“Columbo” began its history in 1971 as part of the NBC Sunday Mystery Movie series, appearing every third week. The show became by far the most popular of the three mysteries, the others being “McCloud” and “McMillan and Wife.”

Falk was reportedly paid $250,000 a movie and could have made much more if he had accepted an offer to convert “Columbo” into a weekly series. He declined, reasoning that carrying a weekly detective series would be too great a burden.

Columbo — he never had a first name — presented a contrast to other TV detectives. “He looks like a flood victim,” Falk once said. “You feel sorry for him. He appears to be seeing nothing, but he’s seeing everything. Underneath his dishevelment, a good mind is at work.”

NBC canceled the three series in 1977. In 1989 ABC offered “Columbo” in a two-hour format usually appearing once or twice a season. The movies continued into the 21st century. “Columbo” appeared in 26 foreign countries and was a particular favorite in France and Iran.

Columbo’s trademark was an ancient raincoat Falk had once bought for himself. After 25 years on television, the coat became so tattered it had to be replaced.

Peter Michael Falk was born Sept. 16, 1927, in New York City and grew up in Ossining, N.Y., where his parents ran a clothing store. At 3 he had one eye removed because of cancer. “When something like that happens early,” he said in a 1963 Associated Press interview, “you learn to live with it. It became the joke of the neighborhood. If the umpire ruled me out on a bad call, I’d take the fake eye out and hand it to him.”

When Falk was starting as an actor in New York, an agent told him, “Of course, you won’t be able to work in movies or TV because of your eye.” Falk would later win two Oscar nominations (“Murder, Inc.,” 1960; “Pocketful of Miracles,” 1961) and collect five Emmys.

After serving as a cook in the merchant marine and receiving a master’s degree in public administration from Syracuse University, he worked as an efficiency expert for the budget bureau of the state of Connecticut. He also acted in amateur theater and was encouraged to become a professional by actress-teacher Eva La Gallienne.

An appearance in “The Iceman Cometh” off-Broadway led to other classical parts, notably as Joseph Stalin in “The Passion of Joseph D.” In 1971 Falk scored a hit in Neil Simon’s “The Prisoner of Second Avenue.”

Falk made his film debut in 1958 with “Wind Across the Everglades” and established himself as a talented character actor with his performance as the vicious killer Abe Reles in “Murder, Inc.” Among his other movies: “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World,” “Robin and the Seven Hoods,” “The Great Race,” “Luv,” “Castle Keep,” “The Cheap Detective,” “The Brinks Job,” “The In-Laws,” “The Princess Bride.”

Falk also appeared in a number of art house favorites, including the semi-improvisational films “Husbands” and “A Woman Under the Influence,” directed by his friend John Cassavetes, and Wim Wenders’ “Wings of Desire,” in which he played himself. Falk became prominent in television movies, beginning with his first Emmy for “The Price of Tomatoes” in 1961. His four other Emmys were for “Columbo.”

He was married to pianist Alyce Mayo in 1960; they had two daughters, Jackie and Catherine, and divorced in 1976. The following year he married actress Shera Danese. They filed for divorce twice and reconciled each time.

When not working, Falk spent time in the garage of his Beverly Hills home. He had converted it into a studio where he created charcoal drawings. He took up art in New York when he was in the Simon play and one day happened into the Art Students League.

He recalled: “I opened a door and there she was, a nude model, shoulders back, a light from above, buck-ass naked. The female body is awesome. Believe me, I signed up right away.”

Falk is survived by his wife Shera and his two daughters.

——

For Associated Press writer Bob Thomas contributed to this report.

It had been 10 years since I covered a war — in Sierra Leone, where Chris and I worked and lived side by side for many stressful weeks. He’d invited me a half dozen times to accompany him on assignment to Iraq and Afghanistan, but for various reasons I never went. It’s hard to say why Libya was different, but it was. There was never a question of not going.

