There’s a story about Elizabeth Taylor that tells you almost everything you need to know about her. When Princess Margaret spotted the famous 33-carat Krupp Diamond on Taylor’s finger and exclaimed, “That’s the most vulgar thing I’ve ever seen,” Taylor slipped the ring off her finger and invited the princess to try it on. She watched as Margaret’s eyes lit up. “See?” Taylor said with a perfectly timed smile. “It’s not so vulgar now, is it?”
That’s who she was. Brilliant timing, zero apology, complete self-possession, and an almost supernatural ability to make you feel the joke rather than the jab. She was also a double Oscar winner, the first actress to negotiate a $1 million salary, one of the most consequential AIDS activists in American history, and the woman who built a fragrance empire so powerful that it would ultimately be worth more than her entire acting career combined.
The Elizabeth Taylor biography is, in the truest sense, the biography of Hollywood itself.
Who Was Elizabeth Taylor? A Quick Introduction
Fast Facts at a Glance
- Full name: Elizabeth Rosemond Taylor
- Date of birth: February 27, 1932
- Place of birth: London, England
- Date of death: March 23, 2011
- Cause of death: Congestive heart failure
- Nationality: British and American
- Occupation: Actress, businesswoman, activist, philanthropist
- Academy Awards: 2 (Best Actress, Butterfield 8, 1961; Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, 1967)
- Total Oscar nominations: 5
- Marriages: 8 marriages to 7 men
- Children: 4 (Michael Jr., Christopher, Liza, Maria)
- Religion: Judaism (converted 1959)
- Notable films: National Velvet, A Place in the Sun, Giant, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Cleopatra, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
- Major honors: French Légion d’honneur, Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award, Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire
- Estimated estate at death: $600 million–$1 billion
Why Elizabeth Taylor’s Story Remains Endlessly Fascinating
More than a decade after her death, Elizabeth Taylor keeps returning to public conversation. Taylor Swift named a song after her in 2025 on her album The Life of a Showgirl. The BBC commissioned a docuseries about her. Her authorized biography became a bestseller. Her White Diamonds perfume is still one of the best-selling celebrity fragrances in the world. Her jewelry sold at Christie’s for $156.8 million.
She was the last great star of the Hollywood studio system, the first modern celebrity, the woman who invented the template that every celebrity who followed her has been using ever since. Her life spanned silent films, World War II, the McCarthy era, the sexual revolution, the AIDS crisis, and the internet age. She was in every decade of the twentieth century and saw the beginning of the twenty-first.
You can’t understand Hollywood without understanding Elizabeth Taylor. So let’s start at the beginning.
Born in London – Elizabeth Taylor’s Early Life and Family
February 27, 1932 – An American Girl Born in England
Elizabeth Rosemond Taylor was born on February 27, 1932, in London, England — though despite this British birthplace, she was American through and through. Her parents, Francis Lenn Taylor and Sara Viola Warmbrodt, were Americans from Kansas who had settled in London, where Francis managed an art gallery for his uncle Howard Young. Elizabeth was their second child, born three years after her brother Howard. She was named after both of her grandmothers.
From the very beginning, she insisted on “Elizabeth” — not “Liz,” a nickname she would tolerate in the press but never warmly. The self-definition started early.
Francis and Sara Taylor – Art, Ambition, and a Stage Mother
Her father Francis was a cultured, quiet art dealer whose business brought the family into contact with some of the most prominent people in British and American society. Her mother Sara was something more complicated: a former stage actress who had given up her own theatrical ambitions when she married and who channeled every ounce of that unfulfilled ambition directly into her daughter.
Sara Taylor is one of the most fascinating supporting characters in Elizabeth’s story. She was, in the most precise sense of the term, a stage mother — someone who organized her family’s life around her child’s career potential and who was by any measure extremely effective at it. She started Elizabeth on formal dancing and singing lessons at age two. By three, the child had already acquired what observers described as remarkable social graces. Sara saw the future clearly, and she was determined to build it.
A Privileged Childhood Under the Shadow of World War II
The Taylor family lived comfortably in London during Elizabeth’s early years, enjoying a standard of living that insulated them from the worst effects of the Great Depression. Their home overlooked Hampstead Heath. They had domestic help. The gallery business was prosperous, and Howard Young’s financial generosity provided a cushion that kept the family’s circumstances stable while much of the world around them suffered.
Elizabeth’s childhood was not entirely sheltered from the world, however. The gathering storm of European politics that would become World War II cast its shadow even over the comfortable homes of London’s middle class. By April 1939, as the situation in Europe deteriorated, the family made the decision to return to America.
