Elizabeth Taylor: 1932-2011 2 hours ago | IMDb News   
       
   Elizabeth Taylor, one of the last great screen legends and winner of two   
   Academy Awards, died Wednesday morning in Los Angeles of complications from   
   congestive heart failure; she was 79. The actress had been hospitalized for   
   the past few weeks, celebrating her birthday on February 27th (the same day as   
   this year's Academy Awards) while at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center with friends   
   and family. Her four children, two sons and two daughters, were by her side as   
   she passed.   
       
   A striking brunette beauty with violet eyes who embodied both innocence and   
   seductiveness, and was known for her flamboyant private life and numerous   
   marriages as well as her acting career, Taylor was the epitome of Hollywood   
   glamour, and was one of the last legendary stars who could still command   
   headlines and standing ovations in her later years. Born to American parents   
   in England in 1932, Taylor's family decamped to Los Angeles as World War II   
   escalated in the late 1930s. Even as a child, her amazing good looks -- her   
   eyes were amplified by a double set of eyelashes, a mutation she was born with   
   -- garnered the attention of family friends in Hollywood, and she undertook a   
   screen test at 10 years old with Universal Studios. She appeared in only one   
   film for the studio (There's One Born Every Minute) before they dropped her;   
   Taylor was quickly picked up by MGM, the studio that would make her a young   
   star.   
       
   Her second film was Lassie Come Home (1943), co-starring Roddy McDowall, who   
   would become a lifelong friend. She assayed a few other roles (including a   
   noteworthy cameo in 1943's Jane Eyre) but campaigned for the part that would   
   make her a bona fide child star: the young Velvet Brown, who trained a   
   champion racehorse to win the Grand National, in National Velvet. The box   
   office smash launched Taylor's career, and MGM immediately put her to work in   
   a number of juvenile roles, most notably in Life With Father (1947) and as Amy   
   in 1949's Little Women. As she blossomed into a young woman, she began to   
   outgrow the roles she was assigned, often playing women far older than her   
   actual age. She scored another hit alongside Spencer Tracy as the young   
   daughter preparing for marriage in Father of the Bride, but her career   
   officially entered adulthood with George Stevens' A Place in the Sun (1951),   
   as a seductive rich girl who bedazzles Montgomery Clift to the degree that he   
   kills his pregnant girlfriend (Shelley Winters). The film was hailed as an   
   instant classic, and Taylor's performance, still considered one of her best,   
   launched the next part of her career.   
       
   Frustrated by MGM's insistence at putting her in period pieces (some were hits   
   notwithstanding, including 1952's Ivanhoe), Taylor looked to expand her   
   career, and took on the lead role in Elephant Walk (1954) when Vivian Leigh   
   dropped out after suffering a nervous breakdown. As her career climbed in the   
   1950s, so did Taylor's celebrity: she married hotel heir Conrad Hilton in   
   1950, and divorced him within a year. She then married British actor Michael   
   Wilding in 1952, with whom she had two sons, though that marriage ended in   
   divorce in 1957, after she embarked on an affair with the man who would be her   
   next husband, producer Michael Todd (who won an Oscar for Around the World in   
   80 Days). As her personal life made headlines, she appeared alongside James   
   Dean and Rock Hudson in Giant (1956), and received her first Academy Award   
   nomination for Raintree County in 1957. Roles in two Tennessee Williams   
   adaptations followed -- Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958) and Suddenly Last Summer   
   (1959), both considered some of her best performances -- followed, earning her   
   two more Oscar nominations, just as tragedy and notoriety would strike her   
   life.   
       
   Todd, whom she married in 1957 and had a daughter with, died in a plane crash   
   in 1958 in New Mexico, leaving a bereft Taylor alone at the height of her   
   stardom. Adored by millions, she went from lovely widow to heartless   
   home-wrecker in the tabloids after starting an affair With Eddie Fisher,   
   Todd's best friend and at the time husband of screen darling Debbie Reynolds.   
   The relationship was splashed across newspapers as Fisher left Reynolds and   
   their two children (including a young Carrie Fisher) for Taylor. The two   
   appeared together in 1960's Butterfield 8, where Taylor played prostitute   
   Gloria Wandrous in a performance that was considered good but nowhere near her   
   previous films, and earned her another Oscar nomination. As the Academy Awards   
   ceremony approached, Taylor was thrust into the headlines again when a   
   life-threatening case of pneumonia required an emergency tracheotomy, leaving   
   her with a legendary scar on her neck. Popular opinion swung yet again as   
   newspapers and fans feared for her life, and the illness was credited with   
   helping her win her first Oscar for Butterfield 8.   
       