We had no illusions about how dangerous and deadly Libya is. Only weeks before, two of Chris’s close friends and colleagues had been kidnapped by Gadhafi forces in separate incidents and he helped see them safely back to the United States once their releases had been negotiated. The day we arrived in Benghazi, four other journalists were nabbed by government forces and are still in custody. Even in the safest place we could find — the hotel rooms we shared in Benghazi — unexplained explosions and random bursts of gunfire on the streets reminded us that danger was literally around every corner.

We talked a lot about that. It’s no exaggeration to say that the risks we faced were always at the top of our minds and influenced every decision we made, even whether to walk a block from the hotel for dinner or to stay indoors and order terrible room service. I try to be as smart as I can in those situations, but Chris had far more experience, so I relied heavily on his judgment. He watched out for me in little ways — like insisting I eat breakfast, which I rarely do — and in big ones, like making sure the flak jacket was properly adjusted.

On the front lines near Ajdabiya, Chris constantly recalibrated the relative risks of our position, a nonstop war calculus that all journalists in such situations know well. We talked about where to run in case of an artillery attack, listened carefully to our sixth senses, and kept mental tally of our positions relative to one another so we wouldn’t get lost in the inevitable chaotic retreat that characterized front line engagements.

At the same time, Chris was running parallel calculations about where to be in order to properly document what we were seeing. In this, he was both patient and fearless.

“Nothing happens,” he said often, “until it does.”

During my time in Libya, I was profoundly proud of my friend. His reputation among his colleagues was evident with each reunion in hotel lobbies and even on the front line. His poise under fire was inspiring. The photos he produced, and the professionalism with which he carried himself while doing so, were second to none.

Since our first international reporting trip together, in Kosovo in 1999, Chris and I have had countless conversations about his hopes and dreams for his life — in Libya, he talked nonstop about his pending wedding and his plan to start a family — and about the risks and responsibilities of being a combat photographer. We talked about this special breed of journalism he was drawn to and how important it was to bear witness to atrocities that take place far most of the world’s eyes. He believed entirely in the power of photojournalism to change the world, to enlighten hearts and minds, and to bring justice and possibly comfort to those who are suffering the most. His deepest commitment, from the very beginning, was to honor those he photographed and bear witness to their struggles. He achieved that time and again, with a degree of humanity and humility I’ve never found in anyone else.

In Libya, he was riding the crest of everything he’d done up to that point and working by the full flame of who he was, both professionally and personally.

I left Benghazi on Wednesday, April 13, heading for Cairo where I planned to cover expected protests in Tahrir Square on Friday. Chris and Tim saw me off from the lobby of the Ouzo Hotel, one of the central gathering places for journalists from around the globe. Tim had joined us only two days before, but we clicked right away. I gave him my flak jacket and my e-mail address when I left. He promised to use both.

In my hotel in Cairo, I saw that the Washington Post ran a stunning photo shot by my friend on the front page a few days before. It was classic Hondros, perfectly capturing both the horror and the exultation of warfare. In perfect late day lighting, Chris had caught a rocket in flight as it was fired from a truck-mounted launcher, a rebel soldier hoisting his rifle in the foreground. It was perfect, and I emailed him my congratulations.

He wrote back that he was headed for Misurata, the besieged city that was the scene of brutal, gruesome warfare. Of course I told him to be safe, but I knew that he would. For more than a decade, Chris has gone into such places with heart and passion. Nothing had happened.

Until it did.

Chris Hondros’ photojournalism can be found on his website at ChrisHondros.com. Tim Hetherington’s work can be viewed at TimHetherington.com.

Once in a while I amused myself by taking ambitious breaks, usually to the less desirable end of Rodeo, where all the shopgirls belonged, the slums of Jamba Juice, Sprinkles Cupcakes and Le Pain Quotidien. Other times I’d only make it to the window across the street, to that all-yellow store with the matching yellow luxury vehicle propped outside, the one I was forbidden to enter forever.

