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• Born: 27 February 1932
• Birthplace: London, England
• Best Known As: The much-married star of Cleopatra

One of the great Hollywood stars of the 20th century, Elizabeth Taylor has had three fairly distinct career personas: as the winsome child star of movies like National Velvet (1944); as a fiery prima donna, the acknowledged "world's most beautiful woman" and star of movies like Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958) and Butterfield 8 (1960); and as an older Hollywood grande dame, tabloid favorite, and friend to pop stars like Elton John and Michael Jackson. Her tempestuous marriage to Welsh actor Richard Burton made them Hollywood's reigning couple in the 1960s: they starred together as lovers in Cleopatra (1963, with Taylor as Cleopatra and Burton as Marc Antony) and then played battling spouses in the 1966 film Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Taylor had seven husbands and eight marriages in all: hotelier Nicky Hilton (1950-51, divorced), actor Michael Wilding (1952-57, divorced), producer Mike Todd (1957 until his 1958 death in a plane crash), singer Eddie Fisher (1959-64, divorced), actor Richard Burton (1964-74, divorced), Burton again (1975-76, divorced again), politician John Warner (1976-82, divorced), and construction worker Larry Fortensky (1991-96, divorced). Taylor won best actress Oscars for Butterfield 8 and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf. She was made a Dame Commander of the British Empire (DBE) in 2000 by Queen Elizabeth II.

Taylor was the first actress to earn a million dollars for one film, for 1963's Cleopatra.

• Born: Feb 27, 1932 in London, England, UK
• Occupation: Actor
• Active: '40s-'80s
• Major Genres: Drama, Comedy
• Career Highlights: Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Giant, The Taming of the Shrew
• First Major Screen Credit: National Velvet (1944)

Biography

Elizabeth Taylor was the ultimate movie star: violet-eyed, luminously beautiful, and bigger than life; although never the most gifted actress, she was the most magnetic, commanding the spotlight with unparalleled power. Few figures have been the recipient of such adoration, the target of such ridicule, or the subject of such gossip and innuendo, and where so many before and after her withered and died in the intense glare of their fame, Taylor thrived; celebrity was her lifeblood, the public eye her constant companion. She knew no moderation -- it was all or nothing. Whether good (two Oscars, the first-ever one-million-dollar paycheck, and charity work), bad (health and weight problems, drug battles, and other tragedies), or ugly (eight failed marriages, movie disasters, and countless scandals), no triumph or setback was too personal for media consumption.

Born February 27, 1932, in London, Taylor literally grew up in public. At the beginning of World War II, her family relocated to Hollywood, and by the age of ten she was already under contract at Universal. She made her screen debut in 1942's There's One Born Every Minute, followed a year later by a prominent role in Lassie Come Home. For MGM, she co-starred in the 1944 adaptation of Jane Eyre, then appeared in The White Cliffs of Dover. With her first lead role as a teen equestrian in the 1944 family classic National Velvet, Taylor became a star. To their credit, MGM did not exploit her, despite her incredible beauty; she did not even reappear onscreen for two more years, returning with Courage of Lassie. Taylor next starred as Cynthia in 1947, followed by Life With Father. In Julia Misbehaves, she enjoyed her first grown-up role, and then portrayed Amy in the 1947 adaptation of Little Women.

Taylor's first romantic lead came opposite Robert Taylor in 1949's Conspirator. Her love life was already blossoming offscreen as well; that same year she began dating millionaire Howard Hughes, but broke off the relationship to marry hotel heir Nicky Hilton when she was just 17 years old. The marriage made international headlines, and in 1950 Taylor scored a major hit as Spencer Tracy's daughter in Vincente Minnelli's Father of the Bride; a sequel, Father's Little Dividend, premiered a year later. Renowned as one of the world's most beautiful women, Taylor was nevertheless largely dismissed as an actress prior to an excellent performance in the George Stevens drama A Place in the Sun; soon, she was earning upwards of 5,000 dollars a week.

Taylor's marriage to Hilton proved short-lived, and in 1952 she married actor Michael Wilding. Often her romantic life overshadowed her career; indeed, her films of the early '50s were largely undistinguished and frequently performed poorly at the box office. In 1956, however, the actress reunited with Stevens to star in his epic adaptation of the Edna Ferber novel Giant. It was a blockbuster, as was her 1957 follow-up Raintree County, for which she earned a Best Actress Oscar nomination. That same year, Taylor's marriage to Wilding ended, and she soon announced her much-publicized engagement to producer Mike Todd; his tragic death in a plane crash the following year left her the world's most glamorous widow, and her fame grew even larger. Whatever sympathy audiences held for Taylor quickly vanished, however, when she was soon identified as the other woman in the break-up of singer Eddie Fisher and actress Debbie Reynolds; their romantic triangle played out in the headlines of tabloids the world over, and although Taylor eventually stole Fisher away, the careers of all three performers were boosted by the scandal -- the public simply could not get enough.