The Move to Los Angeles in 1939 – Hollywood Beckons
The Taylors settled in Pacific Palisades, California, where Francis established a gallery in Beverly Hills. The art business brought them immediately into contact with the Hollywood elite — the same world that Sara had always wanted to enter, now suddenly accessible through her husband’s social connections.
Sara wasted no time. An introduction to the chairman of Universal Pictures through one of her husband’s clients led to a screen test for young Elizabeth. The results were striking enough that Universal offered her a contract.
The Child Actress Years – From Rejection to MGM Stardom
The Universal Pictures Rejection – “Her Eyes Are Too Old”
In April 1941, nine-year-old Elizabeth Taylor began her contract with Universal Pictures. She was cast in a small role in There’s One Born Every Minute (1942), but the studio was not impressed and ended her contract after a year.
The reason the Universal casting director gave has become one of the most famous expressions of wrong-headed judgment in Hollywood history: “The kid has nothing. Her eyes are too old — she doesn’t have the face of a child.” Biographer Alexander Walker noted that the assessment wasn’t entirely without logic — Taylor did look different from the child stars of the era, the Shirley Temples and Judy Garlands who embodied a particular kind of accessible, gap-toothed American innocence.
Taylor later reflected on the rejection with characteristic dry self-awareness: “Apparently I used to frighten grown-ups, because I was totally direct.” She was right, of course. And the eyes that Universal’s casting director dismissed as “too old” would go on to become the most discussed and admired eyes in cinema history.
The MGM Contract and Lassie Come Home (1943)
The rejection from Universal was followed quickly by a second chance. Francis Taylor’s acquaintance Samuel Marx, a producer at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, arranged for Elizabeth to audition for a minor role in Lassie Come Home (1943). The role required a child actress with a convincing English accent — which Elizabeth, raised in London, provided effortlessly.
After a trial period of three months, MGM offered her a standard seven-year contract in January 1943. She was ten years old. The studio system was a machine, and Elizabeth Taylor had just been placed inside it.
National Velvet (1944) – The Role That Made a Twelve-Year-Old a Star
Two years later, everything changed. National Velvet, the beloved novel by Enid Bagnold, was brought to the screen with twelve-year-old Elizabeth Taylor in the lead role of Velvet Brown — a passionate girl who enters her beloved horse The Pie in the Grand National. The film was a massive commercial and critical success, and it transformed its young star from a promising contract actress into a genuine phenomenon.
Taylor later called National Velvet “the most exciting film I ever made.” She trained rigorously for the role and threw herself into it with the total commitment that would characterize her approach to acting throughout her career. The performance was compelling not because it was technically sophisticated — she was twelve — but because it was completely real. The camera saw something in her that Universal had bizarrely missed: an emotional authenticity and a natural charisma that belonged entirely to her.
The Back Injury Nobody Caught – A Lifelong Consequence
During the filming of National Velvet, Taylor suffered a fall from a horse that broke her back. The fracture went undetected for several years. When it was eventually identified, it was already contributing to the chronic back problems that would plague her for the rest of her life. She would break her back multiple additional times over the decades that followed and endured, by her own count, more than thirty hospitalizations. The pain started when she was twelve and never fully left.
The Violet Eyes – Elizabeth Taylor’s Most Famous Physical Feature
What Made Her Eyes So Extraordinary
Elizabeth Taylor’s eyes are one of the most discussed physical features in the history of celebrity. The famous “violet” color that made them so striking wasn’t simply a camera trick or a lighting effect. Taylor was born with a genetic mutation that gave her an extra row of eyelashes — a condition called distichiasis — which created a natural frame around her irises that intensified their color and gave them their characteristic depth and drama.
Her eyes were actually a shade of deep blue-purple, which in certain lighting appeared truly violet. The double lashes also gave them an appearance of exceptional definition that required no artificial enhancement to stand out on film.
Winston Churchill, not a man given to casual hyperbole, described her as the screen’s “most classic beauty.” The eyes were the thing that established that reputation before her acting had fully emerged, and they remained her most immediately recognizable feature throughout her life.
How Her Appearance Shaped Her Casting and Her Career
Taylor’s extraordinary appearance was a gift and, in complex ways, a complication. It meant that she was cast based on how she looked as much as how she acted — a dynamic that drove her to work harder at the craft so that her talent couldn’t be dismissed as incidental to her beauty. Throughout her career, she sought out roles that were emotionally demanding, psychologically complex, and physically unglamorous — roles that required her to work against the face that everyone came to see, because she understood that the face alone wasn’t enough.
