Under the tutelage of Harry Belafonte, Makeba pleaded the case of her people to audiences across America during the height of this nation’s civil rights struggle. In 1962, she performed at President Kennedy’s famous birthday party in Madison Square Garden (also on the bill that night: Marilyn Monroe singing “Happy Birthday”). By 1967, she had a top-selling song on the Billboard singles charts; today that infectious dance tune, “Pata Pata,” has found new life in commercials, and has been re-recorded for her new CD.

In 1968, after two previous marriages (one to trumpet legend Hugh Masekela), Makeba married controversial black activist Stokely Carmichael and lost her spot as toast of the town. She was merely toast. Her gigs were canceled and her career in the United States tanked until the strife in South Africa captured the American imagination during the 1980s. By then, her marriage to Carmichael, who died in 1998 of prostate cancer, was over, and she had lost her only child, her daughter Bongi, to complications of the daughter’s delivery of a stillborn baby.

After 30 years in exile, Makeba returned to South Africa at the close of 1990, and she makes her home there today. Last month, Putamayo World Music released “Homeland,” her first new recording in six years. It’s a mix of strong, captivating African-language pieces, and a few English-language songs in the American pop vein.

At 68, Makeba’s voice has grown even richer and more commanding — qualities tempered by a crackliness that has come with age. This is particularly apparent on the remake of “Pata Pata,” a duet with her sweet-voiced granddaughter, Zenzi Lee. (Makeba’s grandson, Nelson Lee, also appears on “Homeland.”) In the spoken bits of the song, Makeba exudes a sort of bemused world-weariness, an attitude that carries into our conversation when I ask her about her decision to re-record the song.

“I didn’t decide that,” she insists. It was the idea of her producer, Cedric Samson, she says.

“I said, ‘No, man — ‘Pata Pata’ since 1956!’” (Makeba first recorded the song in South Africa 11 years before it made the charts in the U.S.)

Samson convinced her to do it “just for fun,” she explains, so they recorded it live in the studio in a couple of takes. The beat has been slowed down to hip-hop standards, the drums are synthesized and the background vocals have acquired a bluesy bend.

Makeba has always rejected the label of political singer or political activist, countering the claim with the assertion that she merely conveys the truth. “Everybody now admits that apartheid was wrong, and all I did was tell the people who wanted to know where I come from how we lived in South Africa. I just told the world the truth. And if my truth then becomes political, I can’t do anything about that.”

“And your marriage to Carmichael was not, as many claimed, a political statement?”

“How can anybody say that? In this country, for instance, there are people, couples [where] one is Republican and one is Democrat. But no one looks at that as anything. I never seconded any of Stokely’s statements. I mean, he went out there and made his own statements, and he believed in what he believed in. And I can say he died believing in that. He never changed.”

The pain of what happened to her career in the wake of that marriage is still apparently raw; she still seems shocked that her then-husband’s advocacy of taking up arms against the white man should have had any bearing on her own fortunes, especially since she never commented on U.S. domestic politics. And she is right; it was unjust. But her surprise at the image-conscious music industry’s response to her marriage seems startlingly naive, given the convulsions over race experienced throughout American society during the 1960s, not to mention the subordinate role expected of wives to husbands at that time.

“Did you get to see Carmichael before he died?” I ask.

“He came to South Africa and I saw him there,” she says, matter-of-factly. “He came to the unveiling of Steve Biko’s tombstone … And he came to my home [in Johannesburg], but I wasn’t there. And so I went to see him where he was staying because I knew he had been reported ill. I just wanted to go and see him. And I remember that he was leaving to go to the Cape where the unveiling was going to take place. Actually I found him packing … He came down and said hello.”

Letta M’boulu, a singer whose career Makeba promoted in the 1960s, was there with her husband, she says. Whatever emotion she felt at the meeting is not for me to know. It is presented as little more than pleasantries exchanged between acquaintances.

“Then I was invited to come here to Washington when he was honored by all the black important people just before he went to Guinea to die,” she says. “But I couldn’t come. I had been engaged to go perform, and I couldn’t get out of it.”

Big things happen in Makeba’s life while she is on the road, and she is rarely able to cancel a gig, she says, since bad management at the height of her career left her dependent on performances for her income. She receives little money from her recordings, and none, she contends, from the hits she made in the 1960s.

Of all the intrigue and legend of Makeba’s life, perhaps the most consistent theme of her work is the idea of home. After 30 years away, three decades lived as a citizen of the world, how comfortable does she find the South Africa of today? The title of a cut on the advance copy of the “Homeland” CD grabs my attention: “Unhome.” It turns out to be a misprint. When I raise it with Makeba, she corrects me: “UM-home,” she says.

The song is a searing lament in Xhosa, Makeba’s native tongue. The words seem secondary to the cry of desolation conveyed by the singer. I ask her what the lyric means.

It is, she explains, the story of a young woman, newly married in the traditional manner. When it is time for her to go to live with her husband’s family, she is escorted to his home, as is customary, by a young woman from her village, who her new husband falls for.

There’s a knock at the door. I instinctively get up to answer it; it’s the room service waiter with a silver coffee service, which he places on the cocktail table before us, as I move a blood-pressure monitor out of the way. Makeba is not one who has made it this long by dint of good health. She’s had bouts with cancer and, early in her career, survived a gruesome car accident in South Africa. After happening upon the wreck, a white policeman had left Makeba and members of the act, Township Jazz, with which she was performing at the time on the road to die. Three of her fellow troupers did.

Makeba returns to her narrative about the bride in her song.

“Now she’s thinking of the dowry the parents had paid, you know, there are a lot of difficulties,” she explains. “You can’t go back home. You’ll be an embarrassment, so what do you do? So she goes outside and sits on a rock and she says, ‘I have nowhere to go, nowhere to hide. This feeling, I cannot explain. And I cannot go back home.’”