Taylor's sexy image was further elevated by an impossibly sensual performance in 1958's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof; another Tennessee Williams adaptation, Suddenly Last Summer, followed a year later, and both were highly successful. To complete the terms of her MGM contract, she grudgingly agreed to star in 1960's Butterfield 8; upon completing the film Taylor traveled to Britain to begin work on the much-heralded Cleopatra, for which she received an unprecedented one-million-dollar fee. In London she became dangerously ill, and underwent a life-saving emergency tracheotomy. Hollywood sympathy proved sufficient for her to win a Best Actress Oscar for Butterfield 8, although much of the good will extended toward her again dissipated in the wake of the mounting difficulties facing Cleopatra. With five million dollars already spent, producers pulled the plug and relocated the shoot to Italy, replacing co-star Stephen Boyd with Richard Burton. The final tally placed the film at a cost of 37 million dollars, making it the most costly project in film history; scheduled for a 16-week shoot, the production actually took years, and despite mountains of pre-publicity, it was a huge disaster at the box office upon its 1963 premiere.

Still, the notice paid to Cleopatra paled in comparison to the scrutiny which greeted Taylor's latest romance, with Burton; she left Fisher to marry the actor in 1964, and perhaps no Hollywood relationship was ever the subject of such intense media coverage. Theirs was a passionate, stormy relationship, played out in the press and onscreen in films including 1963's The V.I.P.'s and 1965's The Sandpiper. In 1966, the couple starred in Mike Nichols' controversial directorial debut Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, arguably Taylor's best performance; overweight, verbally cutting, and defiantly unglamorous, she won a second Oscar for her work as the embittered wife of Burton's alcoholic professor. Their real-life marriage managed to survive, however, and after Taylor appeared opposite Marlon Brando in 1967's Reflections in a Golden Eye, she and Burton reunited for The Comedians. She also starred in Franco Zeffirelli's The Taming of the Shrew, but none were successful at the box office; 1968's Doctor Faustus was a disaster, and later that year Boom! failed to gross even one-quarter of its costs. After 1969's Secret Ceremony, Taylor starred in The Only Game in Town, a year later; when they too failed, her days of million-dollar salaries were over, and she began working on percentage.

With Burton, Taylor next appeared in a small role in 1971's Under Milk Wood; next was X, Y and Zee, followed by another spousal collaboration, Hammersmith Is Out. In 1972 the Burtons also co-starred in a television feature, Divorce His, Divorce Hers; the title proved prescient, as two years later, the couple did indeed divorce after a decade together. However, few anticipated the next development in their relationship: In 1975, it was announced that Taylor and Burton had remarried, but this time their union lasted barely a year. In the meantime, she was largely absent from films, and did not reappear until 1976's The Blue Bird; a year later, she starred in the telefilm Victory at Entebbe. Taylor concluded the decade with a prolific burst of feature films (A Little Night Music, Winter Kills, The Mirror Crack'd) and TV work (Return Engagement), but audiences no longer seemed interested. Indeed, she made more headlines for her increasing weight, continued health problems, and revelations of drug and alcohol abuse than she did for any of her films. As always, Taylor's love life remained the focus of much speculation as well, and from 1976 to 1982 she was married to politician John Warner.

With no film offers forthcoming, Taylor turned to the stage, and in 1981 she starred in a production of The Little Foxes. In 1983, she and Burton also reunited to co-star on Broadway in Private Lives. Television also remained an option, and in 1983 she and Carol Burnett co-starred in Between Friends. However, Taylor's primary focus during the decades to follow was charity work; following the death of her close friend, Rock Hudson, she became a leader in the battle against AIDS, and for her efforts won the 1993 Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award. She also launched a successful line of perfumes. And of course, Taylor remained a fixture of tabloid headlines; she maintained a close friendship with another favorite target of the tabloids, King-of-Pop Michael Jackson, and during a well-publicized stay at the Betty Ford Clinic, she began a romance with Larry Fortensky, a construction worker many years her junior. They married in 1989, but like her other relationships, it did not last. In between, there was also the occasional film or television project. In 1988, she and Zeffirelli reunited for Young Toscanini, but the picture was never released; a 1989 TV adaptation of Sweet Bird of Youth earned Taylor considerable publicity, but she didn't appear in another film until 1994 with The Flintstones.