Growing Up on Screen – The 1940s and Early 1950s
Teenage Stardom and the MGM Factory
After National Velvet, Taylor was one of the most recognizable faces in America. MGM placed her in a series of family-friendly productions — Courage of Lassie (1946), Life with Father (1947), Little Women (1949) — that kept her in public view while the studio carefully managed the transition from child star to adult actress. This was the studio system at work: protecting its investment, building its asset, controlling its image.
Taylor later described the experience with mixed feelings. The studio managed everything — her schedule, her wardrobe, her dates, her press coverage, even her romantic attachments (MGM arranged for her to be publicly “coupled” with football champion Glenn Davis in 1948 as a managed PR initiative). The control was total and occasionally suffocating.
Father of the Bride (1950) – The Transition to Adult Roles
In 1950, at eighteen, Taylor made the transition to adult roles with Father of the Bride, in which she starred opposite Spencer Tracy. The film was a major success and proved that she could hold the screen as a young adult rather than just as a precocious child. The performance was warm, funny, and convincingly romantic — a different register from the passionate intensity of National Velvet.
The same year, she married for the first time. The professional and personal were beginning to accelerate simultaneously, in the way they would for the next three decades.
A Place in the Sun (1951) – Her First Oscar Nomination and Montgomery Clift
A Place in the Sun, directed by George Stevens and co-starring Montgomery Clift and Shelley Winters, earned Taylor her first Academy Award nomination for Best Actress. The film was based on Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, and Taylor’s performance as the wealthy, glamorous Angela Vickers — the object of Clift’s desperate, fatal obsession — was subtle, luminous, and emotionally precise.
Her friendship with Montgomery Clift was one of the most significant of her life. She adored him, and when Clift suffered devastating injuries in a car accident outside her home in 1956, she physically pulled glass from his throat to prevent him from choking — an act of courage that quite possibly saved his life.
The Golden Decade – Elizabeth Taylor in the 1950s
Giant (1956) With Rock Hudson and James Dean
Giant, George Stevens’s epic adaptation of Edna Ferber’s novel about a Texas ranching family, starred Taylor, Rock Hudson, and James Dean in what became one of the definitive films of the 1950s. Taylor played Leslie Benedict, a strong-willed Eastern woman who marries into Texas cattle culture and spends decades watching the world around her change. Dean died in a car accident before the film’s release, and his presence in it became part of cinema’s mythology.
Taylor’s friendship with Rock Hudson, which began on this film and deepened over the following decades, would have profound consequences for American cultural history decades later.
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958) With Paul Newman
Tennessee Williams’s play about desire, deception, and a dying patriarch became one of Taylor’s definitive performances of the decade. Playing Maggie the Cat opposite Paul Newman’s Brick, she embodied a combination of sexual heat, emotional desperation, and fierce resilience that showed exactly what she could do when given the right material. The film earned her a second Oscar nomination.
Suddenly, Last Summer (1959) – Three Oscar Nominations and No Win
In 1959, Taylor appeared in Suddenly, Last Summer, another Tennessee Williams adaptation, co-starring Montgomery Clift and Katharine Hepburn. The film earned her a third consecutive Oscar nomination. She hadn’t won yet, despite three nominations and performances that critics almost universally praised. The Academy, it seemed, was making her work for it.
Butterfield 8 and the First Oscar (1960)
A Role She Hated That Won Her the Trophy
The irony of Elizabeth Taylor’s first Academy Award is that she won it for a film she actively disliked. Butterfield 8, based on John O’Hara’s novel, cast her as Gloria Wandrous, a New York call girl caught between her complicated feelings and a chaotic life. Taylor considered the source material beneath her and the finished film mediocre, and she said so publicly.
The Oscar she won for it was real, however. Her performance conveyed genuine emotional complexity and a kind of raw self-destructiveness that went well beyond the material’s surface. She was 28 years old. She was the most photographed woman in the world. And she still hadn’t quite made the movie everyone felt she deserved to make.
Nearly Dying During Production – The Tracheotomy
While filming Butterfield 8, Taylor contracted pneumonia and was hospitalized in London. The situation became so critical that a tracheotomy was performed — a surgical procedure to create a direct airway when conventional breathing becomes impossible. On at least one occasion during this crisis, she was reported to be clinically dead before being revived.
She survived. She always survived. But the incident left a visible scar on her throat that she would carry for the rest of her life, and it established a pattern that would define her biography as much as any film or marriage: Elizabeth Taylor faced genuine mortality repeatedly, and she walked away from it every time.
