Elizabeth Taylor connections to Ransom Center holdings

Actress Elizabeth Taylor, who died today at the age of 79, has connections to the Ransom Center holdings, ranging from the Mel Gussow collection to the Ernest Lehman collection.

The former New York Times theater critic Mel Gussow, who died in 2005, wrote Elizabeth Taylor’s obituary. His obituary, with updated contributions from other reporters, was posthumously published today in the New York Times.

The Lehman collection, consisting of more than 2500 items, spans the forty year career of the screenwriter, novelist, short story writer, journalist, motion picture producer and director. Included in the collection are scripts, correspondence, photographs and other material from the production of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? for which Lehman wrote the screen adaption and produced. The 1966 release of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? won Elizabeth Taylor her second Academy Award for her performance as a bitter faculty wife, Martha.

As a part of the Ransom Center’s Tennessee Williams Film Series, the Ransom Center will show Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), starring Elizabeth Taylor as Maggie “the Cat” on Thursday, June 23 at 7 p.m. Included in the Ransom Center’s current exhibition Becoming Tennessee Williams is an unidentified magazine clipping titled, Liz Plays “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.” Though Taylor did not fit Williams’s own idea of Maggie the Cat, Taylor is praised in the article for making herself “believable as a rejected wife, determined somehow to win back her cold and hostile husband.”