5 Great Over-the-Top Elizabeth Taylor Performances

Let's be clear from the get-go: Elizabeth Taylor was perhaps the last of the great legendary movie stars, a tireless hero in the battle against HIV/AIDS, and arguably the epicenter of the pop/celebrity/gossip-culture universe for most of the 20th century. And the proof of her undeniable star power can be found in her most exaggerated performances.

Never dull and never phoned-in, an unhinged Taylor turn is more watchable than most performers' greatest moment on the screen. So while the mainstream obits remind us of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Giant, here are some examples of world-class scenery-chewing, as only Dame Elizabeth Taylor could give us:

Boom!

Taylor had previously teamed with playwright Tennessee Williams to great effect in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and the somewhat overripe Suddenly, Last Summer. (She's wonderfully ferocious in the latter, which gave us the iconic shot of Taylor on the beach in a snug white bathing suit.) But Boom! -- based on Williams' Broadway flop The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore, along with one of his short stories -- is a film so delectably terrible that John Waters considers it an all-time favorite, a masterpiece of what he calls "failed art." As for Taylor's imperious, demented performance as Sissy Goforth, the world's richest woman? Let's just say it's not too hard to see how Divine's starring role in Pink Flamingos was inspired by it. Nobody else could yell "S--t on your mother!" at a servant quite the way Taylor did and still make you feel like you should obey her every command.

X, Y and Zee

Taylor's Oscar win and universal acclaim for Virginia Woolf in 1966 led to a spate of let's-have-Liz-yell-at-people roles. Besides Boom!, there was this mod love triangle which starred Taylor as a shrewish wife sabotaging hubby Michael Caine's affair with designer Susannah York. The film features lots of the grimacing and caterwauling one finds in the most unrestrained Taylor roles, but she also rocks the early 1970s fashions like nobody's business. (In one scene, she wears a purple batik cape over a matching purple fringed poncho -- both go perfectly with her famous violet eyes, of course.) Far from merely playing the wronged wife, Taylor instead decides to hijack someone else's melodrama and turn it into her own show.

The Driver's Seat

More yelling, but this time Taylor finds herself adrift in a movie that literally seems to have no idea where it's going, despite the fact that it's supposedly based on a novel by Muriel Spark. The actress disturbs people on airplanes, gads about Rome, and ostensibly searches for someone to kill her. Word is that she made this movie purely to pay off some back taxes, but even so, she tears up the joint. If anyone's guiding this amorphous flick, it's Taylor -- she gives the movie a dark, mysterious edge that the filmmakers didn't seem to intend.

The V.I.P.s

International air travel used to be so exclusive and glamorous that you could set an entire movie about the beautiful people in the departure lounge of an airport, which is where several plots criss-cross in this glossy, absurd soap opera. Taylor and Richard Burton play an estranged couple -- he's come to the airport to stop her from running off with gigolo Louis Jourdan -- and even though they're essentially playing themselves (or the public's perception of what they were "really" like as a couple), Taylor sobs and frets and bites her knuckles with wonderfully overstated aplomb.

BUtterfield 8

Yes, yes, she won an Oscar for this performance, but have you actually watched it? Here's how one of Movieline's original Bad Movies We Love scholars describe the film's opening scene: "Taylor awakens alone in her married lover's bed, wraps herself in only a sheet, lights a cigar, slugs back a glass of whiskey, discovers her torn dress on the floor, brushes her teeth with booze, finds an envelope with $250 cash, scrawls "No Sale" in red lipstick across a mirror, leaves the money, steals the absent wife's full-length mink coat, calls her answering service, and hails a cab." And that's just the first few minutes! By the end of the film, Taylor's shrieking overripe dialogue like, "Face it, Mama, I was the slut of all time!" before twisting her face a million ways to Sunday in a grandiose death-by-overturned-auto. (The introduction's minimal dialogue is dubbed here in German, but you get the picture.)