Cleopatra and the Scandal That Shook the World (1963)
The $1 Million Contract – A Negotiating First
When 20th Century Fox wanted Elizabeth Taylor to play Cleopatra, she gave them a number that was intended to end the conversation: one million dollars. Plus expenses. Plus a percentage of the profits. Plus other conditions that seemed, to 1961 Hollywood, almost insanely ambitious.
Fox accepted. Elizabeth Taylor became the first actor — male or female — to command a $1 million salary for a single film. In an industry where financial power had historically been monopolized by studios, producers, and male stars, a 29-year-old actress had just redefined the entire structure of the deal. It was one of the most significant contract negotiations in entertainment history, and she pulled it off through the simple mechanism of wanting it enough to ask for it.
The Production Disaster That Nearly Bankrupted a Studio
The Cleopatra production became one of the most spectacular disasters in Hollywood history. Filming began in London under appalling conditions — the climate was wrong, Taylor kept getting ill, the sets were wrong. Production eventually moved to Rome, where the Italian sun and the ancient Roman landscape provided the right atmosphere. But the delays, the overruns, the illness, and the sheer ambition of the project had already pushed costs to extraordinary levels.
The film ultimately cost an estimated $37–44 million, making it the most expensive movie made at that time. It nearly destroyed 20th Century Fox financially. It ran for four hours. When it was finally released in 1963, it was a spectacle on a scale that audiences had rarely seen, and Taylor’s presence in it — draped in gold, surrounded by thousands of extras, inhabiting the most powerful woman of the ancient world — was exactly what the role demanded.
Falling in Love With Richard Burton – “Le Scandale”
On the set of Cleopatra in Rome in 1962, Elizabeth Taylor met Richard Burton. He was a Welsh Shakespearean actor of ferocious talent and equal ferocity in other areas of his life. Both of them were married to other people. Neither of them cared very much about that.
Italian paparazzi with zoom lenses captured the couple in private moments that circulated around the world before either of them had made any public statement. The images were everywhere. The reaction was volcanic.
The Vatican, the U.S. Congress, and “Erotic Vagrancy”
The Vatican newspaper published a condemnation of Taylor and Burton’s relationship, coining the phrase “erotic vagrancy” — a designation that Taylor reportedly found more amusing than distressing. The floors of the United States Congress hosted denunciations of the couple’s behavior. Religious figures across multiple faiths weighed in. The entire world, it seemed, had an opinion about whether two adults could be in love.
Taylor’s response was essentially to proceed. She had never been particularly deferential to institutions that didn’t serve her values, and the combination of Vatican condemnation and Congressional outrage didn’t change her mind about Richard Burton. They divorced their respective spouses and married each other in Montreal in March 1964.
Liz and Dick – The Greatest Love Story Hollywood Ever Produced
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966) and Her Second Oscar
The film that finally gave Elizabeth Taylor the performance that matched her ambition was Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, directed by Mike Nichols from Edward Albee’s searing play about a marriage destroying itself over the course of a single night. Taylor played Martha — overweight, drunk, savage, deeply wounded, and ferociously alive. She was 34 years old and she gained weight for the role, wore aging makeup, and delivered a performance so technically accomplished and emotionally raw that it is still discussed in acting schools.
She won her second Academy Award. She didn’t attend the ceremony — she was recovering from illness — and Anne Bancroft accepted the Oscar on her behalf. It didn’t matter. The performance was undeniable and the recognition was deserved.
Eleven Films Together and a Jet-Set Life Worth Millions
“Liz and Dick” as the press dubbed them, made eleven films together across their relationship. They lived at a scale that most people couldn’t conceive — a private jet, a yacht, a collection of furs and diamonds that was valued in the tens of millions, properties across multiple countries. Burton once remarked that they “generate more business activity than one of the smaller African nations.”
Sociologists who have studied the period identify their relationship as the beginning of the modern celebrity gossip apparatus — the “cottage industry of speculation” that created the template for every tabloid, entertainment website, and celebrity Instagram account that followed. Before Liz and Dick, celebrity coverage had been largely controlled and manufactured by studios. After them, the uncontrolled, invasive, paparazzi-driven model became standard.
The First Divorce in 1974 and the Remarriage in Botswana
They divorced for the first time in June 1974. They reconciled within months. They remarried on October 10, 1975, in a ceremony in Kasane, Botswana — on a riverbank, reportedly with a hippopotamus and a rhinoceros as unplanned witnesses. The second marriage lasted less than a year and ended in another divorce in July 1976.
