Elizabeth Taylor: Eight marriages, 50 movies, two Oscars, 100 operations add a fortune of £360m

By
Tom Leonard
Last updated at 2:08 AM on 24th March 2011

In 79 fabulous years, she looked death in the eye countless times and lived to tell the tale.

But yesterday, after a life as dramatic as any movie script, Elizabeth Taylor’s battle was over.

She died of heart failure in hospital, with her four children at her side. And when the New York Times paid tribute to Hollywood’s last movie goddess, it had to admit that Miss Taylor had actually outlived the obituary writer by six years.

The Oscar-winning actress spent the final six weeks of her life at Cedars-Sinai Medical Centre in Los Angeles. She had been admitted after her weight plummeted to less than 98lb and the heart failure diagnosed in 2004 threatened to overwhelm her.

Mesmerising: Elizabeth Taylor, pictured here on the set of Suddenly, Last Summer, has died aged 79

A friend described her as ‘tiny and fighting for every breath’ and added: ‘She still felt she had so much to live for.

‘But she was happy with her life at the end. She was happy with her family. She was at peace.’

Miss Taylor’s publicist said she died peacefully, watched over by the children from three of her seven husbands – Michael and Christopher Wilding, Liza Todd and Maria Burton.

‘My mother was an extraordinary woman who lived life to the fullest, with great passion, humour and love,’ said Michael, 57.

‘We know, quite simply, the world is a better place for Mum having lived in it.’

He said the family, which includes ten grandchildren and four great-grandchildren, were ‘incredibly proud’ of her ‘remarkable body of work in film, her success as a businesswoman, and her brave advocacy in the fight against HIV/Aids’.

A private family funeral is expected to be held this week.

Miss Taylor’s family is expected to share much of her £360 million fortune although friends say she is leaving some of it to her Aids charity. They may also benefit from the proceeds of handwritten diaries she had reportedly discussed publishing.

Never one to miss a party, she had celebrated her 79th birthday with family and friends a month early as she had to go into hospital ten days later. She had asked fans to pray for her as she faced her latest health hurdle.

One of her last  Twitter messages read simply: ‘I’ll let you know when it is all over. Love you, Elizabeth.’

Miss Taylor had been plagued by health problems all her life. She estimated she had almost died four times.

In one of her last interviews she said her first memory was of ‘pain’. 

She was born with scoliosis, or curvature of the spine, and suffered back problems which were partly to blame for her subsequent addiction to painkillers and alcohol. But she never gave up.

She had both hips replaced and beat skin cancer,a brain tumour, diabetes, seizures and a stroke. She endured an estimated 70 illnesses and had 100 operations, 20 of them major surgery.

A child star who managed to make the transition to adult roles, she won two Oscars – for Butterfield 8 and Who’s

Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? However, her 50-strong list of film credits tends to be overshadowed by her list of  seven husbands, most notably Richard Burton, whom she married and divorced twice.

In 2000, she was thrilled to become Dame Elizabeth Taylor in recognition of her services to film.

She once described herself as a ‘living example of what people can go through and survive’.

By Philip Norman

Iconic: Elizabeth Taylor with Richard Burton in Cleoptra. He was the love of her life and she was to marry him twice

The time was 2am and the voice of Elizabeth Taylor rang around the hotel lobby in Salzburg, Austria, as brimful of hellcat fury as any tempestuous heroine she had ever played on screen.

‘Richard!’ she screamed at her fifth husband, Richard Burton. ‘Will you stop drinking and come to bed this minute! Your voice is ricocheting all over this hotel.’

It was a snowy night in 1968, and Taylor, acknowledged to be the world’s most beautiful woman, hardly looked the part at that moment. Her hair was a tangled mess, her Cleopatra-style eye make-up had gone smudgy. She wore a tatty black leather coat over a tarty red chiffon nightdress, and was barefoot.

Burton still wore a Nazi officer’s uniform for his role in the Alistair MacLean war story Where Eagles Dare. After the day’s filming, he had stayed up drinking vintage brandy with companions, including me, while Taylor had retired to bed. To complete the drama of her reappearance, Burton was being threatened with a handgun by a pushy expat American he’d just told to get lost. The gunman now looked on, as dumbfounded and dazzled as the rest of us.

‘Either you come up now,’ Taylor hissed at Burton, ‘or don’t bother to, ever again.’

‘Aah, get away,’ snarled Burton, reaching for the brandy bottle.

‘Get away yourself,’ Taylor hissed. And, clutching her leather coat more tightly around her, she stomped back to their suite on her own.

Next morning on location, however, all was sweetness and light again. Taylor called Burton ‘Boofy’, he called her ‘Ocean’, and between takes they canoodled like lovestruck teenagers.

‘My dear, you light up the set,’ the film director gushed at Taylor.

