Elizabeth Taylor

Elizabeth Taylor

Elizabeth Taylor is one of the greatest movie stars to ever grace the big screen starring in films such as Cleopatra, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Giant.

Taylor made her big screen debut at the tender age of nine with There's One Born Every Minute and she was snapped up by Metro Goldwyn Mayer when Universal cancelled her contract in 1942.

Lassie Come Home was the next role for the actress before going onto Jane Eyre and The White Cliffs of Dover, the movie that made her a child star.

Her role adult role came in 1948 when she starred in Conspirator - it wasn't the best start to her adult career as the movie bombed at the box office; but her performance was praised.

Taylor's first hit was Father of the Bride, in which she starred in 1950, alongside Spencer Tracy.

But it was from the mid-fifties onwards that Taylor really found herself in the most successful part of her career as she starred in Giant, Raintree County and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and worked with the likes of James Dean, Montgomery Clift and Paul Newman.

Raintree County brought her an Oscar nomination for Best Actress in 1957 but it was her performance in Butterfield 8 in 1960 for which she won her first Academy Award.

That same year she became the highest paid actress of all time when she was paid $1 million to star in Cleopatra, which also starred Richard Burton.

A second Oscar came in 1966 for her role in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, in which she starred alongside then husband Burton.

She would work together with Burton on six other movies throughout the sixties, including The V.I.P.s and Boom!

But by the end of the sixties she was not as big a draw at the box office but she continued to work throughout the seventies.

While she may have been one of the industry's greatest actresses and hit the headlines for her work she was also famous for her private life - marrying eight times to seven husbands; getting hitched to Richard Burton twice.

But in more recent years her health has been a cause for concern with suffering a bought of pneumonia in 1990 before undergoing hip replacement surgery four years later.

She died at the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles aged 79 and is survived by her four children.

FemaleFirst Helen Earnshaw


by for www.femalefirst.co.uk
find me on and follow me on


Tagged in