First: It was appointments only, as the sign on the door demanded. Secondly, it was the House of Bijan — the flagship store of Iranian-American icon Bijan, designer of jewelry, fragrances and luxury menswear, renowned as the man behind the most expensive store in the world, the pride and joy of my fellow Iranians for its exclusivity. I couldn’t go in precisely because of my Iranianness, the wrong kind, the anomaly of anomalies in L.A.: the poor Iranian, that incomprehensible being who either received the cold ignore or flushed pity of rich Iranian ladies who’d nervously fondle my clutches and totes, always mortified at the disgrace of my very existence. (Persian girl, how did this happen to you? a heavily bejeweled elderly Iranian woman, donning what must have been her third or fourth nose, once said to me, as she spotted me sweeping outside the store.)

I was one of many Iranians fascinated by the mess of yellow in and out of the palazzo-inspired $12 million, 35-year-old 90210 landmark. The gilded everything, the obscenely luminous marble floors, the imperious flower arrangements, the Disney-princess sweeping staircase, the mammoth chandelier made of his signature perfume bottles, and of course, the signature yellow Ferrari or Bugatti or Rolls outside, giving you the sense that Bijan lived there. The other notable element inside was the utter emptiness, apparently not a sign of bad business, for once, but evidence that almost no one could afford the place — the way Bijan liked it. (“I am not a mass designer,” he told The Los Angeles Times in 2003. “What was important to me was not to have 2 million clients, like Versace, but to have 20,000 clients.”) And so it followed that at any given day, you’d see a flock of my people huddling with cameras outside the store. Nobody was allowed in, but it didn’t matter. It wasn’t what was inside that was the point, it was all about the surface — again, just as Bijan would have liked it.

(According to a recent Haute Living article, Bijan admitted there were some exceptions to the appointment-only policy: “Sometimes we can tell by the person if we should break the rule.” The writer apparently witnessed a young couple trying to get in, and “Bijan’s intuition told him to allow them into his fashion lair. The couple remained in the store until 9:30 p.m., and eventually spent over $600,000 on clothes and jewelry.”)

Bijan died Saturday morning, April 16, at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles after suffering a stroke at, at age 71 (though he had insisted he was 67). Bijan had hit the 20,000 client mark times two, apparently. His yearly revenue was in the billions, he reported. He was known for dressing celebrities from Tom Cruise to Anthony Hopkins, including 36 different presidents all over the world. (“My favorite are the Americans,” he coos on his website video; apparently even President Obama was a Bijan-man.) Bijan luxury items range from $1,000 suits all the way to $120,000 chinchilla bedspreads. In the same website video, he gushes, “I happen to be the most expensive clothing designer for the world!” And then he adds, “And I’m sorry for that,” sounding anything but sorry.

This is how you imagine the King of Tehrangeles would carry himself. (Tehrangeles is the portmanteau for L.A.’s opulent Little Tehran, specifically the stretch of Westwood Boulevard that flanks the UCLA campus all the way to Beverly Hills, known for its remarkable number of business signs in Persian, Persian Princess denizens on perpetual catwalk, and a ubiquitous soundtrack of Farsi and “Fengilisi” — the Farsi-English hybrid Iranian-Americans often lapse into.) But even while perched on the pinnacle of rampant excess and unfathomable wealth and gold-plated garishness, all the stuff of a Liberace fever dream that were the emblems of Iranian exile style in the Southern California hub, it seemed sometimes like Bijan was a little bit in on the joke.

Bijan’s sense of humor always seemed evident in that gaping half-smirk, half-guffaw he’d brandish on his billboards, like a smile was the essential accessory. His was often featured in his own ad campaigns, especially the ones that strove for controversy with their risqué humor. For example, in 1995, he featured Bo Derek — in his beloved Bo-braids phase (according to the New York Times, he once had “$20 million worth of diamonds braided into Ms. Derek’s hair for a perfume campaign”) — opening up her trench coat against the camera, presumably exposing her infamous body to a comically aghast Bijan and his hand-over-eyes-posing 4-year-old son. Then five years later, inspired by Botero paintings, he used a nude, morbidly obese plus-size model Bella as his mock lover in a campaign that caused many magazines to initially refuse to run it until Talk magazine caved (allegedly because of Tina Brown’s friendship with Bijan). Bijan was also known for the ad that hit closer to his old home: a veiled Muslim beauty with the caption: “Jammal, you might as well know the truth … I’m in love with Bijan.” His ads were always filed under ’90s “shockvertising” studies, but Bijan was not obsessed with the hip or edgy — he just loved the larger than life, all that comprised iconhood. His muses were always huge, from Bella to Michael Jordan (whose cologne he put his name on when the two partnered for the successful venture).

