Elizabeth Tay, screen goddess, was born in 1951's "A Place in the Sun," when she cooed into Montgomery Clift's ear, "You'll be my pickup."
Taylor had been a child and teenage star, but "A Place in the Sun" was the first head-on look at her mature, raven-haired, violet-eyed beauty. It would be captured again, if fleetingly, in the sultry "BUtterfield 8," the sweltering "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" and the fitting "Cleopatra," surely her historical counterpart.Her searing screen presence astonished a moviegoing public. It was a ravishing, glamorous glow that no amount of blockbuster failures or tabloid escapades could dim - and in her 79 years, there were plenty of both.
As news of her death Wednesday spread, it was clear how many were still entranced. Fellow stars, fans and heads of state were nearly as helpless as Clift's George Eastman.
Her former husband, former Sen. John W. Warner recalled her "classic face and majestic eyes." Joan Collins remembered Taylor as "the last of the true Hollywood icons." Elton John said she embodied "the very essence of glamorous movie stardom."
Taylor died early Wednesday of congestive heart failure, said her publicist Sally Morrison. She was surrounded by her four children at Los Angeles' Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, where she had been hospitalized for about six weeks.
Film critic Vincent Canby once wrote that Taylor "represents the complete movie phenomenon - what movies are as an art and an industry and what they have meant to us who have grown up watching them in the dark."
She may have been the quintessential movie star, but Taylor's life was far messier than her on-screen icon. As flawless as she was in celluloid, she was utterly human off-screen. Her stormy personal life - she was married eight times, including twice to Richard Burton - made her an early template for modern celebrity. Most, though, didn't find her diva-like, but self-deprecating, generous and funny.
"I, along with the critics, have never taken myself very seriously," she said, accepting a lifetime achievement award from the American Film Institute in 1993.
Perhaps because of her looks, Taylor often wasn't considered a great actress. But she was utterly suited to the medium: sensual, fiery, vulnerable and innocent. She won three Academy Awards, including a special one for her humanitarian work.
She was an ardent and early supporter of AIDS research, when HIV was new to the industry and beyond. The American Foundation for AIDS Research noted in a statement that she was "among the first to speak out on behalf of people living with HIV when others reacted with fear and often outright hostility."One of her Oscars came for her performance in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" She played an alcoholic shrew in an emotionally sadomasochistic marriage opposite Burton.
For all the ferocity of her screen roles and the turmoil of her life, Taylor was remembered by "Virginia Woolf" director Mike Nichols for her gentler, life-affirming side.
"The shock of Elizabeth was not only her beauty. It was her generosity. Her giant laugh. Her vitality, whether tackling a complex scene on film or where we would all have dinner until dawn," Nichols said in a statement. "She is singular and indelible on film and in our hearts."
Her more than 50 movies included unforgettable portraits of innocence and of decadence, from the children's classic "National Velvet" and the sentimental family comedy "Father of the Bride" to Oscar-winning transgressions in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" and "BUtterfield 8." The historical epic "Cleopatra" is among Hollywood's greatest on-screen fiascos and a landmark of off-screen monkey business, the meeting ground of Taylor and Burton, the "Brangelina" of their day.
To many, her defining role, one that lasted past her moviemaking days, was "Elizabeth Taylor," ever marrying and divorcing, in and out of hospitals, gaining and losing weight, standing by Michael Jackson, Rock Hudson and other troubled friends, acquiring a jewelry collection that seemed to rival Tiffany's.
She was a child star who grew up and aged before an adoring, appalled and fascinated public. She arrived in Hollywood when the studio system tightly controlled an actor's life and image, had more marriages than any publicist could explain away and carried on until she no longer required explanation. She was the industry's great survivor, and among the first to reach that special category of celebrity - famous for being famous, for whom her work was inseparable from the gossip around it.
The London-born actress was a star at age 12, a bride and a divorcee at 18, a superstar at 19 and a widow at 26. She was a screen sweetheart and martyr later reviled for stealing Eddie Fisher from Debbie Reynolds, then for dumping Fisher to bed Burton, a relationship of epic passion and turbulence, lasting through two marriages and countless attempted reconciliations.
She was also forgiven. Reynolds would acknowledge voting for Taylor when she was nominated for "BUtterfield 8" and decades later co-starred with her old rival in "These Old Broads," co-written by Carrie Fisher, the daughter of Reynolds and Eddie Fisher.
Taylor's ailments wore down the grudges. She underwent at least 20 major operations and she nearly died from a bout with pneumonia in 1990. In 1994 and 1995, she had both hip joints replaced, and in February 1997, she underwent surgery to remove a benign brain tumor. In 1983, she acknowledged a 35-year addiction to sleeping pills and painkillers. Taylor was treated for alcohol and drug abuse problems at the Betty Ford Center in Rancho Mirage, Calif.
Her troubles bonded her to her peers and the public, and deepened her compassion. Her advocacy for AIDS research and for other causes earned her a special Oscar, the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award, in 1993.
As she accepted it, to a long ovation, she declared, "I call upon you to draw from the depths of your being - to prove that we are a human race, to prove that our love outweighs our need to hate, that our compassion is more compelling than our need to blame."
The dark-haired Taylor made an unforgettable impression in Hollywood with "National Velvet," the 1945 film in which the 12-year-old belle rode a steeplechase horse to victory in the Grand National.
Critic James Agee wrote of her: "Ever since I first saw the child ... I have been choked with the peculiar sort of adoration I might have felt if we were in the same grade of primary school."
"National Velvet," her fifth film, also marked the beginning of Taylor's long string of health issues. During production, she fell off a horse. The resulting back injury continued to haunt her.
