lit a candle 1d agoSaw her once at a benefit in the early nineties. The way she moved through a room, how she looked at people. You felt seen. That's a gift.
Their story
Elizabeth Rosemond Taylor was born on 27 February 1932 at Heathwood, her family's home at 8 Wildwood Road in Hampstead Garden Suburb, London, to American parents Francis Lenn Taylor, an art dealer, and Sara Sothern, a stage actress. She held dual British and American citizenship from birth. Her older brother…
Elizabeth Rosemond Taylor was born on 27 February 1932 at Heathwood, her family's home at 8 Wildwood Road in Hampstead Garden Suburb, London, to American parents Francis Lenn Taylor, an art dealer, and Sara Sothern, a stage actress. She held dual British and American citizenship from birth. Her older brother Howard was born in 1929. The family's London circle included artists and politician Colonel Victor Cazalet, her unofficial godfather. They moved to California in 1939 as war loomed in Europe. After stays in Pasadena and Pacific Palisades they settled in Beverly Hills, where Francis opened a new gallery. Elizabeth attended Byron House School in Highgate as a child and later Hawthorne School in Beverly Hills. She was raised with Christian Science influences and later converted to Reform Judaism in 1959, saying she found comfort and dignity in the tradition and that she felt she had been a Jew all her life. Biographies and Wikipedia note eyes often described as violet or deep blue, with a double row of eyelashes. Newspaper sources cited on Wikipedia say she later renounced and then restored United States citizenship in the 1970s. This profile treats her as British-and-American, born in England to American parents, with a United States career base.
A Universal contract produced a minor debut in There's One Born Every Minute (1942). The studio dropped her within a year. MGM then signed her after Lassie Come Home (1943). National Velvet (1944), in which she starred at twelve as a girl determined to ride in the Grand National, made her a teen idol and left her with a lasting back injury. Through the 1950s she became one of MGM's most bankable leading women: Father of the Bride (1950), A Place in the Sun (1951), Ivanhoe (1952), Giant (1956) with Rock Hudson and James Dean, and Tennessee Williams adaptations Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958) and Suddenly, Last Summer (1959), the latter earning a Golden Globe. She won the Academy Award for Best Actress for BUtterfield 8 (1960), a call-girl role she disliked, after surviving near-fatal pneumonia and a tracheotomy while Cleopatra was in preparation. She later joked that the Oscar felt like a sympathy award for the tracheotomy.
Cleopatra (1963) made her the world's highest-paid movie star and, with co-star Richard Burton, a global tabloid phenomenon. Their affair while both were married drew Vatican condemnation for "erotic vagrancy" and intense press scrutiny that historians treat as a turning point in modern celebrity coverage. They married in Montreal on 15 March 1964, divorced in 1974, remarried in Botswana on 10 October 1975, and divorced again in 1976. They starred together in eleven films, including Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), which brought Taylor her second Best Actress Oscar and the strongest critical praise of her career. Anne Bancroft accepted that Oscar in her absence. She had already been married to Conrad "Nicky" Hilton Jr. (1950-1951), Michael Wilding (1952-1957), Mike Todd (1957 until his 22 March 1958 plane-crash death), and Eddie Fisher (1959-1964). The Fisher marriage, begun while he was still married to her friend Debbie Reynolds, produced a lasting scandal. Taylor and Reynolds later reconciled. Later marriages were to Senator John Warner (4 December 1976 to 5 November 1982) and construction worker Larry Fortensky (6 October 1991 to 1996), whom she wed at Michael Jackson's Neverland Ranch. She had four children: Michael Howard Wilding (born 6 January 1953) and Christopher Edward Wilding (born 27 February 1955) with Michael Wilding; Elizabeth "Liza" Frances Todd (born 6 August 1957) with Mike Todd; and adopted daughter Maria Burton (born Maria McKeown in 1961), a German orphan whose adoption Burton completed. For many years she lived at 700 Nimes Road in Bel Air.