Blame this on his sense of humor too: In 1982, he created a gold designer gun. He told Time, “I wanted to make something so American. I wanted to design a gun that people who hate guns would want to have and touch and play with because it’s so pretty.” The $10,000 limited edition .38 Colt revolver was made of 56 grams of 24-karat gold and sold in a mink pouch with a Baccarat crystal case embossed with the customer’s name.

Iranians have always wanted to love him, but it wasn’t always easy. My family, distanced at a half-hour and many bank account zeroes from Tehrangeles, had mixed emotions about Bijan. When we’d be out in Westwood for a Saturday kebab lunch, my dad would always excitedly point out his billboards, and then immediately tag on, “Big Bear, so loose!” (A less literal translation: “Grown-ass man, so” — and loose is pretty impossible to translate but it’s a cross between silly, gross, embarrassing, cloying, hideous and precious.) And when his women’s fragrance DNA came out in 1993, at a typical mall outing — all my mother and I ever did together — observing her reaction to the eau de parfum spray scent was like watching a cycle of daylight to darkness. She’d be wide-eyed and smiling pre-sniff and then would fight to retain the brightness post-sniff, only to finally collapse into a sort of half-disappointment, and, with a final glance at the price tag, pure darkness, and she’d move on and put it behind her entirely.

And yet who can deny some joy for my brethren in the ’80s and ’90s of a not-terrorist Iranian? Bijan beat Americans at their own game — he saw the punchline and made it his and won over any potential naysayers with his greatest weapon: the blinding light of flamboyance and ostentation. He embodied American overindulgence to the maximum. He was the creator of Tehrangeles flash-and-trash, which was partially an exuberant succumbing to American capitalism combined with an old-country-gentry national-pride-on-steroids complex. Bijan was monarchy in everlasting exile, the émigré owning his abroad. You needed gold, marble, fountains and columns to carry all that; you needed the brazen optimism of yellow, a shade not unlike the yellow-gold of the Iranian lion, the centerpiece of the pre-Revolution Iranian flag.

Is this the beginning of the end of the Tehrangeleno golden period then? Crossover Iranians, after all, have started to take steps off the pedestal. Cameron Alborzian, early ’90s supermodel (most famous as Madonna’s plaything in the “Express Yourself” video), is now a yoga teacher. Googoosh, Iran’s disco-era Madonna, has a brand-new cosmetics line, and for a limited time is depressingly advertising free caps with any purchase. There is even a website devoted to showcasing the darkest side of Iranian-American assimilation: the monstrous McMansions that have multiplied over the decades in Tehrangeles.

It’s hard not to take Bijan’s passing as an opportunity to declare the end of an era, as he was the last of a sort of unapologetic breed of obscenely affluent out-of-touch Iranian. Always refusing to be down to earth, one can imagine Bijan is most himself in a yellow and gold eternal up-above — the campy heaven of harps and cherubs, the afterlife with angels of the Victoria’s Secret breed frolicking on clouds, the razzle-dazzle paradise his friend Dame Elizabeth Taylor might be glittering in at this very moment.

Years after my shopgirl stint, over the shit jobs and past the novel’s publication, I drove cross-country with a boyfriend. Somewhere in gray rural Tennessee, I saw a giant truck with a familiar image on it: the elegant scrawl and the doughnut-shaped glass bottle. It was a Bijan ad.

I got very, very excited.

Who is Bijan? My boyfriend asked as I took photos.

A designer, I told him. The Iranian-American designer.

You like his stuff? My boyfriend asked.

I hate it! I said and snapped some more.

But for a second I was that shopgirl again, staring at the signature that was the symbol of Bijan as it sped off in front of us, always many steps ahead in some race I never quite understood, and yet somehow, against all odds, suited for the fabric of even the worst of this country.

