The Full Biography
Elizabeth Taylor. Actress. The London-born, Los Angeles-made violet-eyed child who became the most photographed woman of her century and then spent the later years turning the photographs into a war on a plague.
This is her story.
The image most people still carry is a close-up, two bruises of eyes, a diamond that had a name, or a woman on a yacht with Richard Burton. What the still cannot show is Elizabeth Rosemond Taylor of Hampstead, then Beverly Hills, a child under contract, eight marriages, a friendship with Rock Hudson that ended in a disease the town would not name, and a later life as the most useful celebrity AIDS had.
She was born on February 27, 1932, in London, to American parents. Francis Taylor dealt art. Sara, born Warmbrodt, had been an actress. The war sent them west. Universal used her in There’s One Born Every Minute (1942). MGM signed a girl who already photographed like a problem. Lassie Come Home (1943) put her in a picture people still remember for a dog. National Velvet (1944) made her a national daughter: twelve years old, a horse named Pie, a race the studio treated as a coronation. Life with Father (1947), Little Women (1949), and Father of the Bride (1950), opposite Spencer Tracy, kept her in the family’s living room. She was already a close-up the town owned.
George Stevens’s A Place in the Sun (1951), with Montgomery Clift, is the adult door: Angela Vickers, a rich girl who is also a trap. Ivanhoe (1952) put her in armor weather. Stevens’s Giant (1956), with Rock Hudson and James Dean, is Texas as a marriage and a century. She buried Dean in the publicity and kept Hudson as a friend. Raintree County (1957) nearly killed Clift in a crash on the way home from her house; she sat at the hospital. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), Maggie in a slip, is Tennessee Williams as a star vehicle that still works. Suddenly, Last Summer (1959) asked her to be a witness. Then BUtterfield 8 (1960), an Oscar she treated as the wrong statue for the wrong picture — she was ill, she was newly widowed in the public mind, she took the part because the studio had her. The statue sat on a performance she did not trust.
Cleopatra (1963) nearly sank Twentieth Century-Fox and publicly sank a marriage. She was the first actress paid a million dollars for a single picture. The production moved from England to Rome. Richard Burton arrived as Mark Antony. The affair became a second film. The V.I.P.s (1963) and The Sandpiper (1965) cashed the headlines. She won the second Oscar for Mike Nichols’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), opposite Burton, a performance that is all voice and wreckage and still the one to send someone who thinks she was only a face. She gained the weight. She used the voice. Martha is the correction to the violet still. The Taming of the Shrew (1967), Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967), Boom! (1968), and Secret Ceremony (1968) are a marriage working and not working in public. The pictures thinned. The fame did not.
The marriages were a second filmography: Conrad Hilton Jr. in 1950, a disaster measured in months; Michael Wilding, 1952 to 1957, sons Michael Jr. and Christopher; Mike Todd in 1957, who died in a plane crash in 1958, daughter Liza; Eddie Fisher, 1959 to 1964, Debbie Reynolds’s husband — the country took sides; Burton in 1964, again in 1975; John Warner, the Virginia senator, 1976 to 1982; Larry Fortensky, a construction worker she met in treatment, 1991 to 1996. Eight ceremonies, seven men. The Burton years are the folk opera. When Hudson died of AIDS in 1985, she stopped treating fame as a jewel sport and started treating it as a door that could be kicked for money and research. She helped found the American Foundation for AIDS Research. In 1991 she built the Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation. She raised, testified, sat with the sick when that was still a scandal. The diamonds paid for some of it. The voice paid for the rest.
The pictures after the second Oscar are a working actress, not a wax museum. The Only Game in Town (1970) with Warren Beatty did not take. Zee and Co. (1972), Ash Wednesday (1973), The Driver’s Seat (1974), and The Blue Bird (1976) are credits the stills skip. She took them. She needed the work and, some years, the check. A Little Night Music (1977) asked her to sing Sondheim on film. Television movies in the 1980s and 1990s kept the close-up employed. The Flintstones (1994) is a joke she agreed to be in, Pearl Slaghoople, a grandmother in a cartoon live-action. She took the joke because the joke still paid for a foundation night. That is the second career hiding inside the first: the face as a treasury that she finally spent on purpose.
Hudson’s illness and death in 1985 are the turn the marriages cannot explain. She had known him since Giant. The town whispered. She said AIDS. She called in markers the industry had spent forty years stacking at her feet. Commitment to Life, amfAR, the Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation — the letterheads are a filmography of their own. She sat in Senate rooms. She sat on wards. She wore the jewels to dinners where the point was a number on a check. Scientists who had never seen National Velvet learned her telephone voice. That is what lasted after the yacht.
I call it as I see it. And when I didn’t see anyone calling this thing by its name, I used the only instrument I had.Elizabeth Taylor, on the early AIDS years
The turn is Hudson and the plague, not the eighth wedding. She had already been a punch line and a queen. She became, late, a working philanthropist who still wore the jewels because the jewels opened rooms. Congestive heart failure, broken backs, the tabloid body as a public square — she outlived most of the men and most of the jokes. She died on March 23, 2011, in Los Angeles. She was seventy-nine. The foundation did not die with her.
Six things most people never knew
- She was English-born, American-made. Hampstead, then the war, then MGM. The voice kept a trace of both.
