ELIZABETH TAYLOR: THE FILM star Elizabeth Taylor, who has died of heart failure aged 79, was in the public eye from the age of 11 and remained there even decades after her last hit movie.
She held people's fascination through her beauty, courage, character, eight marriages (two of them to the actor Richard Burton), and humanitarian causes. All obscured the reason for her fame: her tantalising screen presence, in films including A Place in the Sun(1951), Cat On a Hot Tin Roof(1958), Butterfield 8(1961), Cleopatra(1963) and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?(1966).
Taylor was born in Hampstead, north London, of American parents. Her mother, Sara, was a former stage actor and her father, Francis, an art dealer. In 1939 the family moved to Hollywood where he opened a gallery frequented by the film community. She was soon making her screen debut at the age of 10 in There's One Born Every Minute(1942) at Universal.
But it was MGM who launched her career proper with Lassie Come Home(1943) and for whom most of her films were made. When Sara Taylor heard that the studio was looking for a young girl to play Velvet Brown, who wins the Grand National disguised as a boy in National Velvet(1945), she brought her daughter to see the producer Pandro S Berman.
He thought her too thin and fragile for the part, although she could ride well. But three months later, after rigid training from her mother, she was able to change Berman’s mind. Her performance, in which she radiates youth, is enjoyed perennially.
At 17 she was despairing about getting much schoolwork done while making Conspirator(1949), in her first "adult" role. "How can I when Robert Taylor keeps sticking his tongue down my throat?"
Her first marriage was to Nicky Hilton, 23-year-old playboy son of hotel magnate Conrad Hilton, in 1950. MGM took advantage of Hollywood's wedding of the year by releasing Vincente Minnelli's delightful comedy Father of the Bride (1950), in which Taylor was the bride and Spencer Tracy the father, at around the same time.
After the genuine marriage ceremony, she whispered to her mother: “Oh, mother! Nick and I are one now, forever and ever.”
“Forever and ever” turned out to be eight months. Hilton, she said, drank heavily and abused her in public. He complained: “I didn’t marry a girl; I married an institution.”
The "institution", still in her teens, in ravishing close-ups, was now driving Montgomery Clift as George Eastman to murder his pregnant girlfriend in George Stevens's A Place in the Sun (1951).
Two years later, she insisted that the scarred and drug-addicted Clift be cast with her in Suddenly, Last Summer.
In due course she met and married sophisticated British actor Michael Wilding, 20 years her senior. They were married in 1952 and had two sons, Michael jnr and Christopher. By 1956 the marriage began to crumble.
She was 24, becoming one of the Hollywood’s most sought-after stars. Wilding was middle-aged and his career was fading, although she got him an MGM contract. Clearly the age gap, which Taylor had insisted was unimportant at the outset, played a part in the break-up and they agreed to an amicable divorce.
Ironically, the man she was to marry next was five years older than Wilding. But the flamboyant impresario Mike Todd (real name Avrom Goldbogen), was noted for his abundant energy.
At their wedding in Acapulco in 1957, Todd’s lifelong friend, crooner Eddie Fisher, was best man and Fisher’s wife, Debbie Reynolds, was matron of honour. In the same year a daughter, Liza, was born. Todd died in an aircraft crash a mere seven months later.
Gradually, Taylor came out of seclusion and completed Cat on a Hot Tin Roof(1958), which she had already been filming when Todd was killed. Despite, or because of, her state of mind she gave one of her most finely wrought performances as the sexually frustrated Maggie. Her voice, never her strong point, seemed to have gained in power, and she matched Paul Newman and Burl Ives blow for blow.
The film’s box-office potential was increased further by the gossip surrounding Taylor and Fisher. Taylor, who had been cast as the grieving widow, now found herself in the role of the vamp who wrecked the Fishers’ apparently idyllic marriage. In 1959, Taylor, who had converted to Judaism when she married Todd, married Fisher in Las Vegas.
She was in London completing Suddenly, Last Summer when offered the title role in Cleopatra. The star half-jokingly told producer Walter Wanger that she would do it for $1 million against 10 per cent of the gross. To everyone’s astonishment, 20th Century Fox agreed to her terms. “If someone’s dumb enough to offer me a million dollars to make a picture, I’m certainly not dumb enough to turn it down,” she said.
In the spring, Taylor won her first Oscar, after three consecutive nominations for her role as a high-class hooker in the 1960 film Butterfield 8.
As for Cleopatra, the project was shipped to Rome. She arrived in the Italian capital with one husband, three children, five dogs, two cats, secretaries and servants. She settled in a 14-room mansion off the Via Appia.
“There comes a time during the making of a movie when the actors become the characters they play,” Wanger noted in his diary. “The cameras turned and the current was literally turned on. It was quiet and you could almost feel the electricity between Elizabeth Taylor and Burton.”
Burton later recalled that “at first it was lust, and then I got to know her and it was love”.
Cleopatra opened to mixed reviews, but interest in their private lives still made the film a top earner of 1963. The affair continued in the public eye until they married in March 1964 at the Ritz-Carlton in Montreal. She wore a pale yellow Irene Sharaff gown, and a $150,000 emerald and diamond brooch that Burton had bought her at Bulgari in Rome.
After the three less than convincing films the couple's credibility as performers was restored in 1966 by Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?for which Taylor won her second Oscar playing the bitter, vulgar wife of self-loathing Burton.
As the Taylor-Burton circus moved from country to country, their way of life, which the New York Timeslikened to the court of Louis XIV, became ever more lavish.
The marriage ended in June 1974. “There were too many differences. I have tried everything,” she told the Swiss court.They were reconciled in August 1975, but a few months later they were again filing for divorce.
Taylor soon met John Warner and they married in 1976. She became a political wife. “It was so boring. That’s why I put on so much weight,” she said.
She then decided to return to acting as vixen Regina Giddens in The Little Foxes, which she also played at the Victoria Palace theatre, London, in 1982 to mixed reviews.
But, with her career in full swing again she and Warner divorced in 1982.
The Burton-Taylor double act then resurfaced. They starred in Noel Coward's Private Livesin New York at a fee of $7,000 a week each. The saga ended with Burton's death in August 1984.
After a spell in the Betty Ford Clinic she met and married Larry Fortensky in 1991 but five years later she was a single woman again and threw herself into charitable work, especially her campaign for Aids awareness.
In 1997 she had an operation for a brain tumour but survived because of “her will to live, and her millions of fans willing her to do so”, according to her friend Michael Jackson.
In 2000, Taylor, was named a dame by Queen Elizabeth.
She is survived by her two sons, Michael and Christopher by Michael Wilding; her daughter Liza by Mike Todd; and her adopted daughter, Maria.
Elizabeth Rosemond Taylor: born February 27th, 1932; died March 23rd, 2011