Lumet started his career directing live TV dramas, which were essentially theater that happened to be broadcast to tens of millions of people simultaneously. If you’ve ever seen any productions from that amazing, brief era — which began in the early 50s and ended about 10 years later, when TV production moved to the West Coast and almost everything started being done on tape rather than live — you can see where Lumet’s aesthetic came from. Directing live television required a commitment to the text, the actors, the moment, the reality of what was happening right then.  You were essentially creating cinema in real-time, figuring out where the actors were going to be at any given moment in the story and making sure that one of several cameras was positioned not just to capture the action, but to showcase it in a dynamic and interesting way, a way that served the moment without overwhelming it.

Lumet carried that aesthetic over to his theatrical films, starting with his 1957 big-screen adaptation of Reginald Rose’s live teleplay “12 Angry Men,” set entirely in a jury room during a murder trial. We think of this as a talk-driven piece, and it is, but it’s also subtly yet boldly visual. According to Lumet’s memoir “Making Movies,” the film’s depth-of-field changes as the story unfolds, starting out with wide-angle lenses (which keep everyone in focus and give faces a slightly gargoyle-like aspect) and then gradually shifting to longer and longer lenses, which compress space and convey a sense of intimacy and isolation. This shift befits Rose’s script, which starts out viewing the jurors as an unformed, anonymous mass, then gradually reveals them as complex, troubled, passionate, imperfect individuals.

And watch what Lumet does in this sequence from “Running on Empty,” in which River Phoenix’s character — the son of political radicals who’ve been living underground for nearly two decades — auditions for Julliard. Notice how Lumet starts the sequence with the camera very far back from everyone involved (conveying the distance between performer and audience at the start of the audition) then gradually moves closer and closer, through cuts, until both the perfomer and the listeners are in closeup. 

This is the sort of directing most viewers might not notice the first time, if at all. But it has a subliminal effect on what we’re feeling as we sit there in the dark. Many of Lumet’s aesthetic choices were like that. He thought about the story from the inside out, letting text and performance dictate visuals, rather than superimposing meaning. It’s not the only valid way to make a movie, but it’s demanding and illuminating, and there are not as many rewards in it as there are in the shoot-the-camera-out-of-a-cannon type of directorial pyrotechnics. That’s why, even though Lumet’s films sometime became hits and won awards, they never gained much currency with auteurist critics. Just because you don’t instantly notice what directors are doing doesn’t mean they aren’t doing anything.

Lumet was also a political filmmaker — a committed liberal, obsessed with social justice (and injustice) and the ways in which the powerful conspired to oppress, exploit and distract the powerless, and the tendency of institutions to flout rules and laws they were supposed to uphold. But these subjects were always embedded in the stories themselves and carried by the characters and the narrative. The movies rarely became straightforward polemics because Lumet was always positioning the morality of his characters in relation to the world and showing where they diverged, and he was more likely to observe than to judge or sneer.

He made more than a few stinkers — the depressingly un-fantastic film version of “The Wiz” is probably his low point, perhaps because it’s the sort of movie Lumet was never good at or terribly interested in — and in the last couple of decades of his life, “Before the Devil” notwithstanding, one could sense an ebb of energy and focus. Some of his later films play like inferior copies of his earlier classics; his last cop corruption thriller “Night Falls on Manhattan” was listless and redundant. And “A Stranger Among Us,” ”Guilty as Sin” and the remake of John Cassavetes’ “Gloria” were flat-out terrible, disasters from which everyone involved was lucky to escape. But when you look back over the breadth of his career, the sheer number of memorable films is astonishing. Lumet was never less than a vital and important American filmmaker, fiercely committed to telling stories about people who might actually exist and things that could actually happen.

