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I LOVED YOU AND WILL MISS YOU LIZ!
Film legend Elizabeth Taylor dies at 79 in LA
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LOS ANGELES – Elizabeth Taylor, the violet-eyed film
goddess whose sultry screen persona, stormy personal life and enduring
fame and glamour made her one of the last of the old-fashioned movie
stars and a template for the modern celebrity, died Wednesday at age 79.
She was surrounded by her four children when she died
of congestive heart failure at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, where she
had been hospitalized for about six weeks, said publicist Sally
Morrison.
"My Mother was an extraordinary woman who lived life
to the fullest, with great passion, humor, and love," her son, Michael
Wilding, said in a statement.
"We know, quite simply, that the world is a better
place for Mom having lived in it. Her legacy will never fade, her spirit
will always be with us, and her love will live forever in our hearts."
Taylor was the most blessed and cursed of actresses,
the toughest and the most vulnerable. She had extraordinary grace,
wealth and voluptuous beauty, and won three Academy Awards, including a
special one for her humanitarian work. She was the most loyal of friends
and a defender of gays in Hollywood when AIDS was still a stigma in the
industry and beyond. But she was afflicted by ill health, failed
romances (eight marriages, seven husbands) and personal tragedy.
"I think I'm becoming fatalistic," she said in 1989. "Too much has happened in my life for me not to be fatalistic."
Her more than 50 movies included unforgettable
portraits of innocence and of decadence, from the children's classic
"National Velvet" and the sentimental family comedy "Father of the
Bride" to Oscar-winning transgressions in "Who's Afraid of Virginia
Woolf?" and "Butterfield 8." The historical epic "Cleopatra" is among
Hollywood's greatest on-screen fiascos and a landmark of off-screen
monkey business, the meeting ground of Taylor and Richard Burton, the
"Brangelina" of their day.
She played enough bawdy women on film for critic Pauline Kael to deem her "Chaucerian Beverly Hills."
But her defining role, one that lasted long past her
moviemaking days, was "Elizabeth Taylor," ever marrying and divorcing,
in and out of hospitals, gaining and losing weight, standing by Michael
Jackson, Rock Hudson and other troubled friends, acquiring a jewelry
collection that seemed to rival Tiffany's.
She was a child star who grew up and aged before an
adoring, appalled and fascinated public. She arrived in Hollywood when
the studio system tightly controlled an actor's life and image, had more
marriages than any publicist could explain away and lasted long enough
to no longer require explanation. She was the industry's great survivor,
and among the first to reach that special category of celebrity —
famous for being famous, for whom her work was inseparable from the
gossip around it.
The London-born actress was a star at age 12, a bride
and a divorcee at 18, a superstar at 19 and a widow at 26. She was a
screen sweetheart and martyr later reviled for stealing Eddie Fisher
from Debbie Reynolds, then for dumping Fisher to bed Burton, a
relationship of epic passion and turbulence, lasting through two
marriages and countless attempted reconciliations.
She was also forgiven. Reynolds would acknowledge
voting for Taylor when she was nominated for "Butterfield 8" and decades
later co-starred with her old rival in "These Old Broads," co-written
by Carrie Fisher, the daughter of Reynolds and Eddie Fisher.
Taylor's ailments wore down the grudges. She
underwent at least 20 major operations and she nearly died from a bout
with pneumonia in 1990. In 1994 and 1995, she had both hip joints
replaced, and in February 1997, she underwent surgery to remove a benign
brain tumor. In 1983, she acknowledged a 35-year addiction to sleeping
pills and pain killers. Taylor was treated for alcohol and drug abuse
problems at the Betty Ford Clinic in Rancho Mirage, Calif.
Her troubles bonded her to her peers and the public,
and deepened her compassion. Her advocacy for AIDS research and for
other causes earned her a special Oscar, the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian
Award, in 1993.
As she accepted it, to a long ovation, she declared,
"I call upon you to draw from the depths of your being — to prove that
we are a human race, to prove that our love outweighs our need to hate,
that our compassion is more compelling than our need to blame."
The dark-haired Taylor made an unforgettable
impression in Hollywood with "National Velvet," the 1945 film in which
the 12-year-old belle rode a steeplechase horse to victory in the Grand
National.
Critic James Agee wrote of her: "Ever since I first
saw the child ... I have been choked with the peculiar sort of adoration
I might have felt if we were in the same grade of primary school."
"National Velvet," her fifth film, also marked the
beginning of Taylor's long string of health issues. During production,
she fell off a horse. The resulting back injury continued to haunt her.
