Colin Farrell in love with Elizabeth Taylor – too much for his publicist?

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/18/colin-farrell-love-elizabeth-taylor-publicist

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Colin Farrell has revealed that he fell in love with Elizabeth Taylor when he was 34 and she was 75. He was the kind of man who always appealed to her, a bit wild and Celtic, and he'd already been tipped as a possible Richard Burton in a biopic. And she never stopped being the most glamorous woman in the world. It was, however, never more than a platonic affair, although Farrell insists he'd have dearly loved to have been the eighth Mr Taylor.

Instead it was a kind of loving friendship, conducted mainly through late-night telephone calls while the rest of the world was asleep. Maybe a sexual liaison between a male star who traded on a reputation as a womaniser who did a bit of hellraising on the side and a woman old enough to be his mother's older sister was more than his publicist could contemplate (publicists, with apologies for the scepticism, seem to be an integral part of the romance). Young men and old women just don't, even when the woman has never ceased to be a global sex object.

Farrell likes older women; men don't generally boast about their failures, but then some are more, well, hurtful and, possibly, less useful than others. Years before, as both parties have often recounted, he'd been turned down by Eileen Atkins, who is practically old enough to be his grandmother. Dame Eileen said later that it sent her into her 70s with a song in her heart. And, as Jonathan Ross chortled when she told the story on his show, sent Farrell home to a queue of old women outside his door.

But even Taylor never reached the equivalent of silver-fox status, the accolade awarded to the sexy older man. There is still an impenetrable cultural barrier that prevents any acknowledgment of older women as sexual, let alone sexy.

At Taylor's funeral two years ago Farrell read the Gerard Manley Hopkins poem, The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo, a hymn to the fragility and imperishability of youth and beauty which Burton himself once dazzlingly recorded. Taylor's was an imperishable beauty even if it was sometimes nearly obscured by her attempts to masquerade as the goddess of eternal youth, which made it so fitting Michael Jackson should have been another of her constant friends.

Now 70 is the new 50, all this will change. The baby boomers, voracious consumers of all the riches the Earth has had to offer, are going to "keep at bay / Age and age's evils, hoar hair / Ruck and wrinkle".

Always assuming we want to, of course. Because getting old turns out to be almost nothing to do with despair at the unexpected hairiness or the imminence of the winding sheet, but instead to be an exhilarating liberation from all the constraints of expectation imposed on poor, beautiful youth. In no particular order, those include the need to have an unblemished complexion, the absolute importance of a constant flow of new clothes, men, and sex, and an inner life that is exclusively preoccupied with being in love. As far as I'm concerned, my list would include falling for Colin Farrell. Not that I'm old enough, anyway.

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