In 1997, the actress once again became a featured tabloid topic when she underwent brain surgery to remove a benign tumor. The same year, she received attention of a more favorable variety with Happy Birthday Elizabeth: A Celebration of Life, a TV special in which she was paid tribute by a number of stars including Madonna, Shirley MacLaine, John Travolta, Dennis Hopper, and Cher. In 2001, Taylor managed the impressive feat of dredging up both old tabloid headlines and creating new ones, thanks to her starring role in the television movie These Old Broads. Co-starring with Shirley MacLaine, Joan Collins, and her old rival, Debbie Reynolds, Taylor's involvement with the project -- which was co-written by Reynolds' daughter, Carrie Fisher, and featured her son, Todd Fisher, in a supporting role -- engendered more than a few inches in the nation's gossip columns, although both Taylor and Reynolds were quick to point out that they had laid their differences to rest a long time ago. ~ Jason Ankeny, All Movie Guide

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Elizabeth Rosemond Taylor (born 1932) is one of film's most legendary women. She starred in over 50 films, from such children's classics as "Lassie Come Home and National Velvetto" adult fare such as "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Cleopatra, and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?"

Elizabeth Rosemond Taylor was born in London, England, on February 27, 1932 to American parents Francis and Sara Taylor. Her father was a prosperous art dealer who had his own gallery in a fashionable part of London. Her mother was an actress who has been successful prior to marriage under the stage name Sara Sothern. She has an older brother, Howard, who had been born two years earlier. In 1939 the family moved to Los Angeles, CA, where Elizabeth was encouraged and coached by her mother to seek work in the motion picture industry. Elizabeth learned well and was signed by Universal in 1941 for $200 a week.

The following year, Elizabeth Taylor signed a contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and landed the part of an English heiress in the successful film Lassie Come Home. MGM was the biggest and best studio of the time and employed stars such as Greta Garbo, Judy Garland, Katherine Hepburn, and Joan Crawford. In 1943 Taylor was cast opposite Mickey Rooney in National Velvet, the story of a young woman who wins a horse in the lottery and eventually rides it in England's Grand National Steeplechase. Taylor was so determined to play the role that she exercised and dieted for four months. During filming, she was thrown from a horse and suffered a broken back, but forced herself to finish the project. Her dedication was well rewarded and National Velvet became both a critical and commercial success.

Elizabeth Taylor loved her studio responsibilities, the costumes, the make-up, and the attention. Hedda Hopper, the columnist and friend of Sara Taylor, declared that at fifteen Elizabeth was the most beautiful woman in the world. Making films such as Little Women, Father of the Bride, Cynthia, and A Place in the Sun Taylor soon began to gain a reputation as a temperamental actress who demanded preferential treatment. It was a role she would often play in a widely publicized life.

Her private hours included friendship and romance with Glenn Davis, Bill Pawley, and Montgomery Clift. On May 6, 1950, she married hotel-heir Conrad N. Hilton, Jr., but the marriage lasted less than a year. After divorcing Hilton at 19, she married British actor Michael Wilding on February 21, 1952, with whom she had two sons.

Between 1952 and 1956 Elizabeth Taylor played in numerous romantic films that did not demand great acting talent. But in 1956 she played opposite James Dean in Giant, followed by the powerful Raintree County (1957), for which she received her first Academy Award nomination, and Suddenly Last Summer (1959) - for which she received $500, 000, the most ever earned by an actress for eight weeks of work, and her third Academy Award nomination.

In 1956 Elizabeth Taylor and Michael Wilding separated, and on February 2, 1957, she married producer Mike Todd. James Dean's death the year before, shortly after the two had finished filming Giant, devastated her. She had also endured the horror of her close friend Monty Clift's nearly fatal automobile accident, for which she felt responsible. Clift had left Taylor's home after a party and had driven into a utility pole. On March 24, 1958, her husband Mike Todd lost his life when his private plane crashed in New Mexico as he was en route to an awards banquet. Taylor's grief seemed bottomless over each tragedy, and for a time she sought relief in pills, hysterics, and alcohol. While struggling with personal losses and the concurrent addictions, she played the emotionally-wrenching part of Maggie in the film Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958). Her portrayal of Maggie won her a second Academy Award nomination and offered the opportunity to develop her friendship with Eddie Fisher, who had been Mike Todd's best man at their wedding. Soon after his scandal-ridden divorce from Debbie Reynolds (who had been Taylor's matron of honor at the ceremony) Elizabeth Taylor married Eddie Fisher on May 12, 1959.

In 1960 Taylor turned in one of her best screen performances as a call-girl in Butterfield 8, for which she won an Oscar as Best Actress. A few months later, in 1961, she signed with 20th Century-Fox for $1 million for the film Cleopatra, with Richard Burton as Marc Antony. The two stars were soon romancing off the set as well as on; even the Vatican spoke out in protest, castigating the "caprices of adult children" and accusing Taylor of "erotic vagrancy." In despair over her alliance with Burton, married and the father of two, Elizabeth Taylor attempted suicide in early 1962. But two years later, the two divorced their respective spouses and married on March 15, 1964.

