"As movie stars go, Dame Elizabeth was the gold standard. She was always a creature of paradoxes: possessed of exquisite beauty, she loved to curse like a longshoreman. She lived her life out loud and in public, yet she ensured her four children and ten grandchildren a private life, which they enjoy to this day. Raised in relative luxury by an art dealer and an actress, she loved the company of working men and women, made friends with the crews of all her films, and embraced Richard Burton’s Welsh coal mining family. She was comfortable with vulgarity. She ate and drank to her heart’s content. Her lust for life informed everything she did, and everything she did was outsized: her eight marriages (two of them to Burton, the love of her life); her six decades’ worth of films; her two Academy awards; her astonishing jewels, including the 33.19-carat Krupp diamond and the 69.42-carat Taylor-Burton Diamond. The English called her “The Wife of Bath.” She was made a Dame of the Realm in 2003. She knew how to be a movie star and, in truth, her stardom and her fabled personal life eclipsed her real gifts as an actress—gifts that most dazzled in A Place in the Sun, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Suddenly Last Summer, Butterfield 8, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and The Taming of the Shrew. She taught the theatrically trained Burton how to act for the camera: he praised her quality of stillness, and learned from it. But off-stage, and in the third act of her life—when Richard was gone, when her marriages to John Warner and Larry Fortensky were over, when her late-career forays into acting on film, onstage, and in television ended—she was anything but still. Some might say her third act was her greatest, and her most fearless. Like Maggie the Cat, she seemed to have nine lives, as she survived a brain tumor, a broken back, the scoliosis she’d had since birth, hip replacements, and heart surgery. In the early 1990s, she took on the daunting cause of raising awareness of and finding a cure for AIDS, by founding the Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Fund—at a time when mainstream America was still recoiling from the disease, and from gay America." — Vanity Fair. Photo of Elizabeth at the premiere of "Moby Dick" in Los Angeles, 1956.