- National Velvet is a child’s labor, not a lark. Twelve, a horse, a studio that already owned the close-up.
- She thought the first Oscar was the wrong one. BUtterfield 8. Virginia Woolf is the performance she trusted.
- Mike Todd’s crash is the first hole in the adult life. 1958. The Fisher marriage is the rebound the country ate.
- The AIDS work started when the town still whispered. Hudson. She said the word. She sat down. She asked for checks.
- The jewels were a treasury and a tool. The last decades used them to open doors the plague had closed.
Her children — Michael Wilding Jr., Christopher Wilding, Liza Todd, and Maria, adopted with Burton — have had to share a myth the size of a century. Friends from the foundation years describe a woman who could be imperial about a lunch and tender in a ward. The violet eyes were a genetic fact. The usefulness was a decision.
The later years
After Virginia Woolf, the life was hospitals, auctions, a perfume line that funded the work, and a face the camera still treated as news. She did not become a recluse. She became a letterhead that actually worked. White Diamonds, launched in 1991, is a scent the department store still stacks and a royalty stream she pointed at the plague. Passion and the other fragrances did the same math: the close-up pays for the ward. She auctioned jewels when the foundation needed a night to become a number. She kept the Krupp diamond and the Taylor-Burton diamond in the public mind because the public mind was the instrument.
In 1985, after Hudson’s death, she helped organize the Commitment to Life benefit in Los Angeles, an evening the industry attended because she had called. amfAR used her name as a door. She testified before Congress when AIDS was still a whisper in those rooms. She sat on beds. She held hands the town would not hold. The Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation, from 1991, sent money to direct care — meals, medicine, the unglamorous ledger — not only to research dinners. Scientists who did not care about Cleopatra cared about the checks. When she died, their statements were as long as the ones from stars. That is a chapter most of the eight husbands could not have predicted.
The body was a public square. She broke her back. She had hip replacements. She had a brain tumor removed in 1997. Congestive heart failure put her in Cedars-Sinai more than once. The tabloids weighed her. She outlasted the jokes. Queen Elizabeth II made her a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2000. She took the honor as a working woman who had been born in Hampstead and employed in Culver City. She appeared, in 1994, as herself adjacent to a joke in The Flintstones. She took the joke. She did not take a retirement.
On March 23, 2011, she died at Cedars-Sinai of congestive heart failure. She was seventy-nine. She was buried at Forest Lawn in Glendale the next day, a private service on her clock, not the town’s. The foundation kept the letterhead. The perfume kept selling. Virginia Woolf kept teaching. The last chapter was not a death date. It was twenty-six years of saying the word AIDS in rooms that had preferred diamonds, and of making the diamonds pay for the word.
She kept a household that was nurses, assistants, children on the phone, and a dog on the bed. She auctioned, in 2002 and after, pieces the public had treated as her identity. The identity was the check the foundation cashed. White Diamonds stayed in the drugstore. Passion stayed beside it. She had already understood, as a child at MGM, that a close-up is a product. In the last decades she used the product as a tool. Dame Commander in 2000 was a Hampstead girl collecting a British receipt for an American life. She accepted it in a wheelchair and did not apologize for the chair.
Cedars-Sinai knew her the way a studio once had: regularly, with a call sheet of procedures. Congestive heart failure is a long weather. She worked inside it. She made appearances when the foundation needed the face and stayed home when the body refused. Friends from those years describe a woman who could still be imperial about a lunch and then ask, without performance, how a particular patient was doing. The violet eyes remained a genetic fact. The usefulness remained a decision she renewed. When she died on March 23, 2011, the scientists’ statements ran as long as the stars’. Forest Lawn took her the next day, on her clock. The letterhead stayed open. That is the chapter. Not a yacht. A policy that still spends.
The perfume counter is still a treasury. White Diamonds still funds the letterhead in the way a close-up once funded a studio. The Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation still cuts checks for care — meals, medicine, the unglamorous month — and amfAR still uses the door she kicked in 1985. Children and grandchildren keep a private house the tabloids no longer get to weigh. Virginia Woolf still teaches a voice. Giant still teaches a friendship. The yacht is a boxed set. The ward is the chapter that spends. She had already been the most photographed woman of her century. She spent the last decades making the photographs useful. That is the life after the eighth wedding, and it is longer than a death date.
She had already outlived Todd, Hudson, and most of the jokes. Burton died in 1984; she spoke of him as a weather, not only as a yacht. Warner went back to Virginia. Fortensky left the file. The children remained. The foundation remained. The close-up remained, now pointed at a plague the town had tried to whisper away. That pointing is the last instrument. It still spends. The jewels opened the rooms. The voice kept them open. The foundation still cuts the checks.
After she was gone
The close-ups still sell perfume and posters. Virginia Woolf still teaches. The AIDS foundations still cash the name for research and for care. Burton is a boxed set. She is a policy. Both are true. The policy is the one that still spends.
She came out of Hampstead, rode a horse for MGM, married a century, buried a producer, made a wreck with Burton that was also art, said AIDS when the town would not, and left a foundation instead of only a closet of stones. If you only remember the eyes, you have the still. If you remember Velvet, Woolf, Hudson, and the checks, you have her.
Portrait: Studio publicity still (unknown photographer) · Public domain (studio publicity still) · via Wikimedia Commons