Hollywood Laughed When She Was 61Then Her Last Film Shocked Everyone With $341 Million

Hollywood Laughed When She Was 61Then Her Last Film Shocked Everyone With $341 Million 

How a cartoon about Stone Age suburbanites became the final, definitive proof that Elizabeth Taylor had always been the smartest person in the room. In the spring of 1993, Elizabeth Taylor walked onto a movie set that made every Hollywood reporter burst out laughing. She was 61 years old. She had just spent a decade fighting a battle that nearly killed her.

And she had chosen, with full awareness, to play a cartoon character’s mother in a movie about prehistoric suburbanites. The entire industry thought she had lost her mind. What happened next proved that Elizabeth Taylor had never, in 60 years, made a single mistake they understood in time. If this story is new to you, subscribe before you keep reading.

Because this is the kind of story that only gets told here, and once you know how it ends, you will want to be here for everything that comes next. To understand what Elizabeth Taylor was doing in 1993, you have to understand what the 1980s had actually done to her, because the public version and the true version are almost completely different.

The public version was a woman in slow decline, photographed at unfortunate angles, ridiculed in gossip columns. The true version was something far more instructive. In 1983, Elizabeth checked herself into the Betty Ford Center in Rancho Mirage, California. She was 51 years old, and she had been dependent on prescription painkillers and alcohol for the better part of two decades.

The origins went back further than most people realized, to a spinal injury sustained in 1956 that left her in chronic pain for the rest of her life, and to the culture of the MGM studio system, which had employed her since childhood and which managed its assets with whatever pharmaceutical assistance kept production schedules on track.

By the time Elizabeth walked into Betty Ford, she had been managing pain for nearly 40 years. What happened inside the treatment center would not become public for years. But what came out of it changed everything, not just for Elizabeth, but for every person watching. She was not the first famous person to seek treatment for addiction.

She was, however, one of the first to speak about it publicly and without apology. In 1985, two years after her first stay at Betty Ford, she would return in 1988, because recovery is rarely a single event. Elizabeth gave an interview in which she described her dependency with a clarity almost without precedent for a person of her stature.

She did not frame it as weakness or moral failure. She described it as a medical reality that had been systematically ignored. The response was enormous. Letters came from people who recognized, sometimes for the first time, that what was happening in their own households had a name, a treatment, and a path forward.

This was the woman who arrived at Universal Studios in the spring of 1993 to begin production on The Flintstones. Not the faded star the gossip columns. Not the cautionary tale. A woman who had walked through something genuinely difficult and come out with a clear-eyed understanding of what mattered and what did not.

 And which opportunities were worth taking precisely because everyone else thought they were beneath her. The Flintstones had been in development at Universal for years before Elizabeth became attached to it. The film was based on the Hanna-Barbera animated series that had run on American television from 1960 to 1966. A show whose nostalgia among the generation that grew up watching it was genuine and deep.

Universal had assembled a strong cast. John Goodman as Fred Flintstone, Rick Moranis as Barney Rubble, Rosie O’Donnell as Betty, Halle Berry in a scene-stealing supporting role. And Elizabeth Taylor as Pearl Slaghoople, Wilma’s mother, a woman constitutionally incapable of approval and magnificently committed to the art of the withering remark.

The industry response, when casting was announced, was exactly what you would expect from an industry that had spent 30 years misunderstanding Elizabeth Taylor. There was amusement. There was the kind of polite concern that is barely distinguishable from condescension. There were columns written about the diminishment of a legend, the pathos of a great career ending in a children’s film, the inevitable decline of the glamorous.

What none of these responses acknowledged, because acknowledging it would have required a degree of self-awareness that celebrity journalism rarely demands of itself, was that Elizabeth had made this decision deliberately, with full knowledge of how it would be received, and with a very specific understanding of what she was actually doing.

She was not taking the only offer on the table. She was taking the offer that most interested her. And the reason it interested her was one that nobody covering the story bothered to ask about. Pearl Slaghoople was a comedic role, and Elizabeth had never been properly credited for her comedic abilities. This is one of the genuinely underappreciated aspects of her career.

The films that won her Academy Awards, Butterfield 8 in 1960, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf in 1966, were dramas of emotional intensity that tended to define public perception of her range. But people who had worked closely with her described performer with a gift for comic timing that was precise and almost entirely self-taught.

