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Elizabeth Taylor is a Actor and Producer British born on 27 february 1932 at Hampstead Garden Suburb (United-kingdom)

Elizabeth Taylor

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Birth name Elizabeth Rosemond Taylor
Nationality United-kingdom
Birth 27 february 1932 at Hampstead Garden Suburb (United-kingdom)
Death 23 march 2011 (at 79 years) at Los Angeles (USA)
Awards Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres‎, Academy Award for Best Actress

Dame Elizabeth Rosemond Taylor, DBE (February 27, 1932 – March 23, 2011) was a British-American actress. From her early years as a child star with MGM, she became one of the great screen actresses of Hollywood's Golden Age. As one of the world's most famous film stars, Taylor was recognized as much for her acting ability as for her glamorous lifestyle, beauty, and distinctive dark blue eyes, which famously appeared to be violet.

Taylor's screen debut was in the film National Velvet (1944) at the age of 12, as her career grew she would later go on to star in such films as Father of the Bride (1950), A Place in the Sun (1951), Giant (1956), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), and Suddenly, Last Summer (1959) for which she won the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress - Motion Picture Drama . She won the Academy Award for Best Actress for BUtterfield 8 (1960), played the title role in Cleopatra (1963), and famously married her co-star Richard Burton leaving her husband of five years Eddie Fisher for him. They appeared together in 11 films, including Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), for which Taylor won the BAFTA Award for Best Actress and her second Academy Award for Best Actress. From the mid-1970s, she appeared less frequently in film, and made occasional appearances in television and theatre.

Her much-publicized personal life consisted of eight marriages, seven husbands (she married Burton twice) and several life-threatening illnesses throughout her extraordinary career. From the mid-1980s, Taylor championed HIV and AIDS programs; she co-founded the American Foundation for AIDS Research in 1985, and The Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation in 1991. She received the Presidential Citizens Medal, the Legion of Honour, the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award and a Life Achievement Award from the American Film Institute, who named her seventh on their list of the greatest female stars of Classic Hollywood Cinema. Taylor died from congestive heart failure in March 2011 at the age of 79, having suffered many years of ill health.

Biography

Marriages, romances, and children

Taylor was married eight times to seven husbands. When asked why she married so often, she replied, "I don't know, honey. It sure beats the hell out of me," but also said that, "I was taught by my parents that if you fall in love, if you want to have a love affair, you get married. I guess I'm very old-fashioned." Taylor's husbands were:

Conrad "Nicky" Hilton (May 6, 1950 – January 29, 1951): Taylor believed that she was in love with the young hotel heir, but also wanted to escape from her mother. Hilton's "gambling, drinking, and abusive behavior", however, horrified her and her parents, caused a miscarriage, and ended the marriage in divorce after nine months.
Michael Wilding (February 21, 1952 – January 26, 1957): The "gentle" Wilding, 20 years older than Taylor, comforted her after she left Hilton. After their divorce, Taylor admitted that "I gave him rather a rough time, sort of henpecked him, and probably wasn't mature enough for him." Wilding and Taylor had two sons, Michael and Christopher.
Mike Todd (February 2, 1957 – March 22, 1958): Taylor's next husband was even older than the previous one: born in 1909, Todd was 23 years older than Taylor and had a son who was older than her. Although this marriage lasted only a little over one year, it was the only one of Taylor's marriages to end without divorce; Todd died in a plane crash while married to Taylor. Todd and Taylor had a daughter, Elizabeth ("Liza"), born only six months after their wedding. Although their relationship was tumultuous, Taylor later called him one of the three loves of her life, along with Burton and jewelry. Todd was Jewish, and about a year after his death, Taylor (who by then was married to another Jewish husband) converted to Judaism herself.
Eddie Fisher (May 12, 1959 – March 6, 1964): Fisher, who was also Jewish, and who had been Todd's best friend, consoled Taylor after Todd's death. They began an affair while Fisher was still married to Debbie Reynolds, causing a scandal; Reynolds eventually forgave Taylor; she even voted for her when Taylor was nominated for an Oscar for BUtterfield 8, and starred with her in These Old Broads.
Richard Burton (March 15, 1964 – June 26, 1974; again from October 10, 1975 – July 29, 1976): The Vatican condemned Burton and Taylor's affair, which began when both were married to others, as "erotic vagrancy". The press closely followed their relationship before, during, and after their ten years of marriage, and there was great public interest in "the most famous film star in the world and the man many believed to be the finest classical actor of his generation." Taylor wanted to focus on her marriage rather than her career. She even gained weight on purpose, in an unsuccessful attempt to not receive film roles. Burton once said, "You can't keep clapping a couple of sticks [of dynamite] together without expecting them to blow up". Sixteen months after being divorced, they remarried in a private ceremony in Kasane, Botswana. They were soon separated all over again and had a second, final divorce in 1976.
John Warner (December 4, 1976 – November 7, 1982): As with Burton, Taylor sought to be known as the wife of her husband, a Republican United States Senator from Virginia. Unhappy with her life in Washington, however, Taylor became depressed and entered the Betty Ford Center.
Larry Fortensky (October 6, 1991 – October 31, 1996): Taylor and Fortensky met during another stay at the Betty Ford Center and were married at the Neverland Ranch, Michael Jackson's property. Michael Jackson was very close to Taylor; they were friends for a very long time.
Taylor had many romances outside her marriages. Before marrying Hilton, she was engaged to Heisman Trophy winner Glenn Davis—who did not know until the relationship ended that Taylor's mother had encouraged it to build publicity for her daughter—and also to the son of William D. Pawley, the United States Ambassador to Brazil. Howard Hughes promised Taylor's parents that if they would encourage her to marry him, the enormously wealthy industrialist and film producer would finance a movie studio for her; Sara Taylor agreed, but Taylor refused. After she left Hilton, Hughes returned, proposing to Taylor by suddenly landing a helicopter nearby and sprinkling diamonds on her. Other dates included Frank Sinatra, Henry Kissinger, and Malcolm Forbes. In 2007 Taylor denied rumors of a ninth marriage to Jason Winters but referred to him as "one of the most wonderful men I've ever known."