Taylor would later say of him: “After Richard, the men in my life were just there to hold the coat, to open the door.” She had more marriages after Burton. None of them touched what that relationship was.
The Eight Marriages – Every Husband in Full
Conrad “Nicky” Hilton Jr. (1950–1951)
Taylor’s first marriage, at eighteen, was to Conrad Hilton Jr. — heir to the Hilton hotel empire. She was a movie star and he was a wealthy socialite, and the marriage lasted ten months before ending in divorce amid reports that Hilton could be violent and that the couple was fundamentally unsuited. Taylor was back at the beginning, undiscouraged.
Michael Wilding (1952–1957) – Two Sons and a Calmer Life
Her second husband was British actor Michael Wilding, 20 years her senior. The marriage was relatively stable by Taylor’s standards, producing two sons — Michael Jr. and Christopher — and lasting five years. Wilding was gentle and warm, but the relationship ran out of energy rather than ending in drama, and they divorced in 1957.
Mike Todd (1957–1958) – Her Happiest Marriage and Its Tragic End
By her own account, Elizabeth Taylor was most content during her brief marriage to film producer Mike Todd. He was ebullient, theatrical, generous, and completely devoted to her. She called him her third husband “the only man who really made me feel loved.” They had one daughter together, Elizabeth Frances — known as Liza.
On March 22, 1958, barely a year after their marriage and just after Liza was born, Mike Todd was killed when his private plane The Lucky Liz crashed in New Mexico. Taylor was widowed at twenty-six. She had been married three times, twice divorced, and once widowed before the age of thirty.
Eddie Fisher (1959–1964) – The Scandal That Made Debbie Reynolds Cry
Fisher was America’s most popular singer. He was also the best friend of Mike Todd and the husband of Debbie Reynolds — America’s sweetheart, the darling of a nation that worshipped wholesome domesticity. When Fisher and Taylor became involved, the public reaction was fierce. Reynolds was positioned by the press as the wronged innocent; Taylor was cast as the predatory home-wrecker.
Taylor did not apologize. She pointed out that a widow in grief was not obligated to maintain anyone else’s marital arrangement, and she married Fisher in 1959. They appeared together in Butterfield 8. When Cleopatra began production and Richard Burton arrived on set, Fisher was history.
Richard Burton – Twice Married, Never Truly Over
The double marriage that defined her public life is covered in its own section above. Suffice it to say that their relationship — the fights, the reunions, the diamonds, the films, the divorces, the remarriage in Africa — is one of the most extraordinary romantic stories the twentieth century produced. They never stopped loving each other. Burton died in 1984, eight years after their final divorce, and Taylor mourned him for the rest of her life.
John Warner (1976–1982) – A U.S. Senator and an Unhappy Wife
Taylor’s sixth husband was John Warner, former Secretary of the Navy and a Virginia Republican who was running for the U.S. Senate. Taylor campaigned vigorously for him in Virginia’s 1978 Senate race, and Warner won — a result that some analysts credited partly to the extraordinary crowds that his famous wife drew to his rallies. The marriage lasted six years, but Taylor found the life of a senator’s wife — the protocol, the Washington social obligations, the sideline role — profoundly unsatisfying. She put on weight during these years, which became tabloid fodder. She left, and she was better for it.
Larry Fortensky (1991–1996) – Meeting in Rehab, Marrying at Neverland
Taylor’s seventh and final husband was Larry Fortensky, a construction worker she met at the Betty Ford Center where both were undergoing treatment for addiction. Their wedding in 1991 was held at Michael Jackson’s Neverland Ranch — a location that generated enormous media attention and reflected the particular quality of Taylor’s social universe, which had always operated at the junction of Hollywood glamour and genuine human connection.
The marriage lasted five years. When it ended, Taylor announced she would not marry again. She didn’t.
Her Four Children and What Became of Them
Elizabeth Taylor had four children, whom she consistently described as her greatest joy and her proudest achievement. Michael Wilding Jr. became a sculptor based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Christopher Wilding worked in film sound editing and lives in California. Liza Todd, daughter of Mike Todd, became a sculptor known for equine art — a connection to the horse world that began with National Velvet and ran through the family. Maria Burton, adopted during the marriage to Richard Burton, has maintained a private life.
All of Taylor’s children and grandchildren have remained connected to The Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation, continuing the philanthropy that was the central cause of her later life.