John Goodman, who spent weeks working with her, said her instincts were remarkable, that she understood comedy structurally, that she knew exactly where the pause belonged and never put it anywhere else. Comic timing is among the most technical skills in performance. It cannot be faked.

 There was also something else at work in her decision, something that requires a small detour into the history of what Elizabeth had been doing with her public life in the years immediately preceding The Flintstones. Because the 1980s had not only been the decade of Betty Ford in recovery, they had been the decade of the AIDS crisis, and Elizabeth Taylor’s response to that crisis is, by any reasonable measure, one of the most consequential things any individual in the entertainment industry has ever done.

In 1985, Rock Hudson, Elizabeth’s friend and co-star from Giant, the 1956 film that had been one of the formative experiences of both their careers, became the first major public figure to announce that he had AIDS. His death that October, at the age of 59, had an effect on public consciousness that is difficult to overstate from the current vantage point.

 It made the epidemic undeniable to an audience that had been able, until that moment, to maintain a comfortable distance from it. It made the human cost visible in a way that statistics could not. And it put a demand on everyone who had known Rock Hudson, everyone who moved in the world he had inhabited, to respond somehow, to say something, to do something, or to remain silent and let their silence be its own kind of statement.

 Most people in Hollywood chose silence, at least initially. Some of it was fear. Fear of association. Fear of a disease still poorly understood. Fear of the political consequences of advocacy in a moment when the administration in Washington was treating the epidemic as something that could simply be ignored. Some of it was the particular cowardice of people in a reputation-dependent industry unwilling to risk what they had built.

Elizabeth had no patience for any of it. In 1985, she co-founded amfAR, the American Foundation for AIDS research, and she did not do so quietly. She testified before Congress. She attended fundraisers when other celebrities declined. She used her name, her face, and her particular talent for demanding attention in service of an organization that would ultimately raise over $270 million for research and treatment.

 People in rooms where she spoke described the silence afterward as the kind that happens when a crowd has been genuinely moved rather than merely impressed. She was not performing. She was furious, and it showed, and it worked. The most striking thing about her activism was not the money. It was what she said and where she said it.

 She was saying things that nobody of her visibility had ever said before, in rooms that had never heard them. By 1993, she had been doing this work for 8 years. She had also been doing it while managing her own recovery, while navigating the chronic physical pain that had never entirely left her since the spinal injury of the 1950s, and while maintaining a public presence that required a constant negotiation between the image the world had constructed of her and the person she actually was.

Against this backdrop, the decision to play Pearl Slaghoople in a Flintstones movie reads rather differently than it did in the entertainment columns of that year. It reads like someone who had earned the right to do exactly what she wanted, who understood that the opinion of people who had consistently misread her for six decades was not a meaningful data point, and who was, in the plainest possible sense, enjoying herself.

Production on The Flintstones ran through the summer of 1993 at Universal Studios, with location shooting in Arizona for the exterior sequences. Elizabeth’s scenes were concentrated primarily in the domestic interiors of the Flintstone house, where Pearl Slaghoople functioned as the comic antagonist to Fred’s aspirations and Wilma’s patient endurance of both of them.

The character was physically demanding in a particular way. The costuming required for the prehistoric aesthetic involved substantial prosthetics and materials that were not designed for comfort, and Elizabeth was working in summer heat in a heavy costume that would have tested performers a quarter of her age.

What the crew noticed, consistently, was that she came prepared, not merely professionally prepared in the general sense, but specifically and thoroughly prepared. She knew her lines. She had thought about the character, and she had ideas about how Pearl should be played that were not always identical to what the script suggested, and that were, in the recollection of people who were present, almost uniformly improvements.

Director Brian Levant described working with her as one of the most instructive experiences of his professional life. He had expected, based on the reputation that preceded her, a degree of star-specific resistance, the protective behavior that very famous people sometimes adopt as a defense against being managed.

He found, instead, a colleague, someone interested in getting the scene right, willing to try different approaches, with a genuine investment in the comedy working rather than simply in her own performance landing. What nobody on that set fully understood yet was that they were watching something that would not become apparent until much later.

Elizabeth Taylor was not making a comeback. She was making a closing argument. John Goodman has talked about their scenes together in terms that are revealing. He described the experience as intimidating in the best possible sense. The intimidation that comes from working opposite someone whose precision makes your own instincts sharper, whose timing creates a pressure that lifts rather than diminishes.

