Elizabeth Taylor

Elizabeth Rosemond Taylor was born on February 27, 1932, in Hampstead Garden Suburb, a planned residential district in north London. Her parents were Americans living abroad: Francis Taylor, an art dealer who ran a gallery in Mayfair, and Sara Sothern, a former stage actress who had retired after marriage ^[1]. Because her parents were United States citizens, Elizabeth held American nationality from birth alongside her British citizenship, a dual status she kept for the rest of her life ^[2].

Her early childhood was comfortable. The family lived well on the income from the gallery, and Elizabeth took ballet lessons as a small girl. That settled existence ended as war approached. In 1939, with conflict in Europe imminent, the Taylors left England and resettled in Los Angeles, where Sara's family lived and where Francis eventually opened a new gallery in Beverly Hills ^[1].

In California the family's connections drew the attention of the film industry. Sara, who had abandoned her own stage career, encouraged her daughter toward acting. Elizabeth's striking appearance, especially her blue-violet eyes framed by dark double lashes, made an immediate impression on studio scouts. She signed first with Universal Pictures, which released her after a single small film, and then in 1943 with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the studio that would shape her professional life for nearly two decades ^[3].

Taylor's breakthrough came at age twelve. MGM cast her in National Velvet (1944) as Velvet Brown, a young English girl who trains a horse for the Grand National steeplechase. The film was a major commercial success, and the studio recognized that it had a valuable long-term asset ^[3]. Unlike many child performers, Taylor made the transition to adult roles without losing her audience.

The MGM system controlled nearly every aspect of her adolescence. She was educated at the studio schoolhouse, worked steadily through her teenage years in films such as Little Women (1949) and Father of the Bride (1950), and later spoke frankly about how little ordinary childhood she had experienced ^[1]. The studio also managed her image, arranging publicity around her first romances and her 1950 marriage to hotel heir Conrad Hilton Jr., which ended within a year.

Her standing as a serious dramatic actress began with A Place in the Sun (1951), directed by George Stevens and adapted from Theodore Dreiser's novel An American Tragedy. Playing opposite Montgomery Clift, who became a close lifelong friend, Taylor earned reviews that treated her as more than a photogenic contract player ^[4]. Through the 1950s she consolidated that reputation with Giant (1956), Raintree County (1957), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), and Suddenly, Last Summer (1959), receiving Academy Award nominations for Best Actress in three consecutive years ^[3].

Any account of Elizabeth Taylor achievements begins with her two Academy Awards. The first came for BUtterfield 8 (1960), in which she played a Manhattan call girl; Taylor herself disliked the film, and many observers believed the vote reflected sympathy after a near-fatal bout of pneumonia that required an emergency tracheotomy ^[2]. The second, for her portrayal of Martha in Mike Nichols's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), was earned without qualification. Taylor gained weight, aged herself visibly, and delivered a raw, abrasive performance opposite Richard Burton that critics ranked among the finest screen acting of the decade ^[4].

Between those two awards came Cleopatra (1963), a production that changed the economics of stardom. Twentieth Century-Fox agreed to pay Taylor one million dollars, a figure no actress had commanded before, and the fee grew further through overages as the troubled shoot dragged on in London and Rome ^[5]. The film nearly bankrupted the studio, yet it confirmed Taylor as the biggest female box-office draw in the world. On set she began her relationship with co-star Richard Burton, a romance conducted under such intense press scrutiny that the Vatican newspaper publicly rebuked the couple ^[5].

Her later achievements extended beyond film. In 1985, after the death of her friend and former co-star Rock Hudson, Taylor became one of the first major celebrities to campaign openly for AIDS research at a time when the disease carried heavy stigma. She helped found the American Foundation for AIDS Research (amfAR) and in 1991 established the Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation, which funds direct care for people living with HIV ^[6]. She testified before Congress, raised hundreds of millions of dollars across her lifetime of advocacy, and received the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award from the Academy in 1993 ^[2]. In 2000 she was appointed a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire ^[1].

