Elizabeth Taylor had just turned 16

Elizabeth Taylor, the stunningly beautiful, violet-eyed actress has died.

The legendary star had two Oscars, and a host of other nominations and awards for her work – but was equally respected for her humanitarian efforts. Taylor was often the target of tabloids brought on by her many scandalous affairs and marriages.

Taylor was a child actress who easily segued into adult stardom. It was her role in Lassie Come Home (1943) that brought her attention along with a lifelong friendship with co-star Roddy McDowall. However it was National Velvet (’44) that made her into a sensation at age 12.

National Velvet was also the film where the actress sustained a broken back, an injury that would cause her pain throughout the years – and the first of many illnesses that threatened her life.

It was her role as Kay Banks in Father of the Bride (1950) where she starred opposite Spencer Tracy and Joan Bennett that gave her success in her first adult role. And in 1951 Taylor was applauded for her role as Angela Vickers, the spoiled socialite who intoxicates Montgomery Clift with her beauty to the point that he murders his Plain Jane pregnant girlfriend (Shelley Winters) in A Place in the Sun.

Of course the roles grew along with her status as a genuine star.

Butterfield 8 (1960) gave the actress her first Academy Award playing Gloria Wandrous, a high-class call-girl. And her second Oscar came in 1966 for her comitragical portrayal of Martha, in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Her off-screen life was the material of soap operas. Eight marriage, two to Richard Burton, heated affairs, home-wrecking in an era of internationally scandalous proportions beginning with the Debbie Reynolds-Eddie Fisher breakup after the death of her third husband Producer Michael Todd. It was that affair and split between Eddie-Debbie that made Taylor the most hated woman in America in 1958.

Her affair with then married Richard Burton on the set of Cleopatra (’63) again put her onto the front pages of the international media. But it was her illness of pneumonia on that film that nearly gutted 20th Century Fox into ruins with cost overruns - and effectively ended the studio star system.

Her imaged changed on a dime when she became the first celebrity AIDS crusader. All because of her love for her longtime gay friend Actor Rock Hudson, whose lingering, painful AIDS illness and death had humanized the disease while Taylor gave it a compassionate nature on the front page.

In 2004 she admitted to suffering from congestive heart failure and in 2009, the actress had leaky valve replaced. Taylor entered into Cedar Sinai Medical Center on February 11th with additional symptom from congestive heart failure.

She died on February 23rd, at the age of 79, surrounded by her four children.

Eight marriage, five broken backs, two hip replacements, and one benign brain tumor – hated, loved, ridiculed, respected, Elizabeth Taylor’s steely, broken, cold, loving heart finally led her off the stage.

Posted by Mari Cartel and Michael Cartel