   Taylor was now the biggest female star in the world, in terms of film and   
   popularity, and her notoriety was only about to increase. Twentieth Century   
   Fox, making a small biopic about the Egyptian queen Cleopatra, tried to offer   
   Taylor the part; she laughed them off, saying she would do it for $1 million,   
   a then-unheard of sum for an actress. The studio took her seriously, and soon   
   she was signed to a million-dollar contract (the first for an actress) and a   
   movie that would soon balloon out of control as filming started. Initially set   
   to film in England with Peter Finch and Rex Harrison as Marc Antony and Julius   
   Caesar, the movie encountered numerous problems and after a first shutdown was   
   moved to Italy, with director Joseph L. Manckiewicz at the helm. Finch left   
   and was replaced by acclaimed stage actor and rising movie star Richard Burton.   
       
   The rest was cinematic and tabloid history, as Taylor and Burton, whose   
   electric chemistry was apparent to all on set, embarked on quite possibly the   
   most famous Hollywood affair ever, while the filming of the epic movie took on   
   gargantuan proportions and its budget increased exponentially. After the dust   
   settled, Fox was saddled with a three-hour-plus film that, despite starring   
   the two actors whose every move was hounded by photographers and reporters,   
   was considered a bomb. The 1963 film almost sunk the studio (which only   
   rebounded thanks to the megahit The Sound of Music two years later), while   
   Burton and Taylor emerged from the wreckage relatively unscathed and   
   ultimately married in 1964.   
       
   However, despite carte blanche to do whatever they wanted, the newly married   
   couple made two marginally successful films, The V.I.P.s (1963) and The   
   Sandpiper (1965), both glossy soap operas that made money but hardly   
   challenged their talents. That opportunity would come with Who's Afraid of   
   Virginia Woolf? (1966), the adaptation of the Edward Albee play directed by   
   first-time filmmaker Mike Nichols. As the beleaguered professor George and his   
   shrewish wife Martha, whose mind games played havoc one fateful night with a   
   younger faculty couple (George Segal and Sandy Dennis), the two gave perhaps   
   their best screen performances ever, tearing into the roles -- and each other   
   -- with a gusto never seen in their previous pairings. They both received   
   Oscar nominations, but only Taylor won, her second and final Academy Award.   
       
   A successful adaptation of The Taming of the Shrew (1967) followed, but the   
   couple's next films were a string of notorious bombs, including Doctor   
   Faustus, The Comedians, and the so-bad-it's-good Boom. Though still one of   
   Hollywood's biggest stars, Taylor's cinematic output in the 1970s became   
   somewhat dismal, as her fraying marriage with Burton took center stage in the   
   press, as did her weight gain after Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? The couple   
   divorced in June 1974, only to remarry briefly in October 1975; by then,   
   Taylor was more celebrity than movie star, still appearing occasionally   
   onscreen and in television, but to less acclaim.   
       
   Taylor married U.S. Senator John Warner at the end of 1976, and during the   
   late 1970s and 1980s played the politician's wife, and her unsatisfying life   
   led her to depression, drinking, overeating and ultimately a visit to the   
   Betty Ford Center. After TV and stage appearances during the 1980s (including   
   a reunion in 1983 with Burton for a production of Private Lives), Taylor found   
   another, surprising role, that of social activist as longtime friend Rock   
   Hudson died of complications from AIDS in 1985. She threw herself into   
   fund-raising work, raising by some accounts $50 million to fight the disease,   
   helping found the American Foundation for AIDS Research (AMFAR).   
       
   Though later generations only saw Taylor on television in films like Malice in   
   Wonderland, and the mini-series North and South, and in her final screen   
   appearance as the mother of Wilma in the live-action movie adaptation of The   
   Flintstones, she remained a tabloid fixture through her marriage to   
   construction worker Larry Fortensky (her eighth and final husband), her   
   friendship with singer Michael Jackson, and her continual charity work, which   
   was only sidelined by hospital visits after being diagnosed with congestive   
   heart failure in 2004. She is survived by four children -- two sons with   
   Michael Wilding, a daughter with Michael Todd, and another daughter adopted   
   with Richard Burton -- and nine grandchildren.   
       
   --Mark Englehart   
       
       
   Regards,   
       
   Roger   
      
   --- D'Bridge 3.59   
    * Origin: NCS BBS -Houma, LA- (1:3828/7)