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Elizabeth Taylor

1932–2011 · 79 years

MGM owned her childhood. She spent the fame on AIDS.

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Portrait of Elizabeth Taylor
Studio publicity still — circa 1955 — Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

MGM owned her at 10. Elizabeth Rosemond Taylor was born in London in 1932 to American parents who kept an art gallery on Bond Street, held dual citizenship from birth, and spent an entire career in the United States. The family sailed for California in April 1939 after the US ambassador warned her father that war was coming. Universal signed her at nine and dropped her within a year. MGM took her in January 1943 on a seven-year contract, put braces on her teeth, pulled two baby teeth, proposed renaming her Virginia, and filled her days end to end with school, filming and evening lessons. She called the studio a big extended factory. National Velvet came at 12. Her childhood, she said afterward, ended when she became a star.

The work is a short list of large pictures. A Place in the Sun in 1951, which she called the first film that asked her to act instead of to be herself. Giant in 1956. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in 1958 and Suddenly, Last Summer in 1959. Cleopatra in 1963, for which Fox paid her a million dollars plus 10 percent of the gross, the first fee that size given to a movie star, on a production that cost 62 million and nearly sank the studio. Two Academy Awards, for BUtterfield 8 and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

The first of those Oscars arrived on April 17, 1961, weeks after pneumonia on the Cleopatra set forced an emergency tracheotomy and one news agency reported that she had died. The picture was BUtterfield 8, made only to close out her MGM contract, and she said she did it with a pistol at her head. The vote was read at the time as sympathy for the scar. Her marriages ran to eight, to seven men, Richard Burton twice, and the list is duller than its reputation. The coverage of it is not. A paparazzi photograph of her and Burton on a yacht off Ischia marks, in one sociologist's account, the end of any wall between a star's private life and her public one. She was among the first people famous in the modern, relentless way.

By 1985 a US president had barely said the word AIDS in public and the studios treated it as untouchable. Rock Hudson, her friend since Giant, announced that summer that he was dying of it. In August, Taylor and the immunologist Michael Gottlieb founded the National AIDS Research Foundation, which merged a month later with Mathilde Krim's to form amfAR. She testified before the Senate and the House for the Ryan White Care Act in 1986, 1990 and 1992, pushed Ronald Reagan into his first speech on the disease in 1987, and in 1991 started her own foundation, paying its overhead herself. She raised more than 270 million dollars. This, not the marriages, is the part she wanted kept.

Lifespan

15401700180019002030

Elizabeth Taylor's life against the full span of the corpus.

Notable works

  • National Velvet film
    Her first starring role, at 12 — she broke her back during filming     1944
  • A Place in the Sun film
    George Stevens — the picture she said first asked her to act     1951
  • Cat on a Hot Tin Roof film
    Tennessee Williams, and her second Academy Award nomination     1958
  • Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? film
    Her second Academy Award, opposite Richard Burton     1966
  • American Foundation for AIDS Research (amfAR) other
    Co-founded with Michael Gottlieb and Mathilde Krim     1985
  • Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation other
    She paid its overhead out of her own money     1991

Life in brief

with age at each point
  • February 27, 1932 aged 0 Born in London to American parents Dual British and American citizenship from birth. Her father dealt art on Bond Street.
  • April 1939 aged 7 The family sails for California ahead of the war US ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy had urged her father to bring them home.
  • January 1943 aged 10 MGM signs her to a standard seven-year contract at 10 Universal had signed and dropped her two years earlier.
  • December 1944 aged 12 National Velvet opens and makes her a star at 12
  • March 22, 1958 aged 26 Her third husband, Mike Todd, is killed in a plane crash She went back to work on Cat on a Hot Tin Roof three weeks later.
  • April 17, 1961 aged 29 Wins her first Academy Award weeks after an emergency tracheotomy A news agency had reported her dead during the March illness.
  • March 15, 1964 aged 32 Marries Richard Burton in Montreal, ten days after divorcing Eddie Fisher They divorced in 1974, remarried in Botswana in 1975 and divorced again in 1976.
  • August 1985 aged 53 Founds the AIDS research foundation that becomes amfAR a month later Rock Hudson had just made his diagnosis public.
  • March 23, 2011 aged 79 Dies of congestive heart failure at Cedars-Sinai, aged 79 Buried the next day at Forest Lawn in Glendale, at a service she asked to start 15 minutes late.

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Contemporaries

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