Taylor during filming of "Jane Eyre"
Forget National Velvet; forget Cleopatra.
For me, Elizabeth Taylor, whose death yesterday was just announced in the New York Times this morning, will always be Helen Burns from the 1943 version of Jane Eyre, a role for which she received no screen credit.
She’s the tiny, sickly orphaned waif whom Jane Eyre befriends when they are at Lowood, the miserable school where poor, sweet-natured Helen Burns, who at least believes she is going to heaven when she dies, nevertheless knows enough about the world to warn Jane that she has too much faith in the love of human beings.
I watched that movie—adapted from Bronte’s novel by John Houseman, Aldous Huxley, Henry Koster, and Robert Stevenson—every 15 minutes as I was growing up. It was part of the “Million Dollar Movie” series on New York television and those old films played as if on a loop-tape. I grew up memorizing the lines because I was mesmerized by the characters. Right up there with other heartbreakers and classics such as Moby Dick, Now Voyager, and Rebecca was Jane Eyre.
Even as a kid I knew that Elizabeth Taylor had gone on to become “a bombshell,” as they said about her in her prime, and I could tell what they meant when I watched her in A Day in the Sun (the adaptation of An American Tragedy) as that movie started to appear every 15 minutes on the small black-and-white TV in the basement.
But for me she was always Helen Burns in the pouring rain.
When I teach Bronte’s novel, I’m eager to let the class seek and discover its own reading, but there are some points I never let them miss. One of those is when Jane realizes she has a character built on defiance, a sense of rage, a lack of faith, and the ability to speak up for herself. She recognizes this as a little girl when she sees her friend collapse into the frailty and passivity—and inevitable death attached to them—and declares “I’m no Helen Burns.”
So entirely has this become a signature of my lectures on the novel, one set of students had a T-shirt made up for me where the line “I’m No Helen Burns” was spelled out in glitter.
Elizabeth Taylor was no Helen Burns, either. It seems as if she did every damn thing she ever wanted to do: made soap-opera appearances as well as defining the characters of Tennessee Williams so entirely that every actress following her in those roles has had to wrestle with Taylor’s portrayals; she married the men she wanted, sometimes several times; she ate what she wanted and had clothes made to fit her rather than trying to fit into some outfit a 13-year-old waif who weighed as much as Helen Burns could wear; she was amazing in BUtterfield 8, even though the rest of the cast was awful; she made her way, barging through life (even when she wasn’t playing Cleopatra) and made the world hers.
Here’s to Elizabeth Taylor, and giving credit where credits are due.
