Elizabeth Taylor, 1932–2011

Elizabeth Taylor remained the quin­tessential movie star long after her last on-screen role (a forgettable turn as Wilma Flintstone’s mother, Pearl Slaghoople, in 1994’s The Flintstones). She was as famous for her many marriages—eight of them, including two to Richard Burton—as she was for her films, and she was an icon of the gay community for her early efforts to raise awareness about AIDS. She posed bald in Life magazine in 1997 after having a benign brain tumor removed, and made a memorable, if not entirely sober, appearance at the 2001 Golden Globe awards. “I’ve been through it all, baby,” she once told an interviewer. “I’m Mother Courage.”

Taylor was born in London to a St. Louis art dealer and his actress wife; the family returned to the U.S. in 1939 “to escape the coming war,” said The Boston Globe. They moved to Los Angeles, where young Elizabeth’s “air of British refinement” and “striking, violet-eyed prettiness” earned her a screen test and a contract with Universal Pictures. A string of small roles followed, but in 1944, armed with a new contract with MGM, she landed the role “that turned the young actress into a household name.” As “horse-crazy Velvet Brown” in National Velvet, she projected such intense passion for the title horse “that one British reviewer was unsettled” by the depth of her emotion.

Intense emotion was Taylor’s signature, said USA Today. “Beauty, glamour, love, men, food, alcohol, friends, causes—everything was done in a big, theatrical, first-class-or-bust kind of way.” Her life encompassed more than 100 movies, four children, “a slew of grandchildren,” at least 70 hospitalizations or operations, and two trips to the Betty Ford Center. Some of her throwaway comments might have wrecked a lesser career. When Hollywood gossip columnist Hedda Hopper chided her for stealing Eddie Fisher from his then wife, Debbie Reynolds, she snapped, “What do you expect me to do? Sleep alone?”

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Nominated six times for an Academy Award, she won three (including the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award in 1993). She took her first Best Actress statuette in 1961 for her portrayal of Gloria Wandrous, the doomed model-escort in BUtterfield 8. Her second came in 1967 for her lacerating performance alongside Burton in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Typically irreverent, she claimed she won her first Oscar only because she was hospitalized with double pneumonia when that year’s award season rolled around. “I won the Oscar because I almost died,” she later said. “Pure and simple.”