LOS ANGELES – Elizabeth Taylor, who has died at the age of 79, was the archetypal Hollywood movie queen, a violet-eyed beauty known equally for her stormy romances and eight marriages as her Oscar-winning performances.
Over a five-decade career she won two Academy Awards for best actress, including in the 1966 classic “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” one of many films where she played opposite her two-times husband Richard Burton. In later years as her health failed she retired from the public gaze, although she notably attended the 2009 funeral of her long-time friend Michael Jackson, while she remained active in raising funds to battle AIDS/HIV. Born in London on February 27, 1932, she was evacuated to California with her American parents in 1939, where she was soon discovered at her father’s art gallery by the fiancee of the chairman of Universal Studios.
She debuted in 1942 in “There’s One Born Every Minute,” and by 1944 had become a child star with “National Velvet,” the story of a girl who rides her horse to victory at the Grand National disguised as a boy. “Before men, my great love was for animals, which I still have,” Taylor would later say. Schooled on the set, it wasn’t long before her attention turned to men. She married for the first time in 1950, aged 18, to playboy hotel chain heir Nicky Hilton. The marriage lasted 203 days, collapsing amid verbal and physical abuse after a lavish Hollywood wedding and a three-month European honeymoon. Taylor moved on, and by 1952 she had tied the knot with British matinee idol Michael Wilding, 19 years her senior. They had two children, Michael Jr. and Christopher.
Though Taylor said Wilding gave her stability, it wasn’t enough. She filed for divorce in 1956, and within days of the separation producer Michael Todd, 49, proposed. Tough and domineering, he was Taylor’s first great love. They had a daughter, Elizabeth Frances, in August 1957, but seven months later tragedy struck: Todd was killed in a plane crash in New Mexico. Devastated, Taylor was accompanied at Todd’s funeral by his best friend, singer Eddie Fisher, whose wife actress Debbie Reynolds stayed home in California to take care of Taylor’s children. From grieving widow to homewrecker, Taylor made a lightning change of roles, stealing Fisher from Reynolds in an affair that scandalized puritanical America. They married in 1959, but the public outrage nearly killed Taylor’s flourishing acting career.
She had just finished filming the Tennessee Williams classic “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” (1958) with Paul Newman, and had already earned critical raves with “Giant” (1956), the Texas oil patch epic with Rock Hudson and James Dean. But her flame only burned brighter. She made Tennessee Williams’ “Suddenly Last Summer” in 1959 with Katharine Hepburn and Montgomery Clift. The following year, she won her first Oscar for best actress for her portrayal of a high-class call girl in “Butterfield 8.” Taylor is said to have hated the movie.
Then came “Cleopatra” (1962) — “surely the most bizarre piece of entertainment ever perpetrated,” Taylor said of the production, at the time the most expensive in Hollywood history. Taylor was paid a record million dollars.The movie flopped, but the Roman set was the backdrop for a sizzling love affair that made headlines around the world: Taylor and her leading man, Burton, who was married. “Elizabeth looks at you with those eyes, and your blood churns,” said Burton, a Shakesperean actor hailed as the next Laurence Olivier.