Taylor matured into a ravishing beauty in "Father of the Bride," in
1950, and into a respected performer and femme fatale the following year
in "A Place in the Sun," based on the Theodore Dreiser novel "An
American Tragedy." The movie co-starred her close friend Montgomery
Clift as the ambitious young man who drowns his working-class girlfriend
to be with the socialite Taylor. In real life, too, men all but
committed murder in pursuit of her.
Through the rest of the 1950s and into the 1960s, she and Marilyn Monroe
were Hollywood's great sex symbols, both striving for appreciation
beyond their physical beauty, both caught up in personal dramas
filmmakers could only wish they had imagined. That Taylor lasted, and
Monroe died young, was a matter of luck and strength; Taylor lived as
she pleased and allowed no one to define her but herself.
"I don't entirely approve of some of the things I have done, or am, or
have been. But I'm me. God knows, I'm me," Taylor said around the time
she turned 50.
She had a remarkable and exhausting personal and professional life. Her
marriage to Michael Todd ended tragically when the producer died in a
plane crash in 1958. She took up with Fisher, married him, then left him
for Burton. Meanwhile, she received several Academy Award nominations
and two Oscars.
She was a box-office star cast in numerous "prestige" films, from
"Raintree County" with Clift to "Giant," an epic co-starring her friends
Hudson and James Dean. Nominations came from a pair of movies adapted
from work by Tennessee Williams: "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" and "Suddenly,
Last Summer." In "Butterfield 8," released in 1960, she starred with
Fisher as a doomed girl-about-town. Taylor never cared much for the
film, but her performance at the Oscars wowed the world.
Sympathy for Taylor's widowhood had turned to scorn when she took up
with Fisher, who had supposedly been consoling her over the death of
Todd. But before the 1961 ceremony, she was hospitalized from a nearly
fatal bout with pneumonia and Taylor underwent a tracheotomy. The scar
was bandaged when she appeared at the Oscars to accept her best actress
trophy for "Butterfield 8."
To a standing ovation, she hobbled to the stage. "I don't really know
how to express my great gratitude," she said in an emotional speech. "I
guess I will just have to thank you with all my heart." It was one of
the most dramatic moments in Academy Awards history.
"Hell, I even voted for her," Reynolds later said.
Greater drama awaited: "Cleopatra." Taylor met Burton while playing the
title role in the 1963 epic, in which the brooding, womanizing Welsh
actor co-starred as Mark Antony. Their chemistry was not immediate.
Taylor found him boorish; Burton mocked her physique. But the love
scenes on film continued away from the set and a scandal for the ages
was born. Headlines shouted and screamed. Paparazzi snapped and swooned.
Their romance created such a sensation that the Vatican denounced the
happenings as the "caprices of adult children."
The film so exceeded its budget that the producers lost money even
though "Cleopatra" was a box-office hit and won four Academy awards.
(With its $44 million budget adjusted for inflation, "Cleopatra" remains
the most expensive movie ever made.) Taylor's salary per film topped $1
million. "Liz and Dick" became a couple on a first name basis with
millions who had never met them.
They were a prolific acting team, even if most of the movies aged no
better than their relationship: "The VIPs" (1963), "The Sandpiper"
(1965), "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" (1966), "The Taming of the
Shrew" (1967), "The Comedians" (1967), "Dr. Faustus" (1967), "Boom!"
(1968), "Under Milk Wood" (1971) and "Hammersmith Is Out" (1972).
Art most effectively imitated life in the adaptation of Edward Albee's
"Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" — in which Taylor and Burton played
mates who fought viciously and drank heavily. She took the best actress
Oscar for her performance as the venomous Martha in "Virginia Woolf" and
again stole the awards show, this time by not showing up at the
ceremony. She refused to thank the academy upon learning of her victory
and chastised voters for not honoring Burton.
Taylor and Burton divorced in 1974, married again in 1975 and divorced again in 1976.
"We fight a great deal," Burton once said, "and we watch the people
around us who don't quite know how to behave during these storms. We
don't fight when we are alone."
In 1982, Taylor and Burton appeared in a touring production of the Noel
Coward play "Private Lives," in which they starred as a divorced couple
who meet on their respective honeymoons. They remained close at the time
of Burton's death, in 1984.
Elizabeth Rosemond Taylor was born in London on Feb. 27, 1932, the
daughter of Francis Taylor, an art dealer, and the former Sara Sothern,
an American stage actress. At age 3, with extensive ballet training
already behind her, Taylor danced for British princesses Elizabeth (the
future queen) and Margaret Rose at London's Hippodrome. At age 4, she
was given a wild field horse that she learned to ride expertly.