There’s an obvious resonance there for Makeba, but not only in the idea of exile. Her first marriage, the one of which her daughter was born, was to a black South African policeman, whom Makeba caught in flagrante with her sister.

The song as it appears on the CD is Makeba’s own interpretation of it, she says, “but it’s an old song I learned from my grandmother. She used to sing this and explain it. I used to wonder if she didn’t go through this because she sang it very well, with so much feeling. And she would look that sad.”

But back to that question of home, I say. Is she really at home in today’s South Africa?

“Well, it’s still the same place, where I left my umbilical cord,” she contends. “In the mind, in the heart, I was always home. I always imagined, really, going back home. Because when I left home [in 1959] I had no intentions of not going back.”

She cites “Masakhane,” the new CD’s opening cut, a rousing number, beautifully composed by Zamo Mbutho, one of the musicians in her band. Written with a Xhosa lyric, the title is a word coined by activists to describe an idealized spirit of nation-building. “This young man knows,” she says of Mbutho. “He’s with me all the time because we work together, we travel. And he knows how happy I am to be back home. There’s a part where it says [she sings]: ‘Sengi buyele mna singibuyile khaya Kwasi kwamnand, ekhaya we vumanibo He mn.’ It means: I’m back! I am back home! And it’s so wonderful; it is so great to be back home. So let’s all get up!”

“A lot of things have changed” in South Africa, she continues. “We’re now able to go to places we were never allowed to go to. Look at black and white children, all those races, going to the same schools, and so on. And here are some beautiful things that have happened. But it’s just still now the poverty and the homelessness that we have to work hard on now. So the struggle goes on.”

“How do you keep the struggle your own,” I ask, “without succumbing to the demands of Western powers whose development money holds the key to developing resources?”

“But the resources, the natural resources,” she says, “they all belong to that very troubled continent of Africa. And I believe that it becomes a troubled continent because there are those who must always cause confusion so that we do not keep these natural resources. For instance, we’re always fighting amongst each other. Who gives us the arms? And then we become indebted to wherever we are buying them from — with what? The very resources we need to keep there.”

It’s time, she says, for the people of Africa to “stop fighting and just be soldiers, beautiful soldiers, who should fight, not against each other or other nations, but fight disease, fight hunger, fight all the ills of the world and bring our people up to a much better way of living. I just wish that that should happen, and it must happen someday. Otherwise, I will look up to the Superior Being and say, ‘What is it that we have done?’ I mean, it cannot go on forever; it should not go on forever.”

She notes the West’s late response to the March floods in Mozambique. “Flood, flood, flood all over; I was never so sad,” she says. “And I cried when I saw that woman have a baby on a tree. I mean, really. And it was so strange that there is little South Africa can do; we were hit in [northern South Africa] by the flood. And our country was struggling there and then also had to go and help in Mozambique with the limited means we have. And the world did not come through until 10, 12 days later. That was the strangest thing, too, and it hurt. It hurt those of us who do love our troubled continent. And you ask yourself the question, why?”

Of the prospect for racial harmony in her own country, Makeba remains cautiously optimistic, though she concedes that legal change alone will not do the trick.

“When you have the laws that people can go to and say, ‘You can’t do this to me because the law says you cannot do it,’ — that was the difference between America and South Africa, even when I first came here.” Racism, she explains, “was not institutionalized anymore” — at least not in the northern states — “but, you know, people practiced it. Which goes to show you, you can make all the laws you want, but you cannot change people’s ways. If you must change them, you have to understand that it will take a long time.

“We have a chance maybe now in that all those little ones are going to the same schools together, and maybe they will grow up not feeling [bad toward] each other, not suspecting one another, because they’re growing up together. . . And so we have a chance, maybe 50 years from now, to be much better. I don’t think it will be gone. Some people are just die-hards; they will not change, and there are quite a few of those on both sides.”

“Do you think you might write another book?” I ask.

“I don’t know,” she says with a sigh.

“Your last one came out in 1988, and a lot of things have happened to you since then.”

“It was not well distributed,” she says of her autobiography, “Makeba: My Story.” “Perhaps it was the wrong time, because there were still a lot of people who thought I was a terrorist or I am this, I am that.”

“Do you still get that?”

“Well, there are so many things that have happened to me that make me feel that some people will never forgive.”

“Forgive what?”

“I don’t know, because I’ve never killed anybody. I’ve never said anything nasty about anybody, except my truth, which is things I’ve experienced in my country, or wherever … I feel sorry for people who cannot forgive, because there are people who think I did something,” she asserts. “But even if I did something, has it not been so long ago that they can’t say, ‘Oh yeah, you know, maybe she was crazy. Maybe she was this.’ If they don’t, it’s them I feel sorry for, because I have forgiven everybody who tried to strangle me and couldn’t — I’m still here.”

There’s a certain irony to Makeba’s circumstance. Because she was categorized as an anti-apartheid activist, with apartheid now over, she herself is starting over as a singer. I mention this, and she laughs.

“I always fall, then get up and — ” she suddenly claps her hands. “My life has been like a yo-yo. One minute I’m dining with presidents and emperors; the next I’m hitchhiking. I’ve accepted it. I say, ‘Hey, maybe that’s the way it was written, and it has to be.’ And that maybe there’s a reason why I’m still here.”

“I hope nobody puts me on a shelf again,” she says plaintively. “I hope all those people can find it in the goodness of their hearts to just please leave me alone.”

“Who?” I ask. “Who do you mean?”

“All the ones who’ve been suppressing and whatever, you know?”

I don’t. “Who don’t give the music the airplay?”

“Who don’t forget.”

“Oh, those people,” I reply, cluelessly. “Well, who do you mean when you say this?”

“They know themselves,” she says, stubbornly. “When they read this, they’ll know who they are.”

