Film Legend Elizabeth Taylor Dies At Age 79 In LA

LOS ANGELES – Elizabeth Taylor, the violet-eyed film goddess whose sultry
screen persona, stormy personal life and enduring fame and glamour made her
one of the last of the classic movie stars and a template for the modern
celebrity, died Wednesday at age 79.

She was surrounded by her four children when she died of congestive heart
failure at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, where she had been hospitalized for
about six weeks, said publicist Sally Morrison.

"My mother was an extraordinary woman who lived life to the fullest, with
great passion, humor, and love," her son, Michael Wilding, said in a
statement.

"We know, quite simply, that the world is a better place for Mom having
lived in it. Her legacy will never fade, her spirit will always be with us,
and her love will live forever in our hearts."

"We have just lost a Hollywood giant," said Elton John, a longtime friend of
Taylor. "More importantly, we have lost an incredible human being."

Taylor was the most blessed and cursed of actresses, the toughest and the
most vulnerable. She had extraordinary grace, wealth and voluptuous beauty,
and won three Academy Awards, including a special one for her humanitarian
work.

One of those Oscars came for a searing performance in "Who's Afraid of
Virginia Woolf?" She played an alcoholic shrew in an emotionally
sadomasochistic marriage opposite real-life husband Richard Burton.

For all the ferocity of her screen roles and the turmoil of her life, Taylor
was remembered by "Virginia Woolf" director Mike Nichols for her gentler,
life-affirming side.

"The shock of Elizabeth was not only her beauty. It was her generosity. Her
giant laugh. Her vitality, whether tackling a complex scene on film or where
we would all have dinner until dawn," Nichols said in a statement. "She is
singular and indelible on film and in our hearts."

Taylor was the most loyal of friends and a defender of gays in Hollywood
when AIDS was new to the industry and beyond. But she was afflicted by ill
health, failed romances (eight marriages, seven husbands) and personal
tragedy.

"I think I'm becoming fatalistic," she said in 1989. "Too much has happened
in my life for me not to be fatalistic."

Her more than 50 movies included unforgettable portraits of innocence and of
decadence, from the children's classic "National Velvet" and the sentimental
family comedy "Father of the Bride" to Oscar-winning transgressions in
"Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" and "Butterfield 8." The historical epic
"Cleopatra" is among Hollywood's greatest on-screen fiascos and a landmark
of off-screen monkey business, the meeting ground of Taylor and Burton, the
"Brangelina" of their day.

She played enough bawdy women on film for critic Pauline Kael to deem her
"Chaucerian Beverly Hills."

That sauciness was part of her real life, too.

"She had a sense of humor that was so bawdy, even I was saying, `really?
That came out of your mouth?'" Whoopi Goldberg said on ABC's "The View,"
recalling how Taylor gave her advice about her own Hollywood career. "She
was just a magnificent woman. She was a great broad and a good friend."

But her defining role, one that lasted past her moviemaking days, was
"Elizabeth Taylor," ever marrying and divorcing, in and out of hospitals,
gaining and losing weight, standing by Michael Jackson, Rock Hudson and
other troubled friends, acquiring a jewelry collection that seemed to rival
Tiffany's.

She was a child star who grew up and aged before an adoring, appalled and
fascinated public. She arrived in Hollywood when the studio system tightly
controlled an actor's life and image, had more marriages than any publicist
could explain away and carried on until she no longer required explanation.
She was the industry's great survivor, and among the first to reach that
special category of celebrity — famous for being famous, for whom her work
was inseparable from the gossip around it.

The London-born actress was a star at age 12, a bride and a divorcee at 18,
a superstar at 19 and a widow at 26. She was a screen sweetheart and martyr
later reviled for stealing Eddie Fisher from Debbie Reynolds, then for
dumping Fisher to bed Burton, a relationship of epic passion and turbulence,
lasting through two marriages and countless attempted reconciliations.

She was also forgiven. Reynolds would acknowledge voting for Taylor when she
was nominated for "Butterfield 8" and decades later co-starred with her old
rival in "These Old Broads," co-written by Carrie Fisher, the daughter of
Reynolds and Eddie Fisher.

Taylor's ailments wore down the grudges. She underwent at least 20 major
operations and she nearly died from a bout with pneumonia in 1990. In 1994
and 1995, she had both hip joints replaced, and in February 1997, she
underwent surgery to remove a benign brain tumor. In 1983, she acknowledged
a 35-year addiction to sleeping pills and pain killers. Taylor was treated
for alcohol and drug abuse problems at the Betty Ford Clinic in Rancho
Mirage, Calif.

Her troubles bonded her to her peers and the public, and deepened her
compassion. Her advocacy for AIDS research and for other causes earned her a
special Oscar, the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award, in 1993.

As she accepted it, to a long ovation, she declared, "I call upon you to
draw from the depths of your being — to prove that we are a human race, to
prove that our love outweighs our need to hate, that our compassion is more
compelling than our need to blame."

