Actress. Born February 27, 1932, in London, England. In 1939, Taylor moved with her family to Los Angeles, to escape the havoc of World War II. Her black-haired, violet-eyed charm caught the eye of the Hollywood film world, and she made her screen debut at the age of 10 in the 1942 film There’s One Born Every Minute. After she was cast opposite Roddy McDowall in Lassie Come Home (1942), Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer signed her to a studio contract. In 1944, Taylor’s performance as a young equestrian in National Velvet made her a bona fide child star. Other early films included Cynthia (1947), Life With Father (1947), and Little Women (1949).
Taylor began playing mature roles by the time she was a teenager—her first adult starring roles came in 1950, in Conspirator, co-starring Robert Taylor. She soon became a major adult star, starring in films like Father of the Bride (1950), opposite Spencer Tracy, and A Place in the Sun (1951), opposite Montgomery Clift. Generally considered one of the most beautiful women alive, Taylor earned an increased measure of critical respect as an actress in Giant (1956) and was nominated for an Oscar three times during the 1950s—for Raintree County (1957), and two film versions of Tennessee Williams plays, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), and Suddenly Last Summer (1959). She won her first Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance as a prostitute in the melodramatic Butterfield 8 (1960). At the height of her marketability as an actress, Taylor agreed to star in an upcoming film, Cleopatra, for the then-record salary of $1 million. Taylor made memorable appearances in several television movies, including Malice in Wonderland (1985) and Sweet Bird of Youth (1989); on TV shows like General Hospital and The Simpsons (as the voice of Baby Maggie); and had a cameo role in a film version of The Flinstones in 1994. Her limited acting career took a backseat to her pursuit of humanitarian causes—most notably AIDS research. After her good friend, Rock Hudson, died of the disease in 1985, Taylor helped start the American Foundation for AIDS Research (AmFAR) and publicly criticized the government’s lack of funding for such a worthy cause. In 1993, she created her own foundation, the Elizabeth Taylor Foundation for AIDS. She was one of the first major celebrities to go public with her support for AIDS victims, and by 1999 she had helped raise an estimated $50 million to fight the disease. She also launched two perfumes, Passion and White Diamonds, both of which played on her legendary beauty and movie star allure. Together, sales of the scents bring in an estimated $200 million annually. In 1999, Taylor was made a Dame of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II.
Neither Taylor’s marital ups-and-downs nor her battle with her weight were ever far from the public eye. In 1991, she married Larry Fortensky--a construction worker thirty years her junior whom she met at the Ford clinic--at the Wonderland Ranch, owned by her close friend Michael Jackson (no stranger to tabloid attention himself). She and Fortensky divorced in 1997. From the mid-1990s, Taylor again captured headlines with her repeated health scares: she had hip replacements in 1994 and 1995 and had a benign brain tumor removed in 1997. In 1998 and 1999, she suffered two falls in her Bel Air home, repeatedly injuring her lower back. And in 2002, she was successful treated for a curable form a skin cancer. Despite such incidents, her energy for her various causes and her family—she has nine grandchildren and a great-grandson—remain undiminished. In 2003, the 71-year-old actress announced she would be retiring from the acting world to devote her energies to the fight against AIDS.