We’ve moved into serious resentment territory. “There is a sad thing, too …,” she continues. “When I left [South Africa] and went to Europe … the manager I had then had me sign so many things. And you would be surprised — I have never had one cent from ‘Pata Pata.’ I should be a millionaire,” she says.

“But, you see, that is the sad story of Makeba. People keep beating me on the head with a hammer.” Her voice tamps down to a whisper. “And I keep getting up.”

Exactly. At that time, you have to realize, Elizabeth Taylor was still being underestimated as an actress. No one took her seriously — she would even make jokes about it in public. And when I wrote that piece, Meryl Streep was constantly being touted as the greatest actress who ever lived. I was in total revolt against that and launched this protest because I think that Elizabeth Taylor is actually a greater actress than Meryl Streep, despite Streep’s command of a certain kind of technical skill.

As the ’90s went on and Turner Classic Movies increasingly became a national institution, people had a chance to see Taylor’s old films on a regular rotation, so they came around to her. And then the extent of her power as an actress, and the enormity of her achievement in her whole body of films, became evident. As time went on, but obviously past her professional peak, she finally obtained universal respect.

To me, Elizabeth Taylor’s importance as an actress was that she represented a kind of womanliness that is now completely impossible to find on the U.S. or U.K. screen. It was rooted in hormonal reality — the vitality of nature. She was single-handedly a living rebuke to postmodernism and post-structuralism, which maintain that gender is merely a social construct. Let me give you an example. Lisa Cholodenko’s “The Kids Are All Right” is a truly wonderful film, but Julianne Moore and Annette Bening — who is fabulous in it and should have won the Oscar for her portrayal of a prototypical contemporary American career woman — were painfully scrawny to look at on the screen. This is the standard starvation look that is now projected by Hollywood women stars — a skeletal, Pilates-honed, anorexic silhouette, which has nothing to do with females as most of the world understands them. There’s something almost android about the depictions of women currently being projected by Hollywood.

This was something you’ve written a lot about, the skinny starlets, the Gwyneth Paltrows …

If Gwyneth Paltrow were growing up in the 1930s, she would have been treated as a hopelessly gawky wallflower who would be mortified by her lanky figure. But everything about her is being pushed on to American young women as the ultimate ideal. And it’s even more unpalatable to me now because I’ve been spending the last few years speaking in Brazil, and I’m fascinated by Brazilian women — their humor, energy and openness and the way they express their sexuality so naturally and beautifully. I love it because it’s so much like the old Hollywood style. Now Elizabeth Taylor’s persona was at first a continuation of Ava Gardner’s. They had a natural lustiness and spontaneity, an animal magnetism, though both Ava and Elizabeth at the beginning of their careers didn’t have command of basic technical skills, particularly dialogue. That’s what people laud Meryl Streep for — “Oh, her accents are so great; oh, her articulation is so perfect.” But she doesn’t really live in her characters, she merely costumes them. Meryl Streep is always doing drag. But it’s so superficial. It all comes from the brain, not the heart or body.

Richard Burton, who was supposed to become the next great Shakespearean actor after Laurence Olivier, used to say how much he had learned from Elizabeth about how to work with the camera. Cinematic acting is extremely understated. The slightest little flick of an eyelid says an enormous amount, and that’s where Elizabeth Taylor was far superior to Meryl Streep. Streep is always cranking it and cranking it, working it and working it, demanding that the audience bow down and “See what I”m going through! See what I’m doing for you!” Streep is an intelligent, good actress, but she doesn’t come anywhere near Elizabeth Taylor on the screen. Because she wasn’t a trained stage actress like Streep, Taylor has vocal weaknesses — at high pitch, she can get a bit screechy — which is perfect for Martha in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” but not so good for Cleopatra. But she was like a luscious, opulent, ripe fruit. She enjoyed life to the max. She loved to eat and drink, she loved baubles, and she had a terrific sense of humor — people would say they could hear her raucously laughing from a mile away. She was a basic, down-to-earth gal who could play queens when she had to. The performances she gave were indelible — for example, that long, long take at the end of “Suddenly, Last Summer” as Catherine finally recalls the way her gay cousin Sebastian was slaughtered and cannibalized by a pack of boys he was trying to pick up!

Your early obsession with Taylor is well-documented.

Elizabeth Taylor has been a colossal pagan goddess to me since I was 11 or 12. I was so lucky to have seen her at her height. And my sensibility as a culture critic and as a feminist was deeply formed by her. In the U.S. in the 1950s, blondes were the ultimate Aryan ideal. Perky blondes like Doris Day, Debbie Reynolds and Sandra Dee ruled the roost! And then there was Elizabeth Taylor with that gorgeous, brunette, ethnic look. She looked Jewish, Italian, Spanish, even Moorish! She was truly transcultural — it was a radical resistance to the dominance of the blond sorority queens and cheerleaders. And then her open sexuality in that puritanical period! It was so daring. She picked up one man after another. The tragedy of Mike Todd being killed in a plane crash — then her stealing Eddie Fisher from Debbie Reynolds. There’s no way to describe the joy I felt at the enormous embarrassment she handed to Debbie Reynolds! I’ve since come to respect both Debbie Reynolds and Doris Day for what fine comedic actresses they were. But at the time, I couldn’t stand them! They represented the saccharine, good-girl style that was being forced on me and my generation by our parents and teachers and every voice in the culture, which was telling us to be like them. Elizabeth Taylor was bad! She was a bad girl! I loved it.

But there were always flickers of strength about her. She wasn’t the exaggerated, vulnerable icon Marilyn Monroe was.

