British-American actress, first on screen as a child in the early 1940s then as a star of classical Hollywood cinema in the 1950s. She became the world’s highest paid movie star in the 1960s, remaining a well-known public figure for the rest of her life.
Born in London to socially prominent American parents residing in Britain, she trained in ballet shortly after learning to walk and once performed before the Queen. In 1939 the Taylor family emigrated back to the Los Angeles area. Her father opened up an art gallery in the Beverly Hills Hotel and this is where Elizabeth was discovered by movie scouts.
With a debut in 1942, she did a film with Universal Studios and was then signed with MGM for a long-term contract that tied her up until the early ’60s. Noted as a perfect beauty, with unique violet eyes, she matured directly from child characters into adult roles.
She won her first Academy Award playing a call girl in BUtterfield 8 (1960), a role she disliked, and was nominated for multiple Oscars. One of the highest paid performers, she won a second Academy Award for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in 1966.
Glamorous and popular as ever despite her bouts with alcohol, food and weight gains, Taylor remained in later life one of the world’s most photographed and publicized celebrities. As her film roles dwindled, she redirected her interests, coming out with her own line of perfumes and becoming active in the crusade against AIDS. She personally raised millions of dollars for AIDS research. Even in her sixties and seventies, Taylor still commanded attention with every performance. By 1990 she insisted she had not had any cosmetic surgery, “just a little work on the jaw.”
By 1997, she had gone through eight husbands, four children and nine grandchildren. At just 18, she married 23-year-old Nicky Hilton, heir to the hotel fortune, on 6 June 1950, and it was a disaster from the first. She later confided to friends that Hilton, a heavy gambler and boozer, did not consummate the marriage until the third night, and after that became sullen, angry, and abusive, physically and mentally. The marriage did not last a year.
Next came divorced British actor Michael Wilding, 19 years Liz’s senior, on 21 February 1952. Wilding was a quiet man who represented security, maturity. Perhaps too much so; they split after five years and two sons. A day after their separation, flamboyant producer Mike Todd leaped into Liz’s life. She got pregnant with their daughter, Liza, and they married on 2 February 1957 in a orchid-covered villa in Acapulco, Mexico. Ironically, crooner Eddie Fisher, who became Liz’s fourth husband, was their best man. After a tumultuous year of passionate fights and reconciliation’s with Todd, he was killed in a plane crash on 23 March 1958.
Eddie Fisher consoled Liz, then abruptly left his wife Debbie Reynolds to marry the widow on 12 May 1959. They adopted a daughter together, but their marriage crashed when she met and fell in love with her Cleopatra co-star Richard Burton.
To all appearances, the most star-crossed and dynamic relationship of her life, she and Burton married – and divorced – twice. The first time was on 14 March 1964 in Montreal, Canada. They became the media darlings of their era with their jet-setting, battling, drinking and reconciliations. They divorced in 1974 and remarried a year later, on 10 October 1975, in Botswana, Africa, for a short rematch.
Liz next married Virginia Senator John Warner on 4 December 1976. She gamely made a try at being a political wife but rapidly gained weight, drinking and pill-popping. After her divorce from Warner, Taylor checked into the Betty Ford clinic, where she met 20-year-younger blue-collar worker Larry Fortensky. He became her eighth husband on 16 October 1991 in a gala held at her pal Michael Jackson’s Neverland ranch. They announced their separation on 30 August 1995 and the marriage, her final, folded in 1996.
Personally she went through tragedies in the death of one husband and a number of medical problems; two hip replacement surgeries, a near fatal bought of pneumonia, weight fluctuations, a lacerated esophagus, emergency eye surgery, irregular heartbeat, colitis, an ulcer and a serious surgery to remove a benign tumor from her left frontal lobe of her brain on 20 February 1997. A fall at home on 19 August 1999 hospitalized her with a compression fracture in her spine. She suffered with osteoporosis for a while and never shook the back problems that began in 1944 at age 12 when she tumbled from a horse while filming National Velvet.
Taylor was awarded Dame commander of the Order of the British Empire at a ceremony at Buckingham Palace on 16 May 2000.
In June 2002 at age 70, she had radiation treatment for skin cancer and her doctor reported no residual evidence of basal cell carcinoma.
Under the terms of the 1998 Holocaust Victims Redress Act, a Canadian lawyer filed a suit against Taylor on 5 October 2004 for ownership of a valuable Van Gogh painting. The attorney, Andrew Orkin, claimed the painting belonged to his great-grandmother, Margarete Mauthner, a Jewish intellectual, patron of the arts, and art collector who fled the Nazis in 1939 Germany. Mauthner died in 1947. Taylor reportedly acquired the painting in a 1963 London auction.
In December 2004, the star revealed that she was suffering from congestive heart failure. She also had scoliosis.
Six weeks after hospitalization, the actress and activist died of congestive heart failure on 23 March 2011 at 1:28 AM local time in Los Angeles. She was 79.
Link to Wikipedia biography