Joan Crawford vs Elizabeth Taylor

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Auntie Carla

While I wouldn't say Crawford is a great actress...Liz Taylor really was a fairly horrible one (except for Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf), so...hmmmm.

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Although I understand that Auntie was good in her one line performance as the maid in Our American Cousin. Mary Lincoln actually laughed at her.

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

As much as I like Elizabeth Taylor, I'm afraid that she would win in the overacting contest. (Although I enjoyed her performance in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof).
Joan Crawford was actually a good actress, if she was given a good script.
(Mildred Pierce, Possessed 1947, Humoresque).

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

Elizabeth Taylor's voice has just always sounded so ungrounded to me. And not in a wispy, fragile way that might elicit an emotional response....but more in an undramatic way, like practically everything she says lacks conviction.

It's just hard to take her seriously with that colorless voice.

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Both were quite good in some roles, less effective in others.

Crawford had that well-practice grand dame "diva" voice, deep and resonant. Sometimes Elizabeth's shrill "fishwife" voice (which she was well aware of) got in her way in terms of her performance in certain films, and sometimes it didn't.

But as someone once observed, few people could match Taylor for heartbroken soliloquy. She could be very effective in some movies (and I think she earned that Oscar for BUTTERFIELD 8 -- sure, the film was a mediocre sudser, but she lifts it to a level of art with her indignance, and at a time before the public had become accustomed to her regal vulgarian persona of the '60s.

Interestingly, Crawford paid Taylor a compliment in 1966 when she said that although she'd been known to be critical of Taylor's personal life ("I shouldn't have done that ... I'm not exactly Goldilocks myself") that over the last few years, Elizabeth has "given some of the finest performances I have ever seen."

Even Katharine Hepburn told her biographer that while she thought Taylor was more interested in being a movie star than an actress, to "make no mistake: Elizabeth Taylor is a brilliant actress...."

So if Joan and Kate give Cleopatra the heart-felt thumbs up, who are we to disagree?

--
LBJ's mistress on JFK:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WcXeutDmuRA