‘She also lights up my heart,’ Burton said gallantly.

As an unworldly 24-year-old, I spent several days with the couple, learning more about Taylor, both as an actress and a person, than most of her obituaries can tell.

Determined: Taylor in National Velvet (1944). At 10, she set her heart on the lead role but was told she was too short. After weeks of punishing exercise and a weight-gaining diet, she convinced the director she’d gained three inches in height – and got the part

For a magazine profile I started out researching for someone else but ended up writing, I also talked to her parents, Francis and Sara, her closest friends, such as the actor Roddy McDowall, her lawyer and a series of directors and old-time Hollywood moguls, some of whom adored her and some who most definitely did not.

Being with her on such intimate terms has left an indelible memory. There was, for instance, the moment at dinner in Salzburg when she turned and fixed me with those amazing violet eyes, whose double row of black lashes never needed enhancement by any mascara brush.

As she smiled at me, I felt suddenly robbed of breath, as if my Adam’s apple had become double its usual size. A moment later, she was regaling the table with a bawdy story about the producer Daryl F. Zanuck.

Taylor was a star of the hugest magnitude; the greatest Hollywood name ever to come out of Britain; a sexual icon to rival Garbo or Monroe. But throughout the craziest fantasies and excesses of her career, she remained always primarily a creature of flesh and hot, hot blood – not a silver planet twinkling coldly in the firmament, but a down-to-earth and earthy woman.

She was the last of the great movie goddesses, thrilling and intriguing the pre-rock star, pre-TV soap world of the Fifties and Sixties with a love life and lifestyle that any Hollywood story-editor would have rejected as impossibly far-fetched.

Even in these celebrity-overdosed
times, with a new glamour icon rocketing to fame every other minute,
Taylor’s eight marriages, her jewels, spending-sprees, tantrums and epic
illnesses remain the stuff of imperishable legend.

She was born – to American parents
living in Britain – in 1932 in Hampstead, North London, on a modest
street not far from where I live now. Her mother, Sara, had been a minor
stage actress; her tall, handsome father, Francis, was an art dealer.

Even as a tiny tot, Elizabeth had an
unsettling, exotic beauty, almost as though the head of a mature woman
had been grafted onto the body of a child.

On the outbreak of war in 1939, her
father moved his art dealership to Beverly Hills, California, starting a
gallery whose clients came to include actor Edward G. Robinson and
writer-director Billy Wilder.

Sara, a ‘stage mother’ of the
pushiest kind, steered her violet-eyed ¬little girl into a contract with
MGM studios, whose patriarchal boss, Louis B. Mayer, boasted owning
‘more stars than there are in Heaven’.

Taylor’s drive to succeed was the
equal of her mother’s. After a taste of fame in Lassie Come Home aged
ten, 12-year-old Elizabeth set her heart on the lead role in National
Velvet, a romance with a horse racing background, but was told she was
too short for the role.

After several weeks of punishing
exercise and weight-gaining diet, she went back to the director and
managed to persuade him she’d gained three inches in height.

Short-lived romance: In 1950, aged 18, she married Nicky Hilton, a deceptively charming young man whose father, Conrad, founded the Hilton hotel-chain. Nicky was an abusive drunk who battered his young bride so brutally, she lost the baby she was carrying

Child stars then seldom made a
comfortable transition to adult roles — witness Shirley Temple — but
Taylor managed it effortlessly. With her virginal beauty went a
voluptuous figure that initially worried the self-censoring movie
bosses. Officials known as B.I.s (bust-inspectors) patrolled her sets,
ordering higher-cut dresses if too much cleavage was visible.

At 18, she married Nicky Hilton, a
good-looking and deceptively charming young man whose father, Conrad,
had founded the Hilton hotel group.

The smiling charmer proved to be an
abusive drunk who battered his young bride so brutally that she lost the
baby she had been carrying.

Divorcing Hilton, Elizabeth rebounded
into the arms of British actor Michael Wilding, a man 20 years her
senior. The five-year marriage produced two sons, Michael and
Christopher, but, as Taylor herself admitted, it was more brother-sister
relationship than love match.

In 1957, she dumped Wilding for the
American producer Mike Todd, a stocky, swashbuckling figure then
preparing to launch his epic screen version of Jules Verne’s Around The
World In 80 Days.

Todd was Taylor’s ideal man – powerful, protective and irresistibly masculine.

He adored her in the uncomplicated
way she craved, treating her like bone china, showering her with jewels
and furs, telephoning her every day no matter where in the world he was.
Together they had a daughter, Liza, although complications during the
birth required Taylor to undergo surgery to prevent any further
pregnancies.

In March 1958, Todd took off on a business trip aboard the private aircraft he had named ‘The Lucky Liz’ in his wife’s honour.

