Elizabeth Taylor (1932 - 2011) was a British-American actress, businesswoman and philanthropist who was among the most famous film stars of the twentieth century. [1] A child performer who became a leading adult actress, she won Academy Awards for BUtterfield 8 and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and was the first performer to be paid a million dollars for a single film, Cleopatra. From the mid-1980s she devoted much of her energy to AIDS advocacy, co-founding amfAR and establishing her own foundation. [2]
Early life and child stardom
Taylor was born on 27 February 1932 in the Hampstead Garden Suburb of London to American parents; her father was an art dealer and her mother a former stage actress. [1] The family returned to the United States before the Second World War and settled in Los Angeles, where she was signed by Universal and then, at the age of ten, by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
She appeared in Lassie Come Home in 1943 and became a star the following year in National Velvet. She moved into young adult roles in Father of the Bride (1950) and A Place in the Sun (1951) opposite Montgomery Clift.
Leading roles
Through the 1950s Taylor established herself as a dramatic actress. She starred in George Stevens's epic Giant (1956) with Rock Hudson and James Dean, and received consecutive Academy Award nominations for Raintree County, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958) and Suddenly, Last Summer (1959), both adapted from Tennessee Williams. [2] She won her first Oscar for BUtterfield 8 in 1960, an award often attributed to sympathy after a near-fatal bout of pneumonia.
She was then cast as Cleopatra, for which she received an unprecedented fee of one million dollars. The production, filmed in Rome and released in 1963, ran far over budget and nearly ruined Twentieth Century-Fox, though it was the year's top grosser. [3] Her relationship with her co-star Richard Burton, begun during filming while both were married to others, drew intense press attention.
Taylor and Burton married in 1964 and appeared together in eleven films. The strongest was Mike Nichols's adaptation of Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), in which Taylor, aged thirty-four, played the embittered, middle-aged Martha; the performance won her a second Academy Award and a BAFTA. [1] From the 1970s she worked increasingly in television and on stage, including a Broadway run in The Little Foxes.
Public life and business
Taylor married eight times to seven men, twice to Burton, and her private life was reported with a persistence that made her one of the first modern celebrities. [2] She converted to Judaism in 1959 and was a public supporter of Israel.
She built a successful fragrance business, most notably the perfume White Diamonds, and assembled a widely publicised jewellery collection.
AIDS activism
After the death of her friend Rock Hudson in 1985, Taylor became one of the first major public figures to campaign on AIDS, at a time when the disease carried heavy stigma and little official attention. She helped found the American Foundation for AIDS Research, amfAR, that year and served as its national chairman. [4]
In 1991 she established the Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation to fund care and support services, raising many millions of dollars. The Academy gave her the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award in 1993, and she received the Presidential Citizens Medal and was appointed a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2000. [1]
Death and legacy
Taylor died of congestive heart failure in Los Angeles on 23 March 2011, aged seventy-nine. [3] She is remembered as an emblem of the Hollywood studio era whose celebrity outlasted the system that created her, and as an early and effective advocate for people with AIDS.
