Elizabeth Taylor: A Private Life for Public Consumption

From Shanisa Emmons (Bloomsbury Publishing)

Elizabeth Taylor: A Private Life for Public Consumption

Ellis Cashmore

“Examines Taylor with the thoroughness of a jeweller with a loupe” – The Sunday Times

“In the cigar-chomping Hollywood of the Fifties … how did Taylor manage to call the shots? Ellis Cashmore’s book is an impressive answer … [His] thesis … [on the effects of Taylor’s unfailing ability to merge art and life is what] makes his book compelling.” -The Daily Telegraph

“A rich and illuminating reassessment” – The Washington Post

The first volume to examine the iconic Elizabeth Taylor in this light, Cashmore 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 jewellery, 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 70.

Cashmore traces our modern, hyperactive celebrity culture back to a single instant in Taylor’s life: the publicising of her scandalous affair with Richard Burton 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.”

Ellis Cashmore is the author of Beyond Black: Celebrity and Race in Obama’s America and other books such as Martin Scorsese’s America and Tyson: Nurture of the Beast. He is currently Visiting Professor of Sociology at Aston University, UK, having previously held positions at the University of Tampa, USA, and the University of Hong Kong.

For more information click here: http://www.bloomsbury.com/elizabeth-taylor-9781628920697/

For an exclusive 20% UK discount use the code TAYLOR2016 (caps sensitive)at the checkout.

Shanisa Emmons
Bloomsbury Publishing
Film & Media
50 Bedford Square | London | WC1B 3DP