a woman, after years of an incredibly sheltered existence.”
On the set with director Richard Brooks
Burl Ives and Elizabeth
“That woman’s got life in her body.” Elizabeth was nominated for her performance both by the Hollywood and British motion picture academies.
“She was absolutely great,” said Brooks of her performance.
The target of one of the “no-neck monsters”
In particular Brooks later said he depended on Elizabeth to put across points of Tennessee Williams’s play that had been softened or edited out entirely for the censors. The subtext of Brick’s homosexuality vanished except for hints that came through in some of Elizabeth and Paul Newman’s scenes. Brooks told Elizabeth that he was relying on this unspoken message to come from her. Through to the end of filming in May 1958, Elizabeth was at the top of her game in terms of acting. Fortunately, she was also surrounded by a top-notch cast performing at the
same level. Elizabeth and Newman both received Academy Award nominations, as did Brooks, William Daniels for his cinematography, Brooks’s collaboration with James Poe on the screenplay, and the film itself for Best Picture.
There were no Oscar wins, but a $17.5 million gross showed that audiences came out en masse. A driving force behind the public interest was the scandal in which Elizabeth was embroiled at the time the film was released. While grieving for Mike Todd, she cried on the shoulder of his best friend, Eddie Fisher, and they fell into an affair. Fisher, of course, was married to Elizabeth’s close friend, actress Debbie Reynolds. The ensuing Liz-Eddie-Debbie scandal rocked the nation and Elizabeth, once the picture of a grieving widow with whom all were sympathetic, was vilified and called a home wrecker in all manner of media feeding the public. Some have speculated that it cost her the Oscar that year, which went to Susan Hayward for her performance in I Want to Live! The public indignation died down over time, and Elizabeth wed Eddie Fisher on May 12, 1959, shortly before going to work on her next film, Suddenly, Last Summer.
Elizabeth’s portrayal of Maggie in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof came about under the most trying of circumstances but she made it a signature performance. In later iterations on stage and screen, Maggie was played by Natalie Wood, Elizabeth Ashley, Jessica Lange, Kathleen Turner, and Ashley Judd, but none generated the excitement of Elizabeth Taylor oozing frustration, love, anger, sorrow, and sex appeal in one of her greatest performances.
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