At the onset of World War II, the Taylors came to the United States.
Francis Taylor opened a gallery in Beverly Hills and, in 1942, his
daughter made her screen debut with a bit part in the comedy "There's
One Born Every Minute."
Her big break came soon thereafter. While serving as an air-raid warden
with MGM producer Sam Marx, Taylor's father learned that the studio was
struggling to find an English girl to play opposite Roddy McDowall in
"Lassie Come Home." Taylor's screen test for the film won her both the
part and a long-term contract. She grew up quickly after that.
Still in school at 16, she would dash from the classroom to the movie
set where she played passionate love scenes with Robert Taylor in
"Conspirator."
"I have the emotions of a child in the body of a woman," she once said.
"I was rushed into womanhood for the movies. It caused me long moments
of unhappiness and doubt."
Soon after her screen presence was established, she began a series of
very public romances. Early loves included socialite Bill Pawley, home
run slugger Ralph Kiner and football star Glenn Davis.
Then, a roll call of husbands:
• She married Conrad Hilton Jr., son of the hotel magnate, in May 1950 at age 18. The marriage ended in divorce that December.
• When she married British actor Michael Wilding in February 1952, he
was 39 to her 19. They had two sons, Michael Jr. and Christopher Edward.
That marriage lasted 4 years.
• She married cigar-chomping movie producer Michael Todd, also 20 years
her senior, in 1957. They had a daughter, Elizabeth Francis. Todd was
killed in a plane crash in 1958.
• The best man at the Taylor-Todd wedding was Fisher. He left his wife
Debbie Reynolds to marry Taylor in 1959. She converted to Judaism before
the wedding.
• Taylor and Fisher moved to London, where she was making "Cleopatra."
She met Burton, who also was married. That union produced her fourth
child, Maria.
• After her second marriage to Burton ended, she married John Warner, a
former secretary of the Navy, in December 1976. Warner was elected a
U.S. senator from Virginia in 1978. They divorced in 1982.
• In October 1991, she married Larry Fortensky, a truck driver and
construction worker she met while both were undergoing treatment at the
Betty Ford Center in 1988. He was 20 years her junior. The wedding, held
at the ranch of Michael Jackson, was a media circus that included the
din of helicopter blades, a journalist who parachuted to a spot near the
couple and a gossip columnist as official scribe.
But in August 1995, she and Fortensky announced a trial separation; she
filed for divorce six months later and the split became final in 1997.
"I was taught by my parents that if you fall in love, if you want to
have a love affair, you get married," she once remarked. "I guess I'm
very old-fashioned."
Her philanthropic interests included assistance for the Israeli War
Victims Fund, the Variety Clubs International and the American
Foundation for AIDS Research.
She received the Legion of Honor, France's most prestigious award, in
1987, for her efforts to support AIDS research. In May 2000, Queen
Elizabeth II made Taylor a dame — the female equivalent of a knight —
for her services to the entertainment industry and to charity.
In 1993, she won a lifetime achievement award from the American Film
Institute; in 1999, an institute survey of screen legends ranked her No.
7 among actresses.
During much of her later career, Taylor's waistline, various diets, diet
books and tangled romances were the butt of jokes by Joan Rivers and
others. John Belushi mocked her on "Saturday Night Live," dressing up in
drag and choking on a piece of chicken.
"It's a wonder I didn't explode," Taylor wrote of her 60-pound weight
gain — and successful loss — in the 1988 book "Elizabeth Takes Off on
Self-Esteem and Self-Image."
She was an iconic star, but her screen roles became increasingly rare in
the 1980s and beyond. She appeared in several television movies,
including "Poker Alice" and "Sweet Bird of Youth," and entered the Stone
Age as Pearl Slaghoople in the movie version of "The Flintstones." She
had a brief role on the popular soap opera "General Hospital."
Taylor was the subject of numerous unauthorized biographies and herself
worked on a handful of books, including "Elizabeth Taylor: An Informal
Memoir" and "Elizabeth Taylor: My Love Affair With Jewelry." In tune
with the media to the end, she kept in touch through her Twitter
account.
"I like the connection with fans and people who have been supportive of
me," Taylor told Kim Kardashian in a 2011 interview for Harper's Bazaar.
"And I love the idea of real feedback and a two-way street, which is
very, very modern. But sometimes I think we know too much about our
idols and that spoils the dream."
Survivors include her daughters Maria Burton-Carson and Liza Todd-Tivey,
sons Christopher and Michael Wilding, 10 grandchildren and four
great-grandchildren.
A private family funeral is planned later this week.