Before he left, he couldn’t stop kissing her goodbye. ‘I’m afraid something’s going to happen,’ he told her. ‘I’m too happy.’

Scorching: Taylor smouldered on screen including in the 1958 classic Cat On A Hot Tin Roof

Legends: Taylor with Richard Burton on their first wedding day in 1964. He was to be her fifth and sixth husband

That night, en route for Kansas City, The Lucky Liz crashed in flames, killing Todd and everyone aboard.

Taylor was traumatised by his loss
for years afterwards. Painkillers and drugs, which she’d begun using as a
child star, were her only means of assuaging the pain, along with
alcohol.

On screen, she was Hollywood’s
nearest answer to smouldering European movie goddesses such as Gina
Lollobrigida and Sophia Loren.

Her portrayal of the sexually
yearning Maggie the Cat in Tennessee Williams’s Cat On A Hot Tin Roof
and of Gloria Wandrous in Butterfield 8 (for which she won her first
Oscar in 1960) fuelled the fantasies of men the world over.

But she also proved herself an
actress of extraordinary depth and range, notably in Giant — a Texan
epic presaging TV’s Dallas — in which she co-starred with heart-throb
James Dean.

In May 1959 she married her fourth
husband, the crooner Eddie Fisher, who had been best man at her wedding
to Todd. The pair had caused a scandal when Fisher left his then wife
Debbie Reynolds for Elizabeth.

A year later, Taylor was filming
Cleopatra, a historical epic so long-drawn-out and horrendously
expensive that it would come near to bankrupting its producers. She was
paid a then record-breaking $1m for her role.

Cast as Mark Antony, the Egyptian
queen’s Roman lover, was Welsh actor Richard Burton, until then better
known on the stage than the vulgar screen.

Much married: Taylor arrives at London Airport with her fourth husband, singer Eddie Fisher, and her sons Michael, six, and Christopher, four, children of her former marriage to Michael Wilding

Taylor and Burton’s first scene
together in Cleopatra produced instant, fizzing sexual chemistry. They
held their first screen kiss for so long that the director called out
sarcastically: ‘I’m sorry to interrupt you two… but it’s time for
lunch.’

Their public love affair caused a
scandal since Taylor was still married to Eddie Fisher and Burton to his
well-known and popular first wife, Sybil. The then Pope even took a
hand, castigating Taylor for stealing another woman’s husband.

Married in 1964, ‘the Burtons’ as
they became known, created a dazzling screen and stage partnership,
appearing together in Shakespeare’s The Taming Of The Shrew and Marlow’s
Dr Faustus. Unable to have children of their own, the couple adopted a
little girl named Maria from a Munich orphanage.

In 1966, they played warring husband
and wife in Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? for which
Taylor won a second Oscar.

Their extravagance was like nothing
the post-war world had seen before. Burton bought Taylor the world’s
largest diamond for a then staggering £1.1 million, as well as other
jewels, furs, old masters and a luxury yacht. I was once shown over the
yacht, and invited to experience the sensation of rolling on the
Burtons’ circular bed.

Longevity: Elizabeth Taylor on the set of Zee and Co in 1972 in which she played opposite Micahel Caine

Taylor seemed to commit herself
wholeheartedly to Burton, even learning Welsh (which she would use to
swear at him during their rows) and valiantly trying to curb her natural
chaotic untidiness. When I met her parents, they told me in amazement
how, since meeting Burton, she’d got into the habit of emptying
ashtrays.

But the grand passion was sabotaged
by drink and by Burton’s growing bitterness at having compromised his
talent by accepting second-rate film roles, as he thought, to keep
Taylor in the luxury she demanded. As disenchantment grew, his pet name
for her changed from ‘Ocean’ to ‘Tubby’.

Having turned their marriage into a
real-life Edward Albee hell, they divorced in 1974, remarried in 1975
but parted for good a year later. Burton died in 1984 from a brain
haemorrhage.

Marriage number seven was to John
Warner, a rather dull American politician then seeking election to the
Senate. Taylor threw herself into the role of Washington wife, even
selling the diamond Richard Burton had given her to fund Warner’s
election campaign.

No longer in demand in Hollywood, her
weight ballooned alarmingly. Seeing the cruel photographs of her with
Warner in the late Seventies, I remembered her father’s innocent
observation — long before anyone knew about ‘eating disorders’ — that
she would routinely eat five hot dogs with bacon, one after another.

Warner and Taylor were divorced in
1982, and two years later came the strangest attachment of all when she
began a friendship with Michael Jackson, then the world’s most famous
and most bizarre rock megastar.