Two films, The VIPs (1963) and The Sandpiper (1965), preceded Elizabeth Taylor's screen triumph, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, for which she won another Oscar. Her husband and co-star, Richard Burton, was nominated for an Academy Award but did not receive one for The Taming of the Shrew. Well over a dozen films followed, as did a divorce from Burton. The couple remarried on October 10, 1975. They divorced for the second, and final, time in July 1976.

Still, the public clamored for news about this beautifully outrageous star with the violet eyes and voluptuous body. The public's curiosity and interest was piqued once more when Taylor married for the seventh time - to John Warner, a Republican campaigning for the U.S. Senate in Virginia in 1978. According to one biographer, Elizabeth Taylor broke "all the rules for being a good political wife." In addition, she had gained considerable weight and the press hounded her mercilessly about it. Warner was elected, divorced Taylor, and was re-elected in 1984.

Taylor's performances were far from over, She moved to Broadway for the first time in a well-received staging of The Little Foxes. Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton then appeared on Broadway in 1983, attempting to rekindle the dramatic spark that had leapt between them, in Noel Coward's Private Lives. The critics were cool, however, feeling that the stage couple projected overtones of the actors' own private times together. It was a poor sequel to their devastatingly effective Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

In 1983 Taylor signed herself into the Betty Ford Clinic in California for treatment of her alcohol addiction. On August 4, 1984, the sudden death of Richard Burton left her "extremely, extremely upset, " according to a spokesperson. Chronic back pain and general ill-health led to her return to drinking and prescription pain killers. Moreover, a number of close friends, among them actor Rock Hudson, fashion designer Halston, and Malcolm Forbes, her private press secretary, became ill with AIDS. Despite her own medical and addiction battles, Taylor became the first actress of such legendary stature to speak out on behalf of AIDS research. In 1985 Taylor became the co-founder and chair of the American Foundation for AIDS research. Her "Commitment to Life" benefit of that year was the first major AIDS research fund-raising gala staged by the Hollywood community.

Tayor returned to the Betty Ford Clinic in 1988, where she met a 40-year old construction worked named Larry Fortensky. Their friendship continued outside the clinic and they married in 1991. She continued her benefit work and, in 1993, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences honored Taylor with a special humanitarian award for her years with the American Foundation for AIDS Research. In 1994, Taylor returned to the silver screen after a 14-year absence for a cameo in The Flintstones. Taylor appeared in the film because some of the proceeds were to benefit AIDS research. Her marriage to Fortensky ended in divorce in 1996. Taylor revealed that she did not plan to marry again, but was quoted as saying, "I expect to fall in love again."

Putting her own health concerns aside, Taylor postponed brain surgery in February 1997 to participate in the star-studded ABC-TV special, "Happy Birthday Elizabeth - A Celebration of Life, " which marked her 65th birthday and raised money for AIDS research. The following day, Dr. Martin Cooper removed a two-inch tumor from her brain. A week later, Elizabeth Taylor was released from Cedars-Sinai Medical Center to recover at home. Through all her triumphs and difficulties, she will always be remembered as a beautiful, much-beloved woman with a presence seemingly larger than life, both on and off the screen.

Further Reading

Among the most detailed and least restrained biographies of Elizabeth Taylor is Kitty Kelley's Elizabeth Taylor, The Last Star (1981). Other useful works include Brenda Maddox's Who's Afraid of Elizabeth Taylor? (1977) and A Passion for Life: the Biography of Elizabeth Taylor (1995) by Donald Spoto. For a discussion of her screen credits, with illustrations, Elizabeth Taylor by Foster Hirsch (1973) is rather complete.

For more information on Dame Elizabeth Rosemond Taylor, visit Britannica.com.

1932–, Anglo-American film actress, b. London. Regarded as one of the world's most beautiful women, Taylor went from child star to a series of ladylike roles to playing worldly, sometimes shrewish women. She won Academy Awards for her work in Butterfield 8 (1960) and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966). Her other films include National Velvet (1944), A Place in the Sun (1951), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), Cleopatra (1963), and The Mirror Crack'd (1979). She has also appeared on Broadway in such productions as The Little Foxes (1981). Taylor has been married nine times, twice to Richard Burton, with whom she co-starred in many films. She has been active in raising money for AIDS research, and was made a Dame Commander, Order of the British Empire, in 2000.

Bibliography

See her autobiography (1965); biographies by C. D. Heymann and D. Spoto (both: 1995).

A British-born twentieth-century actress who became a child star with her appearance in National Velvet. Taylor has starred in numerous films, including A Place in the Sun, the epic Cleopatra, and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, an adaptation of Edward Albee's drama.

Quotes:

"It's not the having, it's the getting."

"I've been through it all, baby. I'm Mother Courage."