Conversion to Judaism – A Decision That Defined Her Identity
In 1959, while married to Eddie Fisher, Elizabeth Taylor formally converted to Judaism. The conversion was not casual or performative — she was received into the religion by Rabbi Max Nussbaum at Temple Israel in Hollywood after a serious period of study. She chose the Hebrew name Elisheba Rachel.
She had been raised as a Christian Scientist and later became Episcopalian, but she described Judaism as the faith she had chosen rather than received, which she believed made her commitment more meaningful rather than less. She participated in Jewish causes throughout her life, and after her death, her body was buried according to Jewish tradition.
Health Battles – A Lifetime of Medical Crises
The Back Injury, Scoliosis, and Chronic Pain
Elizabeth Taylor was born with scoliosis — a curvature of the spine that would have been challenging even without the back fracture she suffered during National Velvet at twelve. The combination created a foundation of chronic pain that underpinned her entire life. She broke her back multiple additional times over the decades, including falls at home in later years that caused further damage.
Pneumonia, Tracheotomies, and Pronounced Dead
Her health crises are almost too numerous to catalog. She had three severe bouts of pneumonia — one in 1961 that required an emergency tracheotomy, leaving her with a permanent throat scar, and one in 1990 that nearly killed her. During the 1961 hospitalization, she was reportedly pronounced clinically dead before being revived. She had two hip replacement surgeries. She survived the removal of a benign brain tumor the size of a golf ball in 1997. She spent time at the Betty Ford Clinic twice for drug and alcohol addiction.
By conservative estimates, she was hospitalized at least thirty times during her life.
The Betty Ford Clinic – Battling Addiction in Public
In the 1980s, Taylor checked herself into the Betty Ford Center for the treatment of alcohol and prescription drug dependence. This was not — at the time — a common or socially accepted thing for a celebrity to do publicly. The stigma around addiction was enormous, and the prevailing expectation was that famous people suffering from these problems would deal with them privately or deny them entirely.
Taylor’s willingness to go publicly and to speak openly about her experience afterward was another act of quiet courage. She helped normalize the conversation about addiction in celebrity culture just as she would help normalize the conversation about AIDS. Both stances required her to accept enormous social risk.
“I’m Mother Courage” – Her Relationship With Her Own Fragility
Throughout all of this, Taylor maintained a relationship with her own physical suffering that was neither stoic nor self-pitying. She was funny about it. When asked about the fact that her life was more dramatic than any soap opera, she said: “Damn right, I’ve survived. I’ve been through it all, baby. I’m Mother Courage, and I’ll be dragging my sable coat with me into old age.”
The Jewelry Obsession – Diamonds, Pearls, and a Famous Quip
The Krupp Diamond, the Taylor-Burton Diamond, and the La Peregrina Pearl
Taylor’s jewelry collection was one of the most extraordinary in private hands in the twentieth century. The centerpieces were gifts from Richard Burton, who bought her jewelry at a scale that reflected both his love for her and his understanding of what jewels meant to her.
The Krupp Diamond — 33.19 carats of colorless perfection, purchased at a 1968 auction — was the ring that prompted the legendary exchange with Princess Margaret. The Taylor-Burton Diamond, at 69.42 carats, was purchased at an auction in 1969 and was, at the time, the largest gem-quality diamond ever sold at public auction. Richard Burton paid $1.1 million for it.
The La Peregrina Pearl — 50 carats of extraordinary natural pearl — had one of the most extraordinary histories of any jewel in the world. It had belonged to Mary I of England in the sixteenth century before passing through centuries of European royalty. Burton bought it at a 1969 auction for $37,000. Taylor had it reset in a ruby, diamond, and pearl necklace by Cartier.
Princess Margaret and the “Most Vulgar Thing I’ve Ever Seen”
The moment with Princess Margaret and the Krupp Diamond is one of the most perfect stories in the Elizabeth Taylor biography — a perfectly constructed little scene in which the wit, the self-confidence, and the absolute refusal to be diminished are all present in a single exchange. Taylor told it often and with obvious pleasure. The story says more about who she was than many of the more formally significant events in her life.
The Christie’s Auction After Her Death
After Taylor’s death in 2011, her jewelry and fashion collections were auctioned by Christie’s in what became the most valuable fashion and jewelry sale ever conducted. The jewelry alone sold for $156.8 million. The clothes and accessories brought a further $5.5 million. The proceeds benefited the Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation.
It was the final act in a love affair with beauty that had started, by her mother Sara’s account, when infant Elizabeth opened her eyes for the first time and immediately focused on Sara’s engagement ring.
