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Elizabeth Taylor’s looks often overshadowed acting abilities

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Arguably the most stunningly beautiful woman ever to grace a movie screen — her raven hair, violet eyes and flawless features perfectly complementing the voluptuous curves of her peak years — Elizabeth Taylor was in many ways Hollywood’s ultimate superstar.

“Miss Taylor is less an actress by now than a great natural wonder, like Niagara or the Alps,” one admirer wrote in the 1960s. “She has become not only the most famous woman of her time, but perhaps the most famous woman of all time.”

That was not much of an exaggeration. A lot of that was due to Taylor’s most famous — but far from best — role, as the wily Egyptian queen in “Cleopatra” (1963).

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It’s still one of the most written-about movies of all time because of its excessive cost — more than $300 million in 2011 dollars — and, of course, the married actress’ adulterous romance with co-star Richard Burton, who was also married at the time.

Taylor’s movies, spanning nearly half a century, are an extremely varied lot, as are her performances.

Especially during the first two decades, the movie camera worshipped her like perhaps no other performer before or since — a fact that, along with her fame, tends to overshadow even her very best work in films such as “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” and “Suddenly, Last Summer.”

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After making her debut at 9 in forgotten B-grade comedy “There’s One Born Every Minute” (1942), Taylor’s breakthrough performance came as a horse-loving teenager in the enormously popular “National Velvet” (1944).

During her 15 years as a contract player at MGM, she was rarely required to do much more than look beautiful opposite the studio’s top male stars.

Although she graced hundreds of magazine covers, Taylor wasn’t taken terribly seriously as an actress until she was lent to Paramount to play a society girl who comes between Montgomery Clift and Shelley Winters with fateful results in “A Place in the Sun” (1951).

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In 1957, Taylor scored her first Oscar nomination, as a mentally disturbed Civil War-era belle in another epic film of the era, “Raintree Country.”

In quick succession, Taylor received two Academy Award nominations for two of her best performances, both in Tennessee Williams adaptations.

She was off-the-charts sexy as the frustrated Maggie in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” (1958), trying to tempt Paul Newman as her alcoholic and quite possibly gay husband while wriggling around in a slip. She became one of the country’s Top 10 box office attractions and repeated every year until 1968, peaking in the No. 1 spot in 1961.

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She was riveting — and delivered an unforgettable monologue in a haunting little-girl voice — as a woman facing a lobotomy to erase horrifying memories of her brother’s death in “Suddenly Last Summer” (1959).

Taylor finally won the Best Actress Oscar for playing an unhappy call girl in “Butterfield 8” (1960).

Most cinema historians call it a sympathy vote for a not-especially great performance. Her husband, Mike Todd, had died in a plane crash and Taylor had undergone an emergency tracheotomy while suffering from pneumonia.

Taylor received a then-record $1 million to star in “Cleopatra,” which was delayed for months and changed directors while she battled life-threatening illnesses and nasty gossip about her relationship with Burton.

She battled toxic gossip, booze, pills and her weight while making 11 more films with Burton.

Most were terrible, but the stunning exception is “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” (1966).

This time, Taylor deserved the Oscar she won for the boozy, profane, blowsy and combative faculty wife Martha — a decidedly unglamorous performance in which her locks were an unkempt rat’s nest. Putting aside her glamorous image, she gained weight for the role and wore padding.

Taylor also made a number of TV appearances — including stints on two soap operas and as a voice on “The Simpsons” — and worked on stage after her marriage to Burton. (They played a divorced couple in “Private Lives” on Broadway.) But few are worth remembering.

With an acting style that tended toward campy in her later years, she was delightful as Hollywood gossip columnist Louella Parsons in the tele-film “Malice in Wonderland” (1984). She made her final big-screen appearance as Fred’s blowsy Stone Age mother-in-law in the movie version of “The Flintstones” a decade later.

“I don’t remember much about ‘Cleopatra,’ ” Taylor, one of Hollywood’s great survivors, quipped many years after the fact. “There were a lot of other things going on at the time.”

lou.lumenick@nypost.com