That’s right. There was a robustness about Elizabeth Taylor, compared to the vulnerability and emotional train wrecks that were Marilyn Monroe and Rita Hayworth. Hayworth also projected a wonderful, melting womanliness on-screen, but Taylor was a tough broad. She had survival instincts. And that’s another thing about her, the way she could bounce back from all her tragedies and near-death experiences and draw on her suffering in her acting. Who could forget when she was near death from pneumonia in London in 1961? There were dramatic pictures of her being carried out on a stretcher, when she had an emergency tracheotomy. Then she bounces right back and gets the Oscar! That was one of the great television nights of my entire life, as I watched the Academy Awards and was praying and praying she would win. Then she goes up to the podium with her bosom exposed and her throat bare, with no bandages, not even a band-aid, so everyone could see the scar, and says in a frail, breathy voice, “Thank you so much.” I was delirious! I could barely focus the entire next day at school. And then the glorious color photos in Look magazine of her sitting serenely with her Oscar at the after-party — stunning!

She won for “Butterfield 8.”

“Butterfield 8″ was my Bible. She didn’t want to make that film. She hated it her whole life. But “Butterfield 8″ meant everything to me as an adolescent. It formed so many of my ideas about the pagan tradition descending to us from Babylon and surviving the Christian onslaught of the Middle Ages. The first time you see her in the film, in that tight, white, sewed-on slip, it’s so amazing. Her dress is ripped on the floor, she brushes her teeth with scotch, and she goes up to the mirror and angrily writes “No sale!” on it in lipstick! To me she represented the ultimate power of the sexual woman.

There was a long feminist attack on the Hollywood sex symbol as a sex object, a commodified thing, passive to the male gaze, and it’s such a crock! “Butterfield 8″ really shows it. There’s that incredible moment in the bar where she’s wearing a svelte black dress and she and Laurence Harvey are fighting. He grabs her by the arm, and she grinds her stiletto heel into his elegant shoe. It’s male vs. female — a ferocious equal match. He’s strong, but she’s strong too! That scene shows the power and intensity of heterosexuality, with all its tensions and conflicts. It also shows how terrible current Hollywood filmmaking is — how false and manufactured sex has become. There’s no real eroticism anymore. “Butterfield 8″ sizzles with eroticism, because of the psychological distance and animal attraction between male and female. The businessmen in that film are all in their uniforms, their black suits. They’re like a horde of identical and characterless myrmidons or clones. They have wealth, they have power, but they’re nothing compared to her! The film truly captures the complexities and struggles of sexuality — all of which have been lost in our period of easy gender-bending. Everything’s become so bland and boring now.

The era of the great movie queens is certainly over. Sharon Stone did have her solar moment in “Basic Instinct.” Not just in the famous interrogation scene in the police station but everywhere in that film, she was commanding sex and commanding the camera. It was a spectacular performance — and then the movie kind of self-destructs. But I had a brief moment of hope there — I thought, is Hollywood sex finally coming back? But no, they never could come up with anything that good for Sharon Stone again, and the moment faded.

Is there really no one else who has made that sort of splash? I’m having a hard time coming up with one. Angelina Jolie, perhaps?

For me, Jolie’s greatest performance was in “Gia,” where she played the bisexual fashion model Gia Carangi, who died of AIDS. Jolie is amazing in that. She had the sensuality and animal energy of Ava Gardner, which virtually no one has been able to duplicate. But after she got huge around the world, Jolie decided to become the big humanitarian. Elizabeth Taylor did that, but it was later in her career. So suddenly Angelina Jolie thinks she’s a U.N. ambassador for all human misery in the world. Everything turns high concept, and soon she’s collecting a multiracial menagerie of children. The result is a total flattening out of her artistic image. In a way, she suffers from the problem of being a star in the age of paparazzi, where you’re much more hounded than even Elizabeth Taylor ever was. Marilyn Monroe was certainly harassed by the press and hated it, but not like today, where there’s hardly a place on earth to have your own thoughts. So Angelina Jolie became defensive and covert, and now there’s something too calculated and manipulative about her public persona, so she’s less interesting than she was. Of course, there are no great roles being written for her. She gets action adventure scripts, like Lara Croft, where a contemporary woman has to show she’s tough and can duke it out with the guys. But I’m not sure Jolie would have been able to handle some of the roles Elizabeth Taylor did so well like “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.” There’s a relaxation at the heart of Elizabeth Taylor’s acting style — and also in Elizabeth Taylor the woman– whereas you always feel a wariness or tension in Jolie.

We’re in a period now where everything has to be taut — in mind and body. And part of it is that we’re in the post-studio era. Elizabeth Taylor was a creation of the old Hollywood studio system — she was one of the last great studio products. And in the studio, you were very protected as you grew up. It was a family environment, which some people — like Katharine Hepburn and Bette Davis — found claustrophobic. But it was very nurturing for someone like Elizabeth Taylor. Angelina Jolie, however, had a kind of hard, unsettled, up-and-down life. She’s tough, she’s a survivor, she’s a little bit cynical. But you never feel cynicism in Elizabeth Taylor — never! She does it when she has to play it, as in “Virginia Woolf,” but it isn’t her. There was never an ounce of cynicism in her. To all reports, she was a warm and maternal woman.

And that’s another thing — all these stars today, accumulating children with an army of nannies. Despite all her children, no one would ever call Angelina Jolie maternal. But Elizabeth Taylor’s maternal quality is central to her heterosexual power. Elizabeth Taylor could control men. She liked men. And men liked her. There was a chemistry between her and men, coming from her own maternal instincts. I’ve been writing about this for years, and it was partly inspired by watching Taylor operate on-screen and off. The happy and successful heterosexual woman feels tender and maternal toward men — but this has been completely lost in our feminist era. Now women tell men, you have to be my companion and be just like a woman; be my best friend, and listen to me chatter. In other words, women don’t really like men anymore — they want men to be like women. But Elizabeth Taylor liked men, and men loved to be around her because they sensed that.

