Hollywood screen legend Elizabeth Taylor dies

Legendary Hollywood actress and violet-eyed beauty Elizabeth Taylor, who captured hearts in National Velvet to launch a film career that spanned five decades, died yesterday aged 79.

Ms Taylor had been in Los Angeles’ Cedars-Sinai hospital for six weeks with congestive heart failure, a condition with which she had struggled for some years and had recently suffered complications, a family statement said.

“She was surrounded by her children: Michael Wilding, Christopher Wilding, Liza Todd, and Maria Burton,” it said, noting that Ms Taylor, who married eight times, was survived by 10 grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.

“My mother was an extraordinary woman who lived life to the fullest, with great passion, humour, and love,” Michael Wilding said.

“Though her loss is devastating to those of us who held her so close and so dear, we will always be inspired by her enduring contribution to our world.”

Ms Taylor won two Academy Awards for best actress, including in the 1966 classic Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? one of many films she played opposite Richard Burton.

Burton was one of the great loves of Ms Taylor’s life – she married and divorced him twice – but her stormy relationships off-screen often overshadowed her glittering film career.

In later years, as her health failed, she retired from the public gaze, although she notably attended the 2009 funeral of her long-time friend Michael Jackson, while she remained active in raising funds to battle AIDS/HIV.

Born in London on February 27, 1932, she was evacuated to California with her American parents in 1939, where she was soon discovered at her father’s art gallery by the fiancée of the chairman of Universal Studios.

She debuted in 1942 in There’s One Born Every Minute, and by 1944 had become a child star with National Velvet, the story of a girl who rides her horse to victory at the Grand National disguised as a boy.

She won her first Oscar for best actress in 1960 for her portrayal of a high-class call girl in Butterfield 8. Ms Taylor is said to have hated the movie.

Then came Cleopatra (1962) – “surely the most bizarre piece of entertainment ever perpetrated,” on the set of which she met Burton. They married in March 1964 in Montreal. By the time they were filming Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, the harrowing portrayal of a marriage torn by booze, bitterness and failure mirrored their own.

They divorced in June, 1974 and remarried in October of the following year in Botswana, only to divorce again in August, 1976.

The marriage left Ms Taylor an alcoholic, and her career in decline. A seventh marriage to Virginia senator John Warner, from 1976 to 1982, failed to cure the blues.

In and out of California’s Betty Ford Clinic in the 1980s, she overcame her alcoholism and a dependence on painkillers and emerged as a champion in the cause of AIDS victims.

In 1991, she stunned the world by marrying husband No. 8: Larry Fortensky, a 40-year-old construction worker she met in rehab. They parted amicably three years later.

Maltese lover

The star had become romantically involved with Maltese businessman Peter Darmanin, who yesterday said it was a “pity Ms Taylor had passed away”.

The two started seeing each other after she broke up with Richard Burton in 1976.

The People magazine had described the moment they met:

“What began to look like the final act of the marathon Taylor-Burton romance took shape in Gstaad, Switzerland in January. Burton was on a trip and Liz was whiling away the lonely hours at the birthday party of her daughter Maria at the Olden Hotel bar.

Across the crowded room she spotted a stranger, Peter Darmanin, 37, a good-looking advertising man from Malta.

Mr Darmanin has often said international press reports on the encounter were incorrect.

Filmography

Some of the key film and TV credits of Elizabeth Taylor

1942: There’s One Born Every Minute – her first movie, aged nine
1943: Lassie Come Home – she played Priscilla
1943: Jane Eyre – minor role, film starring Orson Welles
1944: The White Cliffs of Dover – with young Roddy McDowall
1944: National Velvet – horse-riding movie, starring Mickey Rooney
1946: Courage of Lassie – second dog film, aged 14
1951: A Place In the Sun – with Montgomery Clift
1951: Quo Vadis – with Peter Ustinov
1954: Beau Brummell – with Ustinov again
1958: Cat On a Hot Tin Roof – with Paul Newman
1959: Suddenly, Last Summer – with Katherine Hepburn
1960: Butterfield 8 – best actress Oscar
1963: Cleopatra – first movie with Richard Burton
1963: The V.I.P.s – again with Burton
1966: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? – with Burton. best actress Oscar
1967: The Taming of the Shrew – with Burton
1967: Doctor Faustus – with Burton, played Helen of Troy
1967: Reflections in a Golden Eye – with Marlon Brando
1967: The Comedians – with Burton
1968: Boom! – with Burton
1969: Anne of the Thousand Days – with Burton
1972: X, Y and Zee – with Michael Caine
1972: Under Milk Wood – with Burton
1980: The Mirror Crack’d
1981: General Hospital – soap opera character
1992: The Simpsons – as herself, and voice of Maggie
1994: The Flintstones – as Pearl Slaghoople in animated movie