Elizabeth Taylor (Feb. 27, 1932–March 23, 2011) was born in London, England, to American art dealer Francis Lenn Taylor and his stage actress wife Sara Sothern, becoming a dual British and American citizen at birth. She was brought up as a pro-Zionist Chirstian Scientist, leading her to convert to Judaism in 1959, the same year that she married singer Eddie Fisher at Temple Beth Sholom in Las Vegas.
Fisher was her fourth of seven husbands and the second who was Jewish after film producer Mike Todd. Taylor said neither Todd nor Fisher were the reason for her conversion, that she had wanted to become Jewish “for a long time” and that there was “comfort and dignity and hope for me in this ancient religion that [has] survived for four thousand years … I feel as if I have been a Jew all my life.”
Taylor thereafter became a supporter of Jewish and Zionist causes. The year of her conversion she purchased $100,000 worth of Israel Bonds, prompting Egypt to temporarily ban her from entering the country, but relented after realizing that her film Cleopatra was bringing favorable publicity to the country. She also raised money for the Jewish National Fund, served as a trustee for the Simon Wiesenthal center, advocated for the emigration of Soviet Jews, offered herself as a replacement for the hostages held by Palestinian terrorists at Entebbe, Uganda, and narrated the 1981 Holocaust documentary, Genocide.
After the family moved to the U.S. in 1939, Taylor’s first role as a child actress came in 1942 in There’s One Born Every Minute, in which she portrays the young daughter of a family that profits by false advertising. Other minor roles were in Lassie Come Home, Jane Eyre, and The White Cliffs of Dover. In 1944, she starred in National Velvet, in which her character substitutes at the last moment as a jockey to win Britain’s Grand National steeplechase, but after the race she falls off the horse and is disqualified. In the movie, the fact that the jockey is a girl causes a sensation. There were more teenage roles for Taylor in Courage of Lassie, Cynthia, Life with Father, A Date With Judy, Julia Misbehaves (in which Peter Lawford gave Elizabeth her first onscreen kiss) and Little Women.
In 1950, when she turned 18, she had her first role as an adult in the comedy The Big Hangover, costarring Van Johnson. Taylor married Conrad “Nicky” Hilton Jr that same year, but divorced him eight months later on the grounds that he was abusive and a heavy drinker. She starred in the 1950 comedy Father of the Bride opposite Spencer Tracy and a year later starred in the sequel Father’s Little Dividend. In 1952 she starred in A Place in the Sun, based on Theodore Dreiser’s novel An American Tragedy. The next year she starred in Love is Better Than Ever and then was sent to England to play Rebecca in Ivanhoe, where she was romanced by Michael Wilding, who became her second husband and father of her first child, Michael. They had a second child, Christopher, in 1955.
In 1956, Taylor starred in Giant with Rock Hudson and James Dean. A car crash killed Dean only a few days after he completed filming. Her next film Raintree County won Taylor an Academy Award nomination as Best Actress. Meanwhile she divorced Wilding and married Mike Todd, with whom she had a daughter, Elizabeth Frances. Todd was killed in a plane crash while Taylor was filming Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. She received aonther Academy Award nomination for her role as Maggie in that production, and the film’s popularity swelled when tabloids focused on her marriage to Fisher, who had divorced Debbie Reynolds in the process. Taylor won her Third Academy Award nomination for her role in the 1959 film Suddenly Last Summer. Her last film for MGM was Butterfield 8, in which she played a high-class call girl.
Taylor’s major triumph came in 1963 for her title role in Cleopatra during which her costar Richard Burton became her extramarital lover. With elaborate sets and costuming and high salaries, including $1 million for Taylor, the film took two years and $62 million to complete, and took several years after its release to break even. Burton became her fifth husband in a tempestuous marriage that saw them divorce, reconcile and divorce again. Together they starred in 11 films including The V.I.P’s, The Sandpiper, and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, for which she won an Academy Award. They went on to star in Doctor Faustus, The Taming of the Shrew, The Comedians, Secret Ceremony, Under Milk Wood, Hammersmith Is Out, and Divorce His, Divorce Hers — fitting because Burton and Taylor had their second and final divorce the following year.
During the Taylor-Burton film era, she also appeared in films without him, including Reflections in a Golden Eye opposite Marlon Brando, Boom!, The Only Game in Town, X Y & Zee, Night Watch, Ash Wednesday, and The Driver’s Seat. She married John Warner, her sixth husband, in 1976, who was elected to the U.S. Senate from Virginia. They were divorced in 1982. She met construction worker Larry Fortensky at the Betty Ford Center in 1988 and married him three years later at Michael Jackson’s Neverland Ranch. They divorced in 1996 but remained close.
The actress helped to raise more than $270 million for the treatment of AIDS and the provision of services to AIDS patients, which her Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation has continued to do after her death. Taylor’s fortune was added to with the launching of two best-selling fragrances, Passion and White Diamonds, in association with Elizabeth Arden, inc. She also founded a jewelry company, House of Taylor.
Before Taylor died in 2011 at Cedars Sinai Medical Center, she instructed that her funeral should begin 15 minutes behind schedule, so it could be reported “she even wanted to be late for her own funeral.” After the ceremony officiated by Rabbi Jerome Cutler, she was entombed in the Great Mausoleum at Forest Lawn Memorial Park
Tomorrow: February 28, Bugsy Siegel.
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SDJW condensation of Wikipedia articles.