But she was no pushover! She gave as good as she got. There were those famous knock-down, drag-out fights with Burton, and she loved it. No man ever ruled her. Not for a second. But at the same time her men weren’t henpecked. She liked strong men. That was one reason she dropped Eddie Fisher. Evidently, according to Carrie Fisher in her one-woman show, he was quite renowned in the sack, and Taylor went for that. But then she realized he was no Mike Todd or Richard Burton, and he got the boot.

We’ve spent almost 30 minutes talking about a very small part of her career, but she’s been such a public figure, decades later, in very different ways.

Right! On the way to the library this morning, I was listening to New York’s WABC on the car radio, and they were saying how all the interns think that Elizabeth Taylor was just Michael Jackson’s friend or “that crazy old lady in a wheelchair.” For many people who are older, however, our lives were permeated by her for decades. She affected us on the deepest emotional level.

It’s interesting what a profound rapport she always had with gay men, beginning with Montgomery Clift. She was a great friend and counselor to him early on, when he was struggling with his homosexuality. Then when he had that terrible car crash that deformed his face, I’ve read that she ran down the road to his aid and saved his life by pulling his tongue out of his throat. It was a bloody scene — he was choking to death. She always had a gift for intimate communication with both gay and straight men.

Is there anyone we’re missing, though? Is there no one else who captures, as you’ve called it, her raw, lush sensuality?

I would say there’s no one else in Hollywood. However, there are a number of examples in the European tradition — authentically sexual and maternal stars like Sophia Loren, who has the same combination of qualities. Loren’s tenderness toward men is so obvious. At the same time, she’s very strong — a working-class Italian woman who survived the war. And then you have the French actresses, like Jeanne Moreau, whose overt sexuality is fabulous. But Moreau has a kind of decadent quality that Elizabeth Taylor never had. Moreau’s eroticism was tinged with a sophisticated world weariness — something a bit haggard: “I’ve seen it all. What can you show me?” The French actresses can also project such a delicate femininity. Catherine Deneuve, for example, shows such genuine emotion and sensitivity, but she’s always cool. She’s an observer, a little detached. I adore Deneuve, but she’s not like Elizabeth Taylor, who is volcanic. Taylor is all gusto and fire.

She lived life to its fullest. There hasn’t been anyone quite like her. I mean, we’ve had some high-energy, bawdy, over-the-top actresses like Stockard Channing and Bette Midler, and they’re very endearing, but there’s always something slightly ironic about them.

They’re in on the joke.

They’re campy. But Taylor was so instinctive and intuitive, so in the moment. It was pretty remarkable that someone with such a strong personality could also be such a good actress. Usually, actors who can project themselves into so many different types of roles tend to have a kind of fluid, unfixed identity in real life. But Elizabeth Taylor’s personality was rock solid. At the same time, she was always ready to throw on costumes from any era and look magnificent. She was a real trouper, a pro. By the way, do you notice how we’re calling her an “actress”? The minute Hollywood actresses decided to become “actors,” they lost their sexuality. It’s time to junk that pretentious term.

You famously collected 599 photos of Elizabeth Taylor when you were a teenager. Which one should we use to illustrate this interview?

The canonical shot of Elizabeth Taylor sewn into that white slip in “Butterfield 8″ is one of the major art images of my entire life! She is Babylonian pagan woman — the goddess Ishtar, the anti-Mary!

That photo heralds the dawning sexual revolution, among other things. But the leading feminists totally rejected the Hollywood sex symbols from the start. Raquel Welch was still complaining about that when I interviewed her for Tatler in 1994. Gloria Steinem wouldn’t even let Raquel speak at an abortion rights rally in the 1970s. Puritanical fools! But thanks to Madonna, the pro-sex, pro-pop wing of feminism rose with a vengeance in the 1990s and swept the prudes into the dust bin of history.

Camille Paglia is the University Professor of Humanities and Media Studies at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. Her most recent book is “Break, Blow, Burn: Camille Paglia Reads Forty-Three of the World’s Best Poems.”

She may have been apprehensive about the lurid extreme of public attention; intrigued by the label of “acting” that trailed from Burton; and she was surely perplexed by the way fashion accelerated away from the sexual mode of 1958-62. In “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” (58, Richard Brooks), as Maggie the Cat, she seemed aggressively candid about sex. But by 1970, she was a throwback to elaborate hairdos, fussy clothes, and earnest emoting. She had not matured, but regressed into that vague eligible debutante — or her mother — that she once infused with indolent wantonness, half asleep from being stared at. Even her good films were prominently signaled as “serious acting,” whereas there was once a poignant osmosis of young Hollywood doll and the parts she played. It is the difference between her two Oscar films — “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” (66, Mike Nichols) and “Butterfield 8″ (60, Daniel Mann) — the first based on a clever stage play, the second on a hack novel. Martha in the first is a “character,” far deeper and more demanding. You can hear Taylor thinking out all her complexities as she plays. In “Butterfield 8,” however, she serenely inhabits the melodrama in exactly the way that cinema encourages audiences to live through its stars. Like the audience, Liz had a superstitious preoccupation with glamour.