Lumet made three great movies about police corruption — 1973′s “Serpico,” 1982′s “Prince of the City,” and 1990′s neglected, magnificently scuzzy “Q & A” — and broached the subject in other less successful movies (including 1997′s “Night Falls on Manhattan”). His 1966 adaptation of Mary McCarthy’s “The Group” was a more astute examination of modern American women’s slippery, conflicted, volatile self-images on the cusp of the feminist revolution than almost anything that had been made in Hollywood up till then; the film also introduced a kinetic yet controlled way of shooting group conversations that hadn’t been seen yet, slowly moving the camera around an ensemble while making sure the screen captured important lines or realizations as they occurred. To say Lumet’s “Network,” from a fire-and-brimstone script by Paddy Chayefsky, was prescient would be a gross understatement. It’s not just the hilariously exaggerated portrait of network executives’ greedy crassness that pops off the screen, it’s the movie’s furious and despairing portrait of mass media as a form of mind control that turns viewers into “motorized, transistorized sheep,” “as replaceable as piston rods.” Most chilling of all is the movie’s position of Howard Beale (Peter Finch), the “mad prophet of the airwaves,” as a mere player in the bread-and-circuses master plan of international corporations — a means of letting the people blow off steam without directing their outrage toward substantive and lasting change. It’s all about serving the bottom line, taking care of the Owners. As network president Arthur Jensen tells Beale,

You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no Third Worlds. There is no West. There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multinational dominion of dollars! Petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars, reichmarks, rins, rubles, pounds, and shekels! It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet! That is the natural order of thiiiiiiiings today. That is the atomic and subatomic and galactic structure of thiiiiiiings today! And you have meddled with the primal forces of nature, and you… WILL… ATONE!

“The Fugitive Kind,” Lumet’s adaptation of Tennessee Williams’  “Orpheus Descending,” is a peculiar, loving, smart portrait of outsiders within America — Marlon Brando trading his rebel’s snakeskin jacket for a suit and tie, Anna Magnani’s Italian businesswoman fighting to be taken seriously in the redneck south. It’s more like an American version of a mid-’60s European art film than anything Lumet directed, with the exception of 1964′s searing “The Pawnbroker,” one of his masterworks — a black-and-white drama about a Holocaust survivor (Rod Steiger) plagued by nightmarish flashbacks to his wartime experience. The latter is one of the most important American films of the 1960s — not just for its complex, pained view of racism, urban unrest and liberal guilt (Steiger’s Sol Nazerman finds the poor African-Americans around him unnerving and scary even as his mind sees them as America’s equivalent of persecuted European Jews), but also for its unstinting commitment to physical reality (most of the movie was shot on the streets of New York, sometimes without permits), and its jagged, intuitive cutting style.

Lumet and his editor on “The Pawnbroker,” Ralph Rosenblum, imported French New Wave editing techniques, skipping back and forth between past and present with hard cuts rather than the usual “Now we’re going back in time!” dissolves that were once the norm. Portions of this film have the eerie transporting power of “Hiroshima, Mon Amour,” the film that perfected this kind of cutting. Again, the filmmaking feels internal, subjective; the form of the movie is dictated by its focus on Sol Nazerman’s emotions and psychology, and the most powerful parts of it feel almost first-person — as the hero’s mind is reaching out, wresting the film away from Lumet and shattering it into pieces.

If I had to choose a personal favorite, though, it would be 1975′s “Dog Day Afternoon,” a dramatization of a real-life bank robbery. It showcases one of Al Pacino’s funniest, most touching performances, and it brings many of Lumet’s fascinations together: psychology, group dynamics, the relationship between individuals and society, and institutions and communities, with a little media satire thrown in. (I love the deliveryman bringing a pizza to Pacino’s character, Sonny, then telling the crowd and the cameras, “I’m a fuckin’ star!“) It also politicizes everyday life in ways that modern films wouldn’t dare do. The sequence where Sonny riles up the crowd against the cops and FBI by invoking the bloody Attica riots is one of the great populist rabble-rousing scenes in American motion pictures. Equally good is the opening of the movie, a wordless, nearly four-minute mini-documentary set to Elton John’s “Amoreena” that situates the amazing story we’re about to see within the context of daily existence in a big city. A line from John’s song reminds me of the tough, tender sense of life communicated in Lumet’s movies: “Living/Like a lusty flower.”

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.