Liz Taylor's War Statement

Well, that was a quiet "swan song."

After billing her scheduled Oscar appearance as her formal farewell to Hollywood, Elizabeth Taylor chose to sit out said scheduled Oscar appearance because she was "increasingly uncomfortable" with the ceremony in the wake of the war in Iraq, her publicist said Monday.

Taylor, a two-time Oscar winner, was to have joined 59 other past acting honorees in an anniversary-minded reunion at Sunday's 75th Annual Academy Awards.

Taylor's rep said the screen goddess had been looking forward to the show, but R.S.V.P.'d her regrets to the Academy either late Friday or Saturday morning.

"She just said it was disrespectful to the people out there losing their lives fighting," publicist Sally Morrison said Monday.

The actress, however, did watch the telecast at her home, Morrison said.

Taylor believed the matter of whether to go or not to go "was up to people's individual choice," Morrison said. "But for her, she just couldn't live with herself to do it."

Last week, the 71-year-old legend said she planned to use the Oscar telecast to mark her "swan song from the stage."

"I've retired from acting, it doesn't really interest me that much anymore," Taylor, who last appeared on the big screen in 1994's The Flintstones, told Access Hollywood. "It seems kind of superficial because now my life is AIDS [activism], not acting."

Where Taylor and her whereabouts are concerned, health is always a top concern. But according to her camp, health had nothing to do with her decision stay home Sunday. Said Morrison: "She's absolutely fine."

Indeed, Taylor appeared feisty last week at an AIDS fundraiser hosted in her and Justin Timberlake's honor by Elton John and Sharon Osbourne at the Osbourne clan's Beverly Hills digs. Taylor used to occasion to voice concern about the launch of the U.S. war against Iraq.

"You don't think [terrorists] are going to retaliate? You don't think they're going to bomb the [bleep] out of us?" she asked the New York Daily News. "It's going to be terrifying."

Taylor was far from the only living Academy Award-winning actor or actress to skip Sunday's onstage alumni meeting.

Angelina Jolie, a scheduled presenter and Best Supporting Actress winner for 1999's Girl, Interrupted, was a last-minute withdrawal, reportedly, like Taylor, Will Smith and Jim Carrey, choosing not to do the award-show thing during wartime.

Paul Newman (Class of 1986, Best Actor, The Color of Money) was a long-planned no-show, despite the additional enticement of a Best Supporting Actor nomination for Road to Perdition. The perennial Oscar MIA was said to be racing cars in Mexico. Wife Joanne Woodward (Class of 1957, Best Actress, The Three Faces of Eve) presumably was on the pit crew, since she wasn't at the Kodak Theater, either.

Liza Minnelli (Class of 1972, Best Actress, Cabaret) presumably was unavailable on account of she was "learning so much about [herself]" at a rehab facility in Pennsylvania.

Other notable no-shows: Two-time winners Marlon Brando, Robert De Niro, Sally Field, Jane Fonda, Jodie Foster, Gene Hackman, Glenda Jackson, Jessica Lange, Maggie Smith and Kevin Spacey (although he, along with some other MIAs, like Robin Williams, did appear in a filmed segment on past winners).

Four-time winner Katharine Hepburn has a good excuse--she's 95 and never went to the Oscars, even when she was 25. (All right, she went once, but as a tribute to a friend, not to accept one of her awards.) Gregory Peck is 86. And 78-year-old Charlton Heston is ailing from Alzheimer's.

Recent and/or relatively lively no-shows: Sidney Poitier, Russell Crowe, Helen Hunt, Gwyneth Paltrow and Whoopi Goldberg, a past Oscar host, to boot.

And while 86-year-old Olivia de Havilland brought the black-tie attendees at the Kodak to their feet, her 85-year-old sister, Joan Fontaine, a Best Actress winner for Suspicion, was absent.

Of course, that last development might have been for the best.

The siblings have a heated feud that reportedly reached the boiling point in 1941--during Academy Awards season.