Monday, July 24, 2023

Movie Industry's Chosen Ones For Cleopatra, Elizabeth Taylor and Gal Gadot

 Nadene Goldfoot                                           


I thought no one could top the beauty of Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra.  Dame Elizabeth Rosemond Taylor DBE (February 27, 1932 – March 23, 2011) was a 5'2" British-American actress.                            

Art dealer father, Francis;  with parents  1947; Elizabeth  at 15,  Francis was born in Springfield, Illinois, the son of Elizabeth Mary (née Rosemond) and Francis Marion Taylor. The family later moved to Arkansas City, Kansas.  Francis began dealing in art in New York City for a wealthy uncle by marriage, Stephen Howard Young, later, a friend of Dwight Eisenhower after World War II.  Taylor married stage 
actress
 Sara Sothern (whose real name was Sara Viola Warmbrodt and who was also from Arkansas City) in 1926 in New York.  Sara's father was from Switzerland.  They were the parents of Howard Taylor and of Elizabeth Taylor.

 Born in London to socially prominent American parents,  Francis Lenn Taylor and Sara Sothern, who were Americans living in England. Her parents were originally from Arkansas City, Kansas. Taylor moved with her family to Los Angeles in 1939 who first became a child actress, as famous as Shirley Temple.    It had happened that in early 1939, the Taylors decided to return to the United States due to fear of impending war in Europe.  United States ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy contacted her father, urging him to return to the US with his family.                     

Richard Burton as Mark Antony with Taylor as Cleopatra in Cleopatra (1963)

After completing her MGM contract, Taylor starred in 20th Century-Fox's Cleopatra (1963). According to film historian Alexander Doty, this historical epic made her more famous than ever before.

Taylor was several months pregnant when she married her third husband, theatre and film producer Mike Todd, in Acapulco, Guerrero, Mexico, on February 2, 1957.  They had one daughter, Elizabeth "Liza" Frances (b. August 6, 1957).Todd was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, to Chaim Goldbogen (an Orthodox rabbi), and Sophia Hellerman, both of whom were Polish Jewish immigrants. He was one of nine children in a poor family, the youngest son, and his siblings nicknamed him "Tod" (pronounced "Toat" in German) to mimic his difficulty pronouncing the word "coat." It was from this that his name was derived.  Taylor converted to Judaism.  

 His death in a plane crash on March 22, 1958, left Taylor devastated. She was comforted by Todd's and her friend, singer Eddie Fisher, with whom she soon began an affair. As Fisher was still married to actress Debbie Reynolds, the affair resulted in a public scandal, with Taylor being branded a "homewrecker." Taylor and Fisher were married at the Temple Beth Sholom in Las Vegas on May 12, 1959; she later stated that she married him only due to her grief.

Gal Gadot is the 2nd Cleopatra.

Gal Gadot-Varsano (née GadotHebrewגל גדות Hebrew pronunciation:  born 30 April 1985) is an Israeli actress and model. She was crowned Miss Israel 2004 and represented her country at the Miss Universe 2004 pageant. She then served in the Israel Defense Forces for two years as a combat fitness instructor, whereafter she began studying at IDC Herzliya while building her modeling and acting careers.  

Prior to her birth, her parents had Hebraized their surname from "Greenstein" to "Gadot". Her father is Michael Gadot, an engineer, and her mother is Irit (née Weiss), a physical education teacher.

 Gadot's father is a sixth-generation Sabra. Her maternal grandparents were born in 20th-century Europe; her grandfather survived the Holocaust following his imprisonment at the Auschwitz concentration camp during Nazi Germany's occupation of Czechoslovakia, while her grandmother managed to escape the continent before the outbreak of World War II.  Gadot has stated that she was brought up in a "very Jewish, Israeli family environment".

Marble bust believed to be of Cleopatra VII, Altes Museum, Berlin

Cleopatra's history was that she was a descendant of its founder Ptolemy I Soter, a Macedonian Greek general and companion of Alexander the Great, a Greek of Macedonia.                             

     Nefertiti (c. 1370 – c. 1330 BC) was a queen of the 18th Dynasty of Ancient Egypt, the great royal wife of Pharaoh Akhenaten. Nefertiti and her husband were known for their radical overhaul of state religious policy, in which they promoted the earliest known form of monotheism, Atenism, centered on the sun disc and its direct connection to the royal household.  Moses was born about the same time,  1391 BCE and died 1271 BCE.                                    

Let's face it;  it's hard to have equal beauty of Elizabeth Taylor or Gal Gadot except in my view of past's Queen Nefertiti of Egypt.  She was the great beauty of any day in time.  

Resource: 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Taylor

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