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Elizabeth Taylor with husband Richard Burton in London. (Reginald Davis / Rex USA)
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She was a siren on screen and a vixen in the bedroom.
Voluptuous Elizabeth Taylor collected husbands and lovers like diamonds — marrying eight times, including twice to the same man, and racking up conquests that included actors, a senator and even a construction worker.
The sultry serial bride, who broke hearts and stirred controversy along the way, was actually widowed once when hubby No. 3, producer Mike Todd, was killed in a 1958 plane crash aboard an aircraft called — of all things — “Lucky Liz.”
But Taylor, who was filming “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” with Paul Newman at the time, quickly found comfort in the arms of her husband’s best friend, singer Eddie Fisher. The crooner was already absorbed in a storybook marriage to actress Debbie Reynolds, one of America’s bright-cheeked sweethearts.
Reynolds said she started hearing rumors of a relationship between Taylor and her husband.
“He had gone to New York for some business,” Reynolds said years later. “But I didn’t know it was monkey business.”
Before you could say, “Action,” Fisher left Reynolds on the divorce dump heap and was headed to the altar with Taylor.
Sympathy for the widowed, 26-year-old Taylor soon turned to scorn, with critics calling the temptress a harlot and a home wrecker.
Taylor fired back with a line better suited for Mae West.
“What do you expect me to do?” Taylor said. “Sleep alone?”
In time, the public came around. After a near-death bout with pneumonia, Taylor made an emotional appearance at the 1961 Academy Awards to accept her Oscar for Best Actress for the movie “Butterfield 8.” It was one of the most dramatic moments in Academy Awards history.
“Hell,” Reynolds later said. “I even voted for her.”
What happened next could only exist in the mind of a screenwriter — or on a Hollywood movie set. Taylor left Fisher for her married “Cleopatra” co-star Richard Burton, whom she later called the love of her life.
The 10-year marriage to Burton, Taylor’s longest, was marked by extravagant spending and ugly fights. It, too, ended in divorce.
“You can’t keep clapping a couple of sticks [of dynamite] together without expecting them to blow up,” Burton told the London Daily Mail.
Taylor married and divorced him again, and insisted that if Burton had lived beyond 1984, they probably would have married again.
“I was still madly in love with him until the day he died,” Taylor said.
Next on her list was former Navy Secretary John Warner, who became husband No. 6 in 1976. Two years later, he was elected as a US senator from Virginia, and Taylor took on a role for which she wasn’t suited — dutiful political wife.
The 5-foot-4 Taylor passed the time watching television and eating until her weight ballooned to 180 pounds.
“I don’t think I’ve ever been so alone in my life as when I was Mrs. Senator,” she wrote in a 1988 autobiography.
Taylor was forever linked to a leading man of some sort, whether on the big screen or in everyday life.
Soon after she made a name for herself, she began a series of very public romances. At the height of her stardom in the ’50s and ’60s, loves included socialite Bill Pawley, Pittsburgh Pirates slugger Ralph Kiner and Army football star Glenn Davis.
She was rumored to be engaged to the late publisher Malcolm Forbes, but both claimed their relationship was platonic.
But even the most whirlwind of romances was never enough.
“I think I ended up being the scarlet woman partly because of my rather puritanical upbringing and beliefs,” Taylor once said. “I couldn’t just have a romance; it had to be marriage.”
In all, there were eight marriages, including a seven-month stint with hotel heir Conrad Hilton Jr., when she was only 18, and a bizarre final union with truck driver and construction worker Larry Fortensky, whom she met while undergoing treatment at the Betty Ford Center and married at Michael Jackson’s Neverland Ranch.
The five-year marriage to Fortensky ended in 1996, and so did her love affair with wedlock.
“I’m not going to join a nunnery,” she said after that divorce. “I said I’m through with marriage, but I’m not through with men — that wouldn’t be realistic.”