Key moments in the life of a screen legend. (Sources: Washington Post, Life Magazine, CNN)
Created by washingtonpost on Mar 23, 2011
Last updated: 03/23/11 at 06:13 PM
Tags: elizabeth taylor
Survivors include two children from her marriage to Wilding, Michael Wilding and Christopher Wilding; a daughter from her marriage to Todd, Liza Todd Tivey; a daughter she and Burton adopted, Maria Burton Carson; a brother, Howard Taylor; 10 grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren.
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Taylor meets Fortensky, a construction worker, in the late 1980s at the Betty Ford Clinic while both underwent treatment for substance abuse.
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Taylor plays the scheming matriarch Regina in the Lillian Hellman play. “Oh, I'm wonderful playing bitches,” she told The Washington Post at the time. Her appearance at the Kennedy Center in the play brings mixed reviews, but the show sells out on Broadway and earns her a Tony Award nomination.
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Taylor meets Warner during U.S. bicentennial celebrations at the British embassy in Washington. Their courtship is rapid. As he pursues a U.S. Senate seat, Taylor lends the Warner campaign $200,000 and loads of glamour.
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The split in 1974 is followed by a remarriage and second divorce in 1976.
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Taylor's portrayal as a braying, slovenly wife of a professor in “Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” earns her a second Oscar.
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Taylor surprises many by equaling the power of its stage star, Uta Hagen, in such a challenging part. Taylor gained 25 pounds and shed any remnant of vanity to engage in alcohol-fueled, foul-mouthed psychological battles with her husband, played by Burton.
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Burton’s advanced alcoholism and infidelities hasten their divorce in 1974, followed by a remarriage and second divorce in 1976.
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Reviewers denounce movie, which cost $40 million, took years to film and nearly bankrupted Twentieth Century-Fox.
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Taylor meets Burton, playing Marc Antony to her Queen of the Nile on the set of “Cleopatra” (1963). She and Burton, the dashing, Welsh-born actor, flaunted their off-screen romance by dining and sunbathing together. The Burtons become the world’s best-known couple, smoldering jet-setters that the public loved to follow.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/screen-legend-elizabeth-taylor-dies-at-age-79/2010/09/21/ABPFCYIB_story.html
Filming of 'Cleopatra' is halted in London as Taylor falls ill. The episode becomes world news.
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Taylor wins for role as a call girl named Gloria Wandrous in “BUtterfield 8.” It's a part she never wanted and claimed to detest for the rest of her life. She felt the studio was trying to profit from her troubled off-screen sex life.
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Taylor is nominated for her portrayal of a sexy but traumatized heroine in “Suddenly, Last Summer” (1959), co-starring Clift and Katharine Hepburn.
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The union is troubled from the start and ruptures completely after she meets actor Richard Burton, playing Marc Antony to her Queen of the Nile on the set of “Cleopatra” (1963).
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Her second nomination comes in Tennessee Williams's “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” as Maggie the Cat, who tries to lure her emotionally distant husband (Paul Newman) back into bed.
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Devastated by Todd’s death -- the plane was called the Lucky Liz -- Taylor launches into an affair with entertainer Eddie Fisher, a Todd protégé then married to actress Debbie Reynolds.
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Taylor earns nomination for 1957’s “Raintree County” as a mentally unbalanced Southern belle during the Civil War era.
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He would die a year later in a plane crash.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/screen-legend-elizabeth-taylor-dies-at-age-79/2010/09/21/ABPFCYIB_story.html
Taylor plays a Virginia-bred gentlewoman amid Texas ranchers Rock Hudson and James Dean. “Giant” salvages Taylor's career after she had starred in a string of forgettable romances.
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The couple divorces five years later.
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Critics take notice of Taylor's more dramatic performance in the movie, which was filmed in 1949 and released in 1951. The movie is based on Theodore Dreiser’s novel “An American Tragedy,” about an ambitious drifter (Montgomery Clift) whose love for a socialite of glistening beauty (Taylor) is jeopardized by his pregnant, working-class girlfriend (Shelley Winters).
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Taylor was impressed with the hotel heir's wealth, but his drinking, gambling and womanizing helped ruin the marriage. They divorced in 1951.
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Taylor's performance at age 12 launches her as a child star.
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Taylor appears in the movie at age 9, according to Life Magazine. The studio, Universal, cancels her contract six months later because she couldn't sing.
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Elizabeth Rosemond Taylor is born in London to American parents on Feb. 27, 1932. Her father, Francis, ran an art gallery. Her mother, the former Sara Warmbrodt, had once been an actress who trained Elizabeth from her earliest years to be presentable in public, in looks and manner.
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