The marriage to Burton may have unsettled her, showing her how simple her own dramatic taste was. Once a presence, she became an actress. Not a bad actress, but one unable to regain the shallow clarity of “Butterfield 8.” In the event, she reduced the brittle respectability in Burton to her level — that of boasting of diamonds. Martha in “Virginia Woolf” was an “ugly” woman, something the Taylor of the 1950s would never have been allowed to take on, and a part fundamentally offensive to her view of herself. Later, she tried to look like her former self, as witness the neurotic wealth of costume in “Divorce His, Divorce Hers” (73, Waris Hussein), the TV film released ghoulishly as she and Burton broke up. She was evacuated to America during the war and made her debut in “There’s One Born Every Minute” (42, Harold Young) before finding her place at MGM as a rapturous face in a collie’s mane: “Lassie Come Home” (43, Fred M. Wilcox). In her next film, “Jane Eyre” (44, Robert Steven- son), she was like a young Lizzie Siddall as the child who dies. She was a child still in “The White Cliffs of Dover” (44, Clarence Brown), a big hit in “National Velvet” (44, Brown), and “Life with Father” (47, Michael Curtiz). Her teenage period was happily brief: “A Date with Judy” (48, Richard Thorpe); “Julia Misbehaves” (48, Jack Conway); “Little Women” (49, Mervyn Le Roy); “Conspirator” (49, Victor Saville); and “The Big Hangover” (50, Norman Krasna).

It was Vincente Minnelli and the parental guidance of Spencer Tracy and Joan Bennett that ushered in her maturity in “Father of the Bride” (50) and “Father’s Little Dividend” (51). But her first really striking part was away from MGM as the rich girl in love with Montgomery Clift in “A Place in the Sun” (51, Stevens). That film not only established her own black-haired beauty, but set a popular standard for a decade. In the fifty years since, has any movie actress been so blatant about extraordinary beauty? Julia Roberts in “Pretty Woman” is the only case that I can think of. It also showed how unlucky she was to be the property of MGM, still dealing in Thalberg’s innocuous glamour. In the next few years she was wasted on insubstantial romances and genteel adventure pictures: indeed, her Rebecca in “Ivanhoe” (52, Thorpe) had something of the splendor of the silent screen. Otherwise she tended to sigh and dilate her violet eyes: “Love Is Better Than Ever” (51, Stanley Donen); “The Girl Who Had Everything” (53, Thorpe); “Rhapsody” (54, Charles Vidor); replacing Vivien Leigh in “Elephant Walk” (54, William Dieterle); “Beau Brummel” (54, Curtis Bernhardt); and “The Last Time I Saw Paris” (54, Brooks). But “Giant” was an improvement and signaled a special responsiveness to the naturalistic care of George Stevens. As if to prove her aptitude for saga romance, she was as atmospheric as a fading camellia in “Raintree County” (57, Edward Dmytryk), as a Southern girl who goes mad with love. These were her best years, leading to the Oscar for “Butterfield 8″ and the brimming explicitness of her beach bait for young men in “Suddenly, Last Summer” (59, Mankiewicz).

After “Cleopatra,” she clung to Burton to prove fidelity and professionalism: The “VIPs” (63, Anthony Asquith); the risible “The Sandpiper” (65, Minnelli); “The Taming of the Shrew” (67, Franco Zeffirelli); as Helen of Troy in “Doctor Faustus” (67, Neville Coghill and Burton); “The Comedians” (67, Peter Glenville); “Boom!” (68, Joseph Losey); and “Hammersmith Is Out” (72, Peter Ustinov). She was much more deeply stirred in “Secret Ceremony” (68, Losey), where she seems to catch the sense of sexual instability, and in “Reflections in a Golden Eye” (67, John Huston). But she was restored to former melodrama in “The Only Game in Town” (69, Stevens), “Zee & Co” (71, Brian G. Hutton), “Night Watch” (73, Hutton), and “Ash Wednesday”(73, Larry Peerce), shameless movies, but enough to reprise her brooding self-belief. She rediscovered dignity in “A Little Night Music” (78, Harold Prince). Fifteen years later, the update could list the continuing marital career — but no one cares now. It should mention “The Mirror Crack’d” (80, Guy Hamilton) and “Young Toscanini” (88, Zeffirelli) in theatres, as well as several TV movies: “Between Friends” (83, Lou Antonio); a juicy Louella Parsons in “Malice in Wonderland” (85, Gus Trikonis); as a star who comes out of a mental hospital to make a comeback in “There Must Be a Pony” (86, Joseph Sargent); running a Western brothel in “Poker Alice” (87, Arthur Allan Seidelman); and with Mark Harmon in “Sweet Bird of Youth” (89, Nicolas Roeg).

Yet the work of which she is probably most proud is her feisty, eloquent, and quite implacable resolve to have people talk and know about AIDS. It is somehow fitting that her astonishing strength and durability should now be given so generously to the vulnerable, and in 1993 she received the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award for this service.

Over the years, there have been jokes about Elizabeth Taylor — more than that, she was for a decade or so a roaring comedy of disaster. Yet at the tender age of seventy, she is one of those stars whose mere look or voice brings back so many memories. Her worthless movies of the seventies and eighties are not really held against her. It is to be hoped that she may yet give us a few sensational old ladies — something better than her role in “The Flintstones” (94, Brian Levant).

Nothing yet, except for “These Old Broads” (01, Matthew Diamond).

Excerpted from “The New Biographical Dictionary of Film” by David Thomson Copyright © 2010 by David Thomson. Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Like uranium, Elizabeth Taylor was an unstable element that could be variously refined unto many enormous potentialities. She was a weapon of mass obsession that could be deployed as a means of focusing tsunamis of international money. She was a love bomb — and, like any bomb, the very fact of her existence was a phenomenon that demanded a certain severe, almost Calvinist moral scrutiny. Such power, after all, is terrifying — and the tabloids never seemed quite so grateful as when the person hardest hit by Elizabeth Taylor’s own radioactive fallout was Taylor herself.

Elizabeth Taylor wasn’t a celebrity so much as a part of cultural consciousness with as much resonance as an established religion or a letter of the alphabet — an impossible equation that really irritated the scientific mind in people, since she was always considerably more than the sum of her parts. Her majesty both inflamed and infuriated men (for whom she had a crippling weakness and compulsion to collect).