Taylor had two sons, Michael Howard (born January 6, 1953) and Christopher Edward (born February 27, 1955; her own 23rd birthday), with Michael Wilding. She had a daughter, Elizabeth Frances "Liza" (born August 6, 1957), with Michael Todd. During her marriage to Eddie Fisher, Taylor started proceedings to adopt a two-year-old girl from Germany, Maria (born August 1, 1961); the adoption process was finalized in 1964, by which time Taylor and Fisher were already divorced. Richard Burton later adopted Taylor's daughters Liza and Maria.

In 1971, Taylor became a grandmother at the age of 39. At the time of her death, she was survived by her four children, ten grandchildren, and four great-grandchildren.

Religion and identity
In 1959, at age 27, after nine months of study, Taylor converted from Christian Science to Judaism, taking the Hebrew name Elisheba Rachel. She stated that her conversion was something she had long considered and was not related to her marriages. After Mike Todd's death, Taylor said that she "felt a desperate need for a formalized religion", and explained that neither Roman Catholicism nor Christian Science were able to address many of the "questions she had about life and death".

Biographer Randy Taraborrelli notes that after studying the philosophy of Judaism for nine months, "she felt an immediate connection to the faith." Although Taylor rarely attended synagogue, she stated, "I'm one of those people who think you can be close to God anywhere, not just in a place designed for worship ..." At the conversion ceremony, with her parents present as witnesses and in full support of her decision, Taylor repeated the words of Ruth:

... for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge; thy people shall be my people and thy God my God.

Taylor was a follower of Kabbalah and a member of the Kabbalah Centre.

During an interview when she was 55, Taylor described how her inner sense of identity, when a child actress, kept her from giving in to many of the studio's demands, especially with regard to altering her appearance to fit in:

God forbid you do anything individual or go against the fad. But I did. I figured this looks absurd. And I agreed with my dad: God must have had some reason for giving me bushy eyebrows and black hair. I guess I must have been pretty sure of my sense of identity. It was me. I accepted it all my life and I can't explain it. Because I've always been very aware of the inner me that has nothing to do with the physical me.

Taylor added that she began to recognize her "inner being" during her adulthood:

Eventually the inner you shapes the outer you, especially when you reach a certain age, and you have been given the same features as everybody else, God has arranged them in a certain way. But around 40 the inner you actually chisels your features ... Life is to be embraced and enveloped. Surgeons and knives have nothing to do with it. It has to do with a connection with nature, God, your inner being—whatever you want to call it—it's being in contact with yourself and allowing yourself, allowing God, to mold you.

Impressions of career and marriage
In 1964, at the age of 32, Taylor described herself as an actress: "The Elizabeth Taylor who's famous, the one on film, really has no depth or meaning to me. She's a totally superficial working thing, a commodity." She was also able to explain her acting skills as "minuscule—it's not technique. It's instinct and a certain ability to concentrate." Although most of her film roles during the previous decade portrayed her beauty and sexuality, Taylor claimed they merely exaggerated or contradicted who she was in real life, stating, "I am not a 'sex queen' or a 'sex symbol.' I don't think I want to be one ... If my husband thinks I'm sexy, that's good enough for me." She also implied that the reverse is also true:

I can tell you what I think is sexy in a man. It has to do with warmth, a personal givingness, not self-awareness. Richard [Burton] is a very sexy man. He's got that sort of jungle essence that one can sense. It's not the way he combs his hair, not the things he wears; he doesn't think about having muscles. It's what he says and thinks.

By this point Taylor was married for the fifth time, to Richard Burton. Except for her third husband, Mike Todd, who died in a plane accident, she partly blamed her young romances and divorces on her "puritanical upbringing and beliefs":

At first, I guess I didn't know what was love and what was not. I always chose to think I was in love and that love was synonymous with marriage. I couldn't just have a romance; it had to be a marriage ... When I was first divorced, I was 18 and I had only been married nine months. I was very naïve and really totally crushed. It was the first divorce in my family.

Taylor credited Burton's strong relationship with their children as a factor in expecting their marriage to last, stating that he was the "absolute boss of the household and they respect him for that." She was surprised in hindsight by how they became romantically involved, recalling one of their first meetings:

The first day I saw Richard on the Cleopatra set, there was a lot of hemming and hawing, and he said hello to Joe Mankiewicz and everyone. And then he sort of sidled over to me and said, "Has anybody ever told you that you're a very pretty girl?" I said to myself, oy gevaldt, here's the great lover, the great wit, the great intellectual of Wales, and he comes out with a line like that. I couldn't believe it. I couldn't wait to go back to the dressing room where all the girls were and tell them.