Elizabeth Rosemond Taylor was born in 1932 in the wealthy London district of Hampstead, her father an American art dealer and her mother a former actress. The family moved to Los Angeles, California in 1939 to avoid the hostilities of World War II.
Thanks to her mother’s determined efforts she got her first film contract in 1941 after executives at Universal Pictures were wowed by her beauty. Even though Taylor starred in several unremarkable films as a young teen, it was her captivating performance in 1944’s National Velvet that propelled her to world stardom as a girl who trains and rides her horse to victory in the Grand National. Ironically, her role in the film also had a negative legacy - Taylor was plagued by back problems for the rest of her life after falling from a horse during filming.
Taylor enjoyed a string of moderate successes as an adolescent star until 1949, when as a 16-year-old she played a 21-year-old social debutante in the flop Conspirator. She was now earning over $2,000 a week but it was only in 1950 that she enjoyed her first success in an adult role when she starred with Spencer Tracy in the romantic comedy Father of the Bride. A year later Taylor showed the world that she wasn't just a pretty face, starring in the acclaimed A Place In The Sun as a spoiled socialite.
She still found it hard to attract Oscar-worthy roles until a trio of nominations in the late 1950s for Raintree County, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Suddenly Last Summer. She failed to win but her enhanced reputation helped her make history in Cleopatra (shot in 1960, released in 1963) when she was the first actor or actress to earn $1 million for a performance. It was also on the Rome set of the infamously expensive Cleopatra that she met and fell in love with Welshman Richard Burton - sparking a huge scandal and a condemnation from the Vatican since both were married at the time.
The high point of her acting career came with her two Oscar wins for Butterfield 8 (1960) and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), in which she co-starred with Burton. Their relationship was tumultuous, but of all her seven husbands it was her love for Burton that was the defining romance of her life, as revealed in their love letters.
Their first marriage lasted from 1962 to 1974. They remarried again a year later before breaking up for the second time in July 1976.
Her AIDS work, spurred on by her good friend Rock Hudson's death from the disease, brought her the Legion of Honour, France’s highest civilian award, in 1987 and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award in 1993. In 2000, Queen Elizabeth made her a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire - the equivalent of a knighthood.
During a career which spanned six decades, the legendary beauty with lavender eyes won two Oscars and made more than fifty films, performing alongside such fabled leading men as Spencer Tracy, Montgomery Clift, Marlon Brando and, of course, the aforementioned Richard Burton. She took her cues from a dream list of directors, including George Cukor, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, George Stevens, Vincente Minnelli and Mike Nichols.
Long after she faded from the screen, she remained a mesmerizing figure, blessed and cursed by the extraordinary celebrity that moulded her life through its many phases: she was a child star who bloomed gracefully into an ingénue (like her good friend Michael Jackson); a femme fatale on the screen and in life; a canny peddler of high-priced perfume; a pioneering activist in the fight against AIDS.
Some actresses, such as Katharine Hepburn and Ingrid Bergman, won more awards and critical plaudits, but none matched Taylor’s hold on the collective imagination. In the public's mind, she was the dark goddess for whom playing Cleopatra, as she did with such notoriety, required no great leap from reality.
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