The American Foundation for AIDS Research, for which Taylor was a longtime
advocate, noted in a statement that she was "among the first to speak out on
behalf of people living with HIV when others reacted with fear and often
outright hostility."

"She leaves a monumental legacy that has improved and extended millions of
lives and will enrich countless more for generations to come," the group
said.

The dark-haired Taylor made an unforgettable impression in Hollywood with
"National Velvet," the 1945 film in which the 12-year-old belle rode a
steeplechase horse to victory in the Grand National.

Critic James Agee wrote of her: "Ever since I first saw the child ... I have
been choked with the peculiar sort of adoration I might have felt if we were
in the same grade of primary school."

"National Velvet," her fifth film, also marked the beginning of Taylor's
long string of health issues. During production, she fell off a horse. The
resulting back injury continued to haunt her.

Taylor matured into a ravishing beauty in "Father of the Bride," in 1950,
and into a respected performer and femme fatale the following year in "A
Place in the Sun," based on the Theodore Dreiser novel "An American
Tragedy." The movie co-starred her close friend Montgomery Clift as the
ambitious young man who drowns his working-class girlfriend to be with the
socialite Taylor. In real life, too, men all but committed murder in pursuit
of her.

Through the rest of the 1950s and into the 1960s, she and Marilyn Monroe
were Hollywood's great sex symbols, both striving for appreciation beyond
their physical beauty, both caught up in personal dramas filmmakers could
only wish they had imagined. That Taylor lasted, and Monroe died young, was
a matter of luck and strength; Taylor lived as she pleased and allowed no
one to define her but herself.

"I don't entirely approve of some of the things I have done, or am, or have
been. But I'm me. God knows, I'm me," Taylor said around the time she turned
50.

She had a remarkable and exhausting personal and professional life. Her
marriage to Michael Todd ended tragically when the producer died in a plane
crash in 1958. She took up with Fisher, married him, then left him for
Burton. Meanwhile, she received several Academy Award nominations and two
Oscars.

She was a box-office star cast in numerous "prestige" films, from "Raintree
County" with Clift to "Giant," an epic co-starring her friends Hudson and
James Dean. Nominations came from a pair of movies adapted from work by
Tennessee Williams: "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" and "Suddenly, Last Summer." In
"Butterfield 8," released in 1960, she starred with Fisher as a doomed
girl-about-town. Taylor never cared much for the film, but her performance
at the Oscars wowed the world.

Sympathy for Taylor's widowhood had turned to scorn when she took up with
Fisher, who had supposedly been consoling her over the death of Todd. But
before the 1961 ceremony, she was hospitalized from a nearly fatal bout with
pneumonia and Taylor underwent a tracheotomy. The scar was bandaged when she
appeared at the Oscars to accept her best actress trophy for "Butterfield
8."

To a standing ovation, she hobbled to the stage. "I don't really know how to
express my great gratitude," she said in an emotional speech. "I guess I
will just have to thank you with all my heart." It was one of the most
dramatic moments in Academy Awards history.

"Hell, I even voted for her," Reynolds later said.

Greater drama awaited: "Cleopatra." Taylor met Burton while playing the
title role in the 1963 epic, in which the brooding, womanizing Welsh actor
co-starred as Mark Antony. Their chemistry was not immediate. Taylor found
him boorish; Burton mocked her physique. But the love scenes on film
continued away from the set and a scandal for the ages was born. Headlines
shouted and screamed. Paparazzi, then an emerging breed, snapped and
swooned. Their romance created such a sensation that the Vatican denounced
the happenings as the "caprices of adult children."

The film so exceeded its budget that the producers lost money even though
"Cleopatra" was a box-office hit and won four Academy awards. (With its $44
million budget adjusted for inflation, "Cleopatra" remains the most
expensive movie ever made.) Taylor's salary per film topped $1 million. "Liz
and Dick" became the ultimate jet set couple, on a first name basis with
millions who had never met them.

They were a prolific acting team, even if most of the movies aged no better
than their marriages: "The VIPs" (1963), "The Sandpiper" (1965), "Who's
Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" (1966), "The Taming of the Shrew" (1967), "The
Comedians" (1967), "Dr. Faustus" (1967), "Boom!" (1968), "Under Milk Wood"
(1971) and "Hammersmith Is Out" (1972).

Art most effectively imitated life in the adaptation of Edward Albee's
"Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" — in which Taylor and Burton played mates
who fought viciously and drank heavily. She took the best actress Oscar for
her performance as the venomous Martha in "Virginia Woolf" and again stole
the awards show, this time by not showing up at the ceremony. She refused to
thank the academy upon learning of her victory and chastised voters for not
honoring Burton.

Taylor and Burton divorced in 1974, married again in 1975 and divorced again
in 1976.

"We fight a great deal," Burton once said, "and we watch the people around
us who don't quite know how to behave during these storms. We don't fight
when we are alone."

In 1982, Taylor and Burton appeared in a touring production of the Noel
Coward play "Private Lives," in which they starred as a divorced couple who
meet on their respective honeymoons. They remained close at the time of
Burton's death, in 1984.