The 52-year-old Hollywood matriarch
and the 26-year-old, white-gloved moonwalker were reportedly trembling
on the brink of matrimony. Taylor insisted that, for all his fixations
on childhood and his obsessive facial restructuring, Jackson was the
most ‘normal’ person she’d ever met. This even though Jackson at one
point considered altering his appearance yet again to become a living
replica of Taylor as a young girl in her 1944 film National Velvet.

Always a prey to dramatic illnesses
and accidents, she suffered grievous ill health as the years advanced,
almost dying from viral pneumonia in 1990 and developing chronic
osteo-arthritis that necessitated two hip operations and left her more
than ever reliant on painkilling drugs and alcohol.

Friendship: The actress had a very close relationship with the late Michael Jackson. They are seen here at Liza Minnelli’s wedding to David Gest in New York, 2002

In 1988, while drying out at the
Betty Ford Clinic, she lost her heart again, to a construction worker
named Larry Fortensky, 21 years her junior, who was tackling his own
alcoholism. They married in 1991 at Michael Jackson’s Neverland ranch,
with ex-presidents Reagan and Ford among the guests and Jackson picking
up the $1 million tab. As a thank you, Taylor bought the singer an
elephant named Gipsy.

The relationship between former
goddess and her ‘bit of rough’ lasted a surprising eight years, although
for most of that time Fortensky looked more like Taylor’s bodyguard
than her husband.

He was eventually dismissed with a
pay-off of £1.3m and returned to his job as a construction worker with,
doubtless, a few stories to tell the other lads on site.

Honour: Taylor was made a Dame at Buckingham Palace in 2000

So why did Taylor keeping marrying
until eventually scoring higher than Henry VIII? Her old friend Roddy
McDowall thought it pointed to a deeply old-fashioned nature. ‘When
Elizabeth falls for someone, she doesn’t just fall into bed with them,’
McDowall told me. ‘She has to make it legitimate.’

In 1997, a year after her divorce
from Fortensky, Taylor underwent a successful operation on a benign
brain tumour, emerging with her once-luxuriant dark curly hair now
close-cropped and white. Her movie and TV career behind her (except for
occasional forays like voicing baby Maggie in The Simpsons cartoon), she
no longer needed a Mike Todd or Burton to buy her diamond.

A range of perfumes marketed in her
name had boosted a fortune then estimated at £100m. She became a
tireless campaigner for Aids awareness and, by her own gutsy refusal to
go under, despite her mounting health problems, a symbol of courage for
women everywhere.

In 2000, she paid her first visit to
her homeland for many years to be invested as a Dame by the Queen and be
honoured by the UK film industry. Though often confined to a
wheelchair, she still managed to look spectacular and seem as
down-to-earth as ever (despite having sent an advance demand that her
Dorchester Hotel suite be repainted violet to match her eyes).

‘A Dame?’ she echoed to one interviewer in amazement. ‘I didn’t think I was the kind of person that happened to.’

Close: Elizabeth Taylor holds the hand of her good friend Jason Winters in 2007. She was said to be contemplating a ninth wedding with the LA property developer, 28 years her junior

Thereafter, she became increasingly
frail and wheelchair-bound, and behind the lavender-drenched walls of
her Bel Air mansion, she came increasingly to resemble Norma Desmond,
Sunset Boulevard’s has-been screen goddess. Indeed, Desmond’s great
snarl of defiance in the movie could equally have been written for
Taylor. ‘I’m still big. It’s the pictures that got small.’

The years may have been remorselessly
advancing, but her famous sexual magnetism still flickered fitfully.
She was even said to be contemplating a ninth wedding, this time to an
LA property developer named Jason Winters, 28 years her junior. Handle

A disaffected landscape gardener who
left her employment also claimed she had demanded sex from her bisexual
French butler, who was wont to refer to her disparagingly as ‘the old
trampoline’.

To refute claims that her formidable
list of ailments now included Alzheimer’s disease, she appeared on Larry
King’s TV talk show in 2006, dressed in a lime green and purple kaftan
and sporting, as she liked to say, ‘more bling than J-Lo’.

As a further sock in the eye to
would-be obituaritists, she flew to Hawaii and had herself winched into
the water in a cage to enjoy the experience of swimming with sharks.

Burton remained the love of her life,
run a close second by Mike Todd. She often spoke of being buried near
Burton’s childhood home in South Wales even though the actor’s grave is
actually in Switzerland, where he died in 1984.

Indeed, it was as one half of the
world’s most glamorous double act, Burton and Taylor – or Antony and
Cleopatra – that she was at her most beautiful, most spectacularly
impossible and professionally brilliant.

I often think back to having dinner with the two of them in Salzberg in 1968, how kind they were to a young journalist and the moment Taylor’s amazing violet eyes turned directly on me.

Even that 43-year-old memory still takes my breath away.

Frail: Taylor attends the annual a benefit in Santa Monica in 2009. Her health had been poor for years