Richard Burton kept his twice-wed wife in line by undermining her. The New York Times obituary this morning had this ghastly quote:

The notion of (Richard Burton’s) wife as “the most beautiful woman in the world is absolute nonsense,” he said. “She has wonderful eyes,” he added, “but she has a double chin and an overdeveloped chest, and she’s rather short in the leg.”

This, I think, was how Burton kept his own ballast: by breaking Elizabeth down into criticizable parts — bruised fender, bad hubcaps — he could teasingly deny her the satisfaction of his comment on her as a total driving experience. He couldn’t acknowledge all the power she had under the hood. It probably would have pleased her too much, and upset their ongoing libidinous struggle to passionately conquer each other.

Elizabeth Taylor’s collaboration with life compelled her to suffer: as if to atone for her wealth, and smite her own perfect appearance. But these catastrophes created, ultimately, a common experience and parity with her audience. Of all people, Elizabeth Taylor is not a star that should have had the Common Touch, but she did. She was, in a sense, her own portrait of Dorian Gray — a walking, talking Faustian contract replete with whiplash plot points and reversals of fortune that might have killed someone not so well grounded in their own humanity (like her dear young friend Michael Jackson).

The friendship she shared with Jackson, which seemed so utterly bizarre in the 1980s, seems less so now: They were both declawed jaguars kept as ornaments dead center in the dictatorship of fame. Their lives had been deprived of any semblance of normalcy — but the suffering of human life is unavoidable, even for stars of such magnitude. There is no cure for life, and this is where they must have been a comfort to each other. Michael did not have Elizabeth’s fortitude of ego or breadth of character; he was, in the end, tragically incapable of being a mere human being — but humanity was Elizabeth Taylor’s fallback position, and her saving grace.

She was the only conceivable human embodiment of Cleopatra, and, offscreen, a sick, lonely, grieving person of weak constitution, prone to grave illnesses and emotional disasters. She was the impossible luxury of White Diamonds (one of her many fragrances) — and she used this wild surplus of personal glamour to champion AIDS back in the earliest days, when it was still perceived as the most frightening stigma on earth — the bubonic plague of sexual deviants — when no other persons of rank and profile had the balls to publicly acknowledge it, let alone lend their full weight to raising money for medical research.

When Elizabeth Taylor’s full power was unleashed on-screen, her portrayals were more than the sum of acting: She was capable of engraving herself in certain emotional states on your consciousness forever, to the point of symbolizing them.

Her chemistry with Montgomery Clift was so palpable in “A Place in the Sun,” you can practically taste both the honey and the razor blade of blinding new love on your own tongue.

The itchy quality that Elizabeth brought to the role of Maggie the Cat in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” traversed the screen and became the shorthand for that eternally wretched feminine state of gnawing, incurable desire — that devouring inner combustion that comes of wanting more from your experience of love than your love object is capable of delivering.

Her very first breakthrough role, in “National Velvet,” crystallized the sincere innocence and honesty of a teenage girl in love with her horse, riding to the very limits of her strength right into the fiery mess of life, with all its fear and pain and hope — sweetly, bravely, with inspiring optimism. Elizabeth Taylor seemed to preserve this courageous innocence in herself offscreen, through whatever life handed her: hails of rose petals and diseases and pills and divorces and savage indignities like John Belushi. Her acting worked so well because she was truthful with herself, and with us — a real, honest citizen who cheerfully bore the punishments of her life while showing no bitterness and protecting no vanity.

Various mystical cosmologies speak of the spiritual goal of dissolving into union with the rest of everything — a process that is usually achieved through the dismantling and gradual erosion of the ego, unto enlightenment (or its cultural equivalent).

Even at the center of attention in Hollywood, Elizabeth Taylor was never too precious to protect herself from ego plunder. She engaged with life on its own terms, even as it periodically killed her hopes and her looks and her love life and her health and her reputation. Ultimately, she was unperturbed, and unshakably generous in her good humor, particularly when the jokes were at her expense. She bravely put her best chin forward and gave life the simple love of an honest, human, achingly beautiful young girl.

Elizabeth Taylor was an impossible vision driving by in a dreamy convertible that every girl wants to be and every boy wants to marry. She leaves in her wake a dazzling aura, a lingering whiff of perfume, a red-hot sexual need and an enduring, indestructible ability to inspire love.

No one as big as Elizabeth Taylor was can quite be forgotten, but the reasons why we remember her are not entirely clear. One younger colleague of mine recalls her as a mysterious figure who pitched diamonds on TV. Another was blown away by Taylor’s electrifying performance as the boozy, embittered, charismatic Martha in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” — the only Taylor movie she’s ever seen — and resolved to have a marriage like that. (Will those of you in the congregation who were actually raised in 1960s or ’70s alcoholic households please join me in saying: Dear God, please don’t.) How in the world do you make sense of a career that encompasses those things, along with a period of pure, almost piercing child stardom, stretches as a leading lady and an Oscar-winning character actress, well-deserved reputations as a boozehound and serial monogamist, genuinely heroic AIDS activism (at a time when almost no celebrities wanted to be associated with a deadly homosexual plague) and an extended afterlife as the butt of late-night comedy routines and confidante of Michael Jackson?

You can’t quite do it, of course, which is why celebrity biographers and journalists are drawn toward Taylor the way the Nazgûl are drawn to the One Ring, as an example of everything they hate, everything they love and everything about the 20th century they long to understand and explain to others. In her 2009 review of William J. Mann’s “How to Be a Movie Star: Elizabeth Taylor in Hollywood,” my colleague Laura Miller wrote that Taylor didn’t much care about movies and that her real breakthrough was inventing a more candid and openly hedonistic model of public celebrity: “What she really wanted was to lounge around on yachts and in luxury hotels, chowing down on fried chicken with ‘lots of gravy’ and waking up to a Tiffany’s box on her pillow on a fairly regular basis. Acting, fame and a few of her marriages were little more than means to those ends.”