AIDS Activism – The Greatest Role of Her Life
Rock Hudson’s Death and a Friendship That Changed History
Elizabeth Taylor had known Rock Hudson since they starred together in Giant in 1956. They were close friends for three decades — the kind of friendship that spans careers and marriages and life changes and remains constant underneath all of it. When Hudson was diagnosed with AIDS in 1985 and the news became public, he was one of the first major American celebrities to be publicly identified with the disease.
He died on October 2, 1985. Taylor was devastated. She was also angry in a specific and productive way — angry at a society paralyzed by fear and shaped by homophobia that had been slow to respond to a public health crisis killing thousands of people, many of them young gay men who deserved far better than the combination of medical neglect and social stigma they were receiving.
Co-Founding amfAR in 1985 – What It Cost Her to Go First
In the same year Hudson died, Taylor helped co-found the American Foundation for AIDS Research — amfAR — which would become one of the most significant HIV/AIDS research organizations in the world. She was not the only founder, but she was the most famous, and her involvement brought visibility to the cause at a moment when other celebrities were choosing to maintain careful distance from an epidemic associated with gay men and intravenous drug users.
Going first has a cost. There were people who withdrew from her socially. There were industry figures who found her advocacy inconvenient. She went forward anyway.
The Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation (1991)
In 1991, Taylor founded the Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation — a separate organization focused on direct care for people living with HIV/AIDS rather than purely on research. ETAF provided funding for direct services to those suffering from the disease, prioritizing the most vulnerable patients and the communities most acutely affected.
By 1999, her combined efforts through amfAR and ETAF had contributed an estimated $50 million to AIDS research and care. The total impact of her advocacy — measured in money raised, awareness created, stigma reduced, and political will mobilized — is impossible to calculate fully.
$50 Million Raised and a Legacy That Outlasted Her
When Taylor died in 2011, GLAAD issued a statement calling her “an icon not only in Hollywood, but in the LGBT community where she worked to ensure that everyone was treated with the respect and dignity we all deserve.” Former President Bill Clinton said at her death: “Elizabeth’s legacy will live on in many people around the world whose lives will be longer and better because of her work and the ongoing efforts of those she inspired.”
The Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation continues to operate today, carrying forward the work she started in the darkest moment of the epidemic.
The Business Empire – Fragrances, Fashion, and Sharp Instincts
Passion (1987) and White Diamonds (1991) – The Perfumes That Made Her a Billionaire
In 1987, Elizabeth Taylor launched her first fragrance, Passion, in collaboration with Elizabeth Arden. The commercial success was significant. In 1991, she followed it with White Diamonds — a fragrance that became one of the best-selling celebrity perfumes in history and which is still actively sold today, more than thirty years after its launch.
Taylor personally supervised the creation of each of the eleven fragrances that ultimately carried her name. She was not a passive licensor — she was involved in the creative process and understood exactly what she was building. By the end of her life, the fragrance collection generated an estimated $200 million annually in revenue.
Why She Earned More From Fragrance Than From Acting
This is one of the most remarkable facts in the Elizabeth Taylor biography: according to biographers Sam Kashner and Nancy Schoenberger, she earned more money through her fragrance collection than during her entire acting career. The Guardian estimated at her death that the majority of her $600 million–$1 billion estate was derived from perfume revenue.
She was, in the truest sense of the term, a businesswoman who had built a genuine empire. The first star to negotiate a $1 million film salary was also the first female celebrity to create a fragrance brand of this magnitude, and she turned it into the most enduring financial legacy of her life.
House of Taylor and the $600 Million–$1 Billion Estate
In 2005, Taylor founded House of Taylor — a jewelry company — in collaboration with Kathy Ireland and business partners Jack and Monty Abramov. The venture extended her business interests beyond fragrance and demonstrated that her entrepreneurial instincts had not dimmed with age. She was 73 years old when she launched it.
At her death in 2011, her estate was estimated at between $600 million and $1 billion — a figure that placed her among the wealthiest entertainers in history and that was built almost entirely on the business ventures of her later career.
Later Years, Awards, and a Damehood
The AFI Life Achievement Award (1993)
In 1993, the American Film Institute honored Taylor with its Life Achievement Award — the organization’s most prestigious career recognition. She was 61 years old and had been one of the most recognizable faces in the world for half a century.
Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award and French Légion d’honneur
The same year, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences awarded her the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award at the 65th Academy Awards — a recognition not of her acting but of her AIDS activism. In 1987, France had already honored her with the Légion d’honneur. In 1996, she received the Presidential Citizens Medal from President Clinton.