Elizabeth Rosemond Taylor was born in London on Feb. 27, 1932, the daughter
of Francis Taylor, an art dealer, and the former Sara Sothern, an American
stage actress. At age 3, with extensive ballet training already behind her,
Taylor danced for British princesses Elizabeth (the future queen) and
Margaret Rose at London's Hippodrome. At age 4, she was given a wild field
horse that she learned to ride expertly.

At the onset of World War II, the Taylors came to the United States. Francis
Taylor opened a gallery in Beverly Hills and, in 1942, his daughter made her
screen debut with a bit part in the comedy "There's One Born Every Minute."

Her big break came soon thereafter. While serving as an air-raid warden with
MGM producer Sam Marx, Taylor's father learned that the studio was
struggling to find an English girl to play opposite Roddy McDowall in
"Lassie Come Home." Taylor's screen test for the film won her both the part
and a long-term contract. She grew up quickly after that.

Still in school at 16, she would dash from the classroom to the movie set
where she played passionate love scenes with Robert Taylor in "Conspirator."

"I have the emotions of a child in the body of a woman," she once said. "I
was rushed into womanhood for the movies. It caused me long moments of
unhappiness and doubt."

Soon after her screen presence was established, she began a series of very
public romances. Early loves included socialite Bill Pawley, home run
slugger Ralph Kiner and football star Glenn Davis.

Then, a roll call of husbands:

• She married Conrad Hilton Jr., son of the hotel magnate, in May 1950 at
age 18. The marriage ended in divorce that December.

• When she married British actor Michael Wilding in February 1952, he was 39
to her 19. They had two sons, Michael Jr. and Christopher Edward. That
marriage lasted 4 years.

• She married cigar-chomping movie producer Michael Todd, also 20 years her
senior, in 1957. They had a daughter, Elizabeth Francis. Todd was killed in
a plane crash in 1958.

• The best man at the Taylor-Todd wedding was Fisher. He left his wife
Debbie Reynolds to marry Taylor in 1959. She converted to Judaism before the
wedding.

• Taylor and Fisher moved to London, where she was making "Cleopatra." She
met Burton, who also was married. That union produced her fourth child,
Maria.

• After her second marriage to Burton ended, she married John Warner, a
former secretary of the Navy, in December 1976. Warner was elected a U.S.
senator from Virginia in 1978. They divorced in 1982.

• In October 1991, she married Larry Fortensky, a truck driver and
construction worker she met while both were undergoing treatment at the
Betty Ford Center in 1988. He was 20 years her junior. The wedding, held at
the ranch of Michael Jackson, was a media circus that included the din of
helicopter blades, a journalist who parachuted to a spot near the couple and
a gossip columnist as official scribe.

But in August 1995, she and Fortensky announced a trial separation; she
filed for divorce six months later and the split became final in 1997.

"I was taught by my parents that if you fall in love, if you want to have a
love affair, you get married," she once remarked. "I guess I'm very
old-fashioned."

Her philanthropic interests included assistance for the Israeli War Victims
Fund and the Variety Clubs International.

She received the Legion of Honor, France's most prestigious award, in 1987,
for her efforts to support AIDS research. In May 2000, Queen Elizabeth II
made Taylor a dame — the female equivalent of a knight — for her services to
the entertainment industry and to charity.

In 1993, she won a lifetime achievement award from the American Film
Institute; in 1999, an institute survey of screen legends ranked her No. 7
among actresses.

During much of her later career, Taylor's waistline, various diets, diet
books and tangled romances were the butt of jokes by Joan Rivers and others.
John Belushi mocked her on "Saturday Night Live," dressing up in drag and
choking on a piece of chicken.

"It's a wonder I didn't explode," Taylor wrote of her 60-pound weight gain —
and successful loss — in the 1988 book "Elizabeth Takes Off on Self-Esteem
and Self-Image."

She was an iconic star, but her screen roles became increasingly rare in the
1980s and beyond. She appeared in several television movies, including
"Poker Alice" and "Sweet Bird of Youth," and entered the Stone Age as Pearl
Slaghoople in the movie version of "The Flintstones." She had a brief role
on the popular soap opera "General Hospital."

Taylor was the subject of numerous unauthorized biographies and herself
worked on a handful of books, including "Elizabeth Taylor: An Informal
Memoir" and "Elizabeth Taylor: My Love Affair With Jewelry." In tune with
the media to the end, she kept in touch through her Twitter account.

"I like the connection with fans and people who have been supportive of me,"
Taylor told Kim Kardashian in a 2011 interview for Harper's Bazaar. "And I
love the idea of real feedback and a two-way street, which is very, very
modern. But sometimes I think we know too much about our idols and that
spoils the dream."

Survivors include her daughters Maria Burton-Carson and Liza Todd-Tivey,
sons Christopher and Michael Wilding, 10 grandchildren and four
great-grandchildren.

A private family funeral is planned later this week.