Taylor's private life generated as much coverage as her films, and the basic Elizabeth Taylor facts include eight marriages to seven men. After the brief union with Conrad Hilton Jr., she married the British actor Michael Wilding, with whom she had two sons, Michael and Christopher. Her third husband, producer Mike Todd, died in a plane crash in 1958, barely a year after the birth of their daughter Liza; Taylor described his death as one of the great losses of her life ^[1].

Her subsequent marriage to singer Eddie Fisher, who had been Todd's close friend and was then married to Debbie Reynolds, provoked a public backlash that briefly damaged her standing. That marriage collapsed during the filming of Cleopatra, when Taylor and Richard Burton began their celebrated affair. She married Burton in 1964, divorced him in 1974, remarried him in 1975, and divorced him again in 1976. Together they adopted a daughter, Maria, and made eleven films ^[5]. Her final two marriages were to United States Senator John Warner of Virginia and to construction worker Larry Fortensky, whom she met during treatment at the Betty Ford Center ^[2].

Health problems shadowed her from childhood, when a fall from a horse during National Velvet injured her back. Over the decades she endured dozens of operations, chronic spinal pain, life-threatening pneumonia twice, hip replacements, the removal of a benign brain tumor in 1997, and treatment for dependence on alcohol and prescription painkillers, which she discussed candidly after seeking help in 1983 ^[2]. She also built a business empire outside acting: her perfume lines, beginning with Passion in 1987 and White Diamonds in 1991, earned more than her entire film career ^[6]. Her jewelry collection, assembled over decades and documented in her own book My Love Affair with Jewelry, sold at Christie's in 2011 for approximately 116 million dollars, a record for a single-owner jewelry auction ^[7].

Taylor's film work thinned after the 1970s. She appeared on stage, making her Broadway debut in a 1981 revival of Lillian Hellman's The Little Foxes, which earned her a Tony nomination, and she worked in television films and series, winning new audiences through appearances that traded knowingly on her own legend ^[3]. Her last theatrical feature of note was the 1994 live-action comedy The Flintstones, though she continued voice and television work into the early 2000s.

Her energy in these decades went mainly into activism and business. She lobbied for AIDS funding through amfAR and her own foundation, appeared at benefit galas well into her seventies, and used her fame deliberately, arguing that celebrity was only worth having if it could be spent on causes ^[6]. She was also a loyal public defender of her friend Michael Jackson, whose 1991 wedding gift to her included hosting her marriage to Fortensky at his Neverland Ranch.

Congestive heart failure, diagnosed in 2004, gradually confined her. She used a wheelchair in her final years because of spinal problems but remained active on social media and in her foundation's affairs. Elizabeth Taylor died of complications from congestive heart failure on March 23, 2011, at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, at the age of 79. She was buried at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California ^[2].

Taylor occupies a distinct place in film history: the last great product of the studio system who outlived it and learned to command it. The American Film Institute ranked her seventh among the greatest female screen legends of classical Hollywood cinema ^[8]. Her million-dollar Cleopatra contract reset expectations for star salaries, and her handling of fame, including the sale of exclusive photographs and the building of branded businesses, anticipated the way later celebrities would manage their own images ^[5].

Any Elizabeth Taylor biography must weigh the acting against the activism, and many who worked in HIV advocacy argue the second mattered more. Her willingness to speak about AIDS in 1985, when political leaders largely avoided the subject, helped shift public attitudes and unlocked funding for research and patient care. The Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation continues her work, supported in part by a share of ongoing fragrance revenues ^[6].

Her films remain in circulation, with A Place in the Sun, Giant, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? regularly revived and studied. National Velvet was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress ^[8]. More than a decade after her death, her estate, her jewels, and her image still draw exhibitions, documentaries, and biographies, evidence that the fascination she inspired in life has not faded ^[7].