From the mid-1980s she redirected celebrity into HIV/AIDS activism after friends including Rock Hudson faced the crisis. Frustrated that little was being done beyond headlines, she helped organize early Los Angeles AIDS benefits, co-founded what became amfAR in 1985 with Mathilde Krim's foundation, and created the Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation in 1991 to fund care and awareness while paying overhead herself. Campaigns and testimony for the Ryan White Care Act, pressure on presidents to name the disease, and decades of fundraising are credited with helping raise more than $270 million for the cause. She received the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award in 1993 and the Presidential Citizens Medal from President Bill Clinton on 8 January 2001. Career honours included the AFI Life Achievement Award (1993), a SAG life achievement honour with a humanitarian emphasis (1997), the BAFTA Fellowship (1999), Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 2000 New Year Honours, the GLAAD Vanguard Award (2000), and Kennedy Center Honors (2002). The American Film Institute ranked her seventh among the greatest female screen legends in 1999. Parallel business success came through fragrances, especially Passion (1987) and White Diamonds (1991), which biographers note earned more than her entire film salary history. Iconic jewels associated with her included the Krupp Diamond, the Taylor-Burton Diamond, and the La Peregrina pearl. A Hollywood Walk of Fame star and a French Legion of Honour (Knight, 1987) sit alongside that public life. Later screen and stage work included The Little Foxes, Private Lives, a Flintstones cameo in 1994, and a final Love Letters AIDS benefit with James Earl Jones in 2007. Years active run roughly from 1941 to 2007.
Chronic health problems included congenital scoliosis and the National Velvet back injury, spinal surgery in the 1950s, alcohol and prescription-drug addiction treated at the Betty Ford Center (first openly as a celebrity patient, December 1983 into January 1984), hip replacements, surgery for a benign brain tumor in 1997, skin cancer treatment in 2002, and congestive heart failure diagnosed in 2004. She used a wheelchair in later years and rarely appeared in public after the mid-1990s. She died of congestive heart failure at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles on 23 March 2011, aged 79, after about six weeks in hospital. The New York Times placed the time at 1:28 a.m. Pacific. Her publicist said she died peacefully. Her four children were with her. Death-certificate reporting cited by ABC News listed cardiopulmonary arrest caused by congestive heart failure. A private Jewish funeral was held the next day, 24 March 2011, at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale. She is entombed in the Great Mausoleum. At her request the service began fifteen minutes late. The family asked donations for the Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation in lieu of flowers. Vincent Canby had written that she represented the complete movie phenomenon, and that Elizabeth Taylor was the most important character she ever played. The House of Taylor estate continues her likeness work, with Wikipedia reporting that a share of royalties supports the foundation she created.
Biography adapted from EN Wikipedia; NYT obituary 24 Mar 2011; BBC; ABC News; Wikiquote; Quote Investigator; Clinton archives; ETAF; elizabethtaylor.com.
In their own words
“There is no deodorant like success.”
LIFE magazine interview with Richard Meryman, 18 December 1964; echoed in her 1965 informal memoir. (Wikiquote; Quote Investigator)
“I've always admitted that I'm ruled by my passions.”
Widely cited; Telegraph obituary quote roundup and Wikiquote.
“You find out who your real friends are when you're involved in a scandal.”
Telegraph obituary quote roundup and Wikiquote.
“I decided that with my name, I could open certain doors, that I was a commodity in myself... I could take the fame I'd resented... and use it to do some good.”
Vanity Fair, on turning to AIDS activism, via Wikipedia.
“I feel as if I have been a Jew all my life.”
On her 1959 conversion to Reform Judaism (Wikipedia).
“The public me, the one named Elizabeth Taylor, has become a lot of hokum and fabrication... and I find her slightly revolting.”
Elizabeth Taylor: An Informal Memoir (1965). Wikiquote and LibQuotes citing the memoir.
“I loved Michael with all my soul and I can't imagine life without him.”
On Michael Jackson, 2009. Entertainment Weekly via Wikiquote.
Photos
6Elizabeth Taylor, 1952 portrait by Philippe Halsman
by People Forever
Elizabeth Taylor, late 1950s MGM publicity still
by People Forever
Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra (1963)
by People Forever
Elizabeth Taylor in the Giant trailer
by People Forever
Yes, she used her voice when so many stayed silent. A real legacy.