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Elizabeth Taylor, the legendary goddess of Hollywood’s golden age whose renowned beauty and scandalous love life made her an icon and celebrity far beyond the silver screen, died yesterday. She was 79.
The “Cleopatra” star — who had suffered numerous illnesses throughout her life — was surrounded by family as she succumbed to congestive heart failure at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.
“My mother was an extraordinary woman who lived life to the fullest, with great passion, humor and love,” said her son Michael Wilding.
“We know, quite simply, that the world is a better place for Mom having lived in it. Her legacy will never fade, her spirit will always be with us, and her love will live forever in our hearts.”
Taylor was one of the first celebrities of the modern tabloid age, whose fame grew as much from her on-screen successes as from her personal failures, including eight marriages, numerous illnesses and bouts with addiction.
For the past six weeks she had been undergoing treatment at Cedars-Sinai for heart problems, from which she had suffered for several years.
“Though she recently suffered a number of complications, her condition had stabilized and it was hoped that she would be able to return home,” said her spokeswoman, Sally Morrison. “Sadly, this was not to be.”
Morrison added that “all her children were with her” when she died.
In addition to her four children, she is survived by 10 grandchildren and four great-grandkids.
The loss of the movie matriarch brought an outpouring of grief yesterday from superstars around the world.
“We have just lost a Hollywood giant,” said longtime pal Elton John. “More importantly, we have lost an incredible human being.”
“It’s the end of an era,” said Barbra Streisand. “It wasn’t just her beauty or her stardom. It was her humanitarianism. She made her life count.”
The raven-tressed Hollywood heavyweight — who was as famous for her trips down the aisle as for her three Oscars — had been active as recently as last month, when she posted a Twitter message about how happy she was to have done a Harper’s Bazaar interview with Kim Kardashian.
In the piece, she talked about her romantic life as she reminisced about her many Tinseltown ups and downs.
“I never planned to acquire a lot of jewels or a lot of husbands,” she said. “For me, life happened, just as it does for anyone else.”
Elizabeth Rosemond Taylor was born on Feb. 27, 1932, in London to American parents. Her dad, Francis Taylor, was an art dealer and her mother, Sara Sothern, a stage actress.
The family moved to Beverly Hills and Taylor soon became a child star. Her first role came when she was 9 in the comedy “There’s One Born Every Minute.” She got a long-term studio contract the next year.
Her first major starring role came in 1945 in “National Velvet,” about a girl riding in a horse race. She would later win Best Actress Oscars for “Butterfield 8” in 1960 and “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” in 1966. She received an honorary Oscar in 1993 for her humanitarian work.
In 1963 she starred in the blockbuster Hollywood epic “Cleopatra,” during which she met Richard Burton.
The pair, who would marry twice, had a fiery relationship that made them the most talked-about “it” couple of the 1960s and ’70s.
Burton was just one of her seven husbands. Her first was hotel scion Conrad Hilton Jr., whom she wed at age 18 in 1950. They lasted only eight months.
In 1952 she married actor Michael Wilding. Five years later she tied the knot with movie producer Michael Todd. He died the next year in a plane crash on a New York-bound flight, which Taylor missed only because she was ill.
She later married the best man at the Todd wedding, Eddie Fisher, who had just left his wife.
She married Burton in 1964 and stayed with him until 1974. They reunited in 1975 and stayed married for just a year. In December 1976 she married former US Senator and Navy Secretary John Warner.
Finally, in 1991, she married Larry Fortensky, a construction trucker whom she had met in rehab. They divorced in 1997.
Her long string of “I do’s” caused wags to call her “Mrs. Hilton Wilding Todd Fisher Burton Burton Warner Fortensky.” She blamed her parents for her propensity to wed.
“I think I ended up being the scarlet woman partly because of my rather puritanical upbringing and beliefs,” she once said. “I couldn’t just have a romance; it had to be marriage.”
Throughout her life, Taylor’s health was in as critical a condition as her relationships, as she underwent some 20 major operations. As early as 1961 and still in her 20s, she came down with near-fatal pneumonia while filming “Cleopatra” and had to undergo a tracheotomy.
In 1990 she again suffered serious pneumonia. In 1994 and 1995 she had hip joints replaced, and in February 1997 underwent surgery to remove a benign brain tumor. She also suffered from drug addiction. In 1983 she admitted she had been hooked on sleeping pills and painkillers for 35 years. She checked into the Betty Ford clinic that year, and again in 1988.
Thanks in part to her time in rehab, and because of the death of friend Rock Hudson from AIDS, Taylor became a major advocate for AIDS research.
In her later years, Taylor continued to work, even making a cameo on the “The Simpsons” in 1992 as the voice of baby Maggie Simpson.
In 1999 she was granted the title Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire, making her formally “Dame Elizabeth Taylor.”
“I’ve always been a broad,” she said at the time. “Now I’m a dame.”