Dame Commander of the British Empire (2000)
In the millennium New Year Honours List, Queen Elizabeth II appointed Dame Elizabeth Taylor a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire — one of the United Kingdom’s highest civil honors. The woman who had been born British and spent her life as an American was formally celebrated by both of her countries. She was 67 years old.
The Flintstones, The Simpsons, and a Graceful Step Back
In her later acting years, Taylor brought the same quality of game self-awareness to her career choices that she’d brought to everything else. She played Pearl Slaghoople in The Flintstones (1994). She did a voice role on The Simpsons. She appeared in multiple CBS sitcom cameos in a single night to promote her new fragrance. She was funny, she was self-deprecating, and she seemed entirely at peace with the idea that the seriousness of her career was behind her even as the seriousness of her advocacy was reaching its peak.
Death on March 23, 2011 – The End of an Era
Congestive Heart Failure at Cedars-Sinai
On March 23, 2011, Dame Elizabeth Rosemond Taylor died at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles from congestive heart failure. She was 79 years old. Her four children were by her side.
She had been admitted to the hospital six weeks earlier with the condition, which had been worsening for some time. The end came quietly, in a hospital room in the city where her career had been born — the same Los Angeles that her mother Sara had targeted as the destination when the family left wartime London in 1939.
The World’s Reaction
The response to her death was global and immediate. Tributes came from world leaders, fellow actors, activists, and millions of ordinary people who had grown up watching her. Former President Clinton’s statement about her AIDS legacy was among the most quoted. GLAAD’s tribute to her role as an LGBT icon reflected a dimension of her legacy that often gets overlooked in the romantic mythology.
Taylor Swift, writing decades later, would describe her as “the most famous woman in the world” — a description that, while perhaps disputable in abstract terms, captured something true about the scale of her presence during the decades of her greatest fame.
Buried at Forest Lawn Memorial Park
Taylor was buried at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California — the same cemetery that has served as the final resting place for many of Hollywood’s greatest figures. In keeping with Jewish tradition, her funeral was held within 24 hours of her death. Her estate noted that she arranged for the service to begin fifteen minutes late — one final flourish from a woman who had always arrived in her own time.
Elizabeth Taylor’s Legacy and Cultural Impact
The AFI’s Greatest Female Screen Legends – Ranked Seventh
In 1999, the American Film Institute published its list of the 100 Greatest Female Screen Legends, placing Taylor at number seven. The ranking is, by any reasonable assessment, too modest — she is arguably the most famous woman in the history of Hollywood and the person most responsible for the modern celebrity landscape. But the list reflects a particular critical framework that weights acting range over cultural impact, and Taylor’s legacy was always bigger than any purely critical framework could contain.
An LGBTQ Icon Whose Work Still Matters
Taylor’s status as a gay icon preceded the era when the term was commonly used. Her larger-than-life persona, her unapologetic emotional excess, her aesthetic sensibility, and above all her AIDS activism made her a beloved figure in the LGBTQ community long before her death. Paul Flynn of The Guardian noted that she was “a new type of gay icon, one whose position is based not on tragedy but on her work for the LGBTQ community” — a distinction that sets her apart from earlier icons defined by suffering.
Taylor Swift’s “Elizabeth Taylor” and the Ongoing Cultural Conversation
In August 2025, Taylor Swift announced the track list for her album The Life of a Showgirl, which included a song titled “Elizabeth Taylor.” Swift also references Taylor in an earlier song with the lyric “Burton to this Taylor” — drawing explicit parallels between her own career and the life of the most famous woman in Hollywood history. The renewed cultural interest generated by Swift’s references brought a new generation to the Elizabeth Taylor biography, confirming that her story loses none of its power with time.
Why She Was the Original Modern Celebrity
Every tabloid, every celebrity gossip website, every paparazzi photograph, every entertainment news program, every Instagram post by a movie star about their personal life — all of it flows from the model that Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton inadvertently created in Rome in 1962 when Italian photographers captured them in private moments and the world went mad to see more.
Before Liz and Dick, celebrity coverage was largely controlled and manufactured. After them, the invasive, uncontrolled, detail-hungry model became standard. The celebrity industrial complex that shapes contemporary culture was, in a very real sense, her creation — not intentionally, but inevitably, because she was simply too large for any managed frame to contain.
Elizabeth Taylor Net Worth and Estate
At the time of her death in 2011, Elizabeth Taylor’s estate was estimated at between $600 million and $1 billion. The vast majority of this wealth — contrary to what many people assume — