Taylor appeared in over 50 films, and would win Oscars for her performances in Butterfield 8 (1960) and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), in which she starred opposite ex husband Richard Burton.
By the time she was in her mid-20s she had become a screen goddess, teenage bride, mother, divorcee and widow. Taylor would endure near-death traumas, and many declared her a symbol of survival — with which she agreed. “I've been through it all, baby,” she once said. “I'm Mother Courage.”
“No actress ever had a more difficult job in getting critics to accept her onscreen as someone other than Elizabeth Taylor,” film historian Jeanine Basinger said. “Her persona ate her alive.”
This violet-eyed film goddess whose sultry screen life was often upstaged by her stormy personal life, also saw herself as a champion of the exploited or mistreated, including the pop singer Michael Jackson. She would help to make AIDS an issue of mainstream concern, saying her interest began when she was asked to chair a benefit for AIDS patients in Los Angeles in 1984. The next year, Rock Hudson, her friend and former co-star, died of AIDS. She was founding national chairman of the American Foundation for AIDS Research and started the Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation.
In 1993, she received the Academy Awards’ Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award and an American Film Institute Life Achievement Award. And in 2002 she would receive a Kennedy Center Honor for her film work, philanthropy and endurance in the American public eye.
R.I.P. Ms Taylor...
*Associated Press & Washington Post
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