In the face of all that, it seems curiously old-fashioned to insist on going back to Taylor’s actual film performances, which really can’t be separated from the larger context of her performance as Elizabeth Taylor. (As everyone else will be observing today, she despised the nickname “Liz,” and none of her friends ever used it.) Certainly by the 1966 film version of Edward Albee’s Broadway smash “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,” her role as the drunken, sexy harridan Martha, opposite two-time husband Richard Burton, was already an aspect of her meta-celebrity, and the love-hate relationship between George and Martha was understood (correctly or not) to reflect the one between Liz and Dick.

Taylor won an Oscar for that role at age 34, and no one could have imagined that her career as a star was almost over. Oh, she made more than 20 films after that, if you add up all the made-for-TV dreck from the ’80s, but hardly any of them are worth seeing: Franco Zeffirelli’s “Taming of the Shrew,” with Burton? I’m sure it’s super-dated, but maybe. John Huston’s “Reflections of a Golden Eye,” with Marlon Brando? Basically meh. I remember enjoying the 1977 film of Stephen Sondheim’s “A Little Night Music,” in which Taylor plays Mephistophelean husband-tamer Desiree Armfeldt, but I’d be scared to watch it now. Otherwise there’s a whole lot of “Victory at Entebbe” and “The Mirror Crack’d” and “Hammersmith Is Out” (apparently a film made in 1972 that I’ve never heard of, let alone seen), not to mention TV roles in “General Hospital” and “Hotel” and “North and South.”

Taylor’s period of real movie stardom, when she was at least as famous for her screen performances as her personal life, begins with her World War II-era roles in “Lassie Come Home” and “National Velvet,” made when she was 11 and 12 years old. One secret of her enduring fame is that those movies remained a staple of childhood viewing for several subsequent generations; by the time I first saw them, they were almost three decades old. Another is that they preserve a vision of this impossibly pretty girl before puberty and sexuality and stardom and all the versions of herself that would come later. (“Lassie Come Home” is too leisurely and talky for my kids, but “National Velvet” still holds up — and every public library has multiple copies.) The productions are stagey, English-y and old-fashioned, but Taylor’s emotional immediacy, amazing expressiveness and memorably violet eyes command your attention throughout. She was injured falling from a horse while making “National Velvet,” the first of a long series of medical emergencies that often made her seem like a Hollywood human sacrifice.

She played successful supporting roles in a few late-’40s hits, including “Life With Father” and “Little Women,” and then emerged as a full-fledged teenage star in 1950 with Vincente Minnelli’s “Father of the Bride” and its sequel the following year, “Father’s Little Dividend.” These movies are halfway bearable comic antiques loaded with the day before yesterday’s gender stereotypes, and I’m not sure anything about them is convincing, including Taylor’s performance as a wholesome American bride. But she brings unquenchable spirit to a generally damp enterprise, and even injects a dose of sexuality into films that have been systematically cleansed of it. You can’t take your eyes off her.

So for the rest of the ’50s Taylor was a big star, at least — but again, relatively few of those films have stood the test of time. I’m not the world’s biggest fan of George Stevens’ 1951 “A Place in the Sun,” a weirdly butchered adaptation of Theodore Dreiser’s “An American Tragedy,” but there’s no denying the melodramatic undertow provided by Taylor and Montgomery Clift. (Another thing everyone who writes about Taylor notices: She seemed to connect intensely with gay co-stars like Clift and Rock Hudson.) Otherwise it’s an array of forgotten costume dramas — “Ivanhoe,” “Beau Brummell,” “Elephant Walk” — until Taylor’s roles opposite Rock Hudson in “Giant” (1956) and Paul Newman in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” (1958), the two best and biggest pictures of her entire career.

You can accuse Taylor of not caring much about her movie roles, as William Mann does, but you can’t accuse her of not responding to superior material. “Giant” and “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” may seem overwrought and soapy by contemporary standards, but they’re pretty much Shakespeare compared to Taylor’s other ’50s movies, and she throws herself into them body and soul. The tangled sexual politics of Tennessee Williams’ frustrated Maggie the Cat are more than we can work out here, but viewers of both sexes and all orientations were hypnotized by the voluptuous Taylor, stuffed into that slip, as she begged, cajoled, commanded and manipulated her reluctant, drunken, probably-gay husband into bed.

Quite honestly, the movies we’ve now mentioned are all you need to see, or almost all. Taylor followed “Cat” with another acclaimed adaptation of a Williams play, “Suddenly, Last Summer,” but that’s an even more bizarre and dated psychosexual nightmare, with an oddly inflated reputation. It looks and sounds classy, thanks to director Joseph L. Mankiewicz, screenwriter Gore Vidal and a cast that includes Clift, Katharine Hepburn and Mercedes McCambridge, but just try watching it all the way to the end without horrified laughter. Taylor won her first Oscar playing a hooker in the moralistic “Butterfield 8,” and while she chews up the scenery and looks terrific, the movie’s isn’t trashy enough to be fun or serious enough to be any good.

With Mankiewicz’s tormented 1963 production “Cleopatra,” essentially the last of Taylor’s roles as a Hollywood leading lady, she simultaneously moved into the Richard Burton period and the famous-for-being-famous period. The movie is almost entirely remembered as one of the most expensive flops in Hollywood history — adjusted for inflation, it cost perhaps $300 million — and as the occasion that brought Burton, who plays Mark Antony, into Taylor’s life. How good is her performance as the doomed Egyptian queen, and how do we separate that out from the world-conquering, self-parodying personality explosion of Taylor writ large? I’ve seen the movie, but the triumph and tragedy of Elizabeth Taylor lies in the fact that I just can’t answer that question. Nobody can; it isn’t a question that matters. Taylor escaped from the movies at that point, and they’d never held more than a few fragments of her personality in the first place.