He described a quality of presence he recognized immediately. The quality of someone completely inside a scene rather than performing alongside it. Genuinely reacting rather than executing a prepared response. This is not common. It is particularly uncommon in performers who have been working at Elizabeth’s level for five decades, where the habits of long professional success can calcify into technique at the expense of spontaneity.

Elizabeth, in his account, had maintained both. The Flintstones opened on Memorial Day weekend in May of 1994. The critical response was mixed in the way that films made from beloved animated properties almost always receive a mixed critical response. Reviewers were uncertain about the faithfulness of the adaptation, divided about the tonal register, and generally conflicted about whether nostalgia for the source material was being honored or merely exploited.

What was not mixed was the audience response. The film grossed over $341 million worldwide on a budget of 46 million, making it one of the most commercially successful films of that year and one of the most profitable live-action adaptations of an animated property that had been produced up to that point. The reviews of Elizabeth specifically were, without significant exception, positive.

Not the kind of polite positive that reviewers extend to legendary performers in minor roles as a courtesy, but the kind of positive that indicates genuine surprise. The recognition that someone had delivered a performance that exceeded what the reviewer had expected to see. That the work was actually good rather than simply adequate.

 That the legend, in this instance, was not trading on accumulated goodwill, but earning a new assessment. There was a quality of reluctant admission in some of the notices that is, in retrospect, rather satisfying. The columnists who had spent the previous year suggesting that she was diminished found themselves in the position of recalibrating and doing so in print.

 And doing so without any particularly graceful way of acknowledging that they had been wrong. She had been here before. She would be, in the mathematics of her career, exactly here one more time. Because The Flintstones was not a comeback. It was a conclusion. And Elizabeth Taylor knew that better than anyone.

 In the months following the film’s release, Elizabeth gave a small number of interviews about her decision to take the role. What is striking about these, read together, is the absence of defensiveness. She did not explain herself or justify the choice. She described what had interested her about Pearl Slaghoople, what she had enjoyed about the filming, what she admired about her co-stars.

She spoke about comedy with the fluency of someone who had thought carefully about what made it work. And in one interview, she offered a single sentence that deserves to be considered carefully. She said that she had spent her career doing what other people thought she should, and that she intended to spend the rest of it doing what she found interesting.

The sentence was offered almost as an afterthought, which is perhaps why it has stayed with the people who heard it. Elizabeth Taylor did not make another film after The Flintstones. She made television appearances, continued her work with amfAR, and lived in Bel Air with her dogs, her art collection, and her friends, who were numerous and loyal and included, until his death in 2009, Michael Jackson, with whom she had formed one of the stranger and more genuinely affectionate friendships in the recent history of celebrity.

She died on March 23rd, 2011 at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles of congestive heart failure. She was 79 years old. The obituaries were, on the whole, generous and respectful and organized around the narrative that had defined public understanding of her for decades. The violet eyes, the marriages, the scandals, the MGM childhood, the Burton years, the AIDS activism, the recovery.

What most of them did not find a way to adequately address was the specific quality that The Flintstones had illuminated so clearly for anyone who was paying attention in 1994. The quality of someone who had simply never required outside permission to know who she was. The industry had laughed at her choice in 1993, and she had let them laugh, and she had gone to work, and she had been excellent at the work, and the film had made $300 million, and she had returned home and continued her life.

The arc of the story was entirely consistent with every other arc in her career. The people who laughed always came around eventually. She never seemed to need them to. There is something worth sitting with in the image of Elizabeth Taylor at 61, in a heavy prehistoric costume in the Arizona heat, delivering comic lines with the precision of someone who had been studying the architecture of a joke for 50 years.

It is not the image that gets attached to her name in the historical imagination, which tends toward the younger photographs, the violet eyes, the jewels, the glamour of the Cleopatra years. But it is, in certain ways, the most purely characteristic image of her. The one that contains, in concentrated form, the stubbornness and the intelligence and the refusal to accept other people’s definitions of what she was and what she was capable of.

 The willingness to be laughed at in the knowledge that the laughter would eventually stop and the work would remain. The entire industry thought she had lost her mind. She was, as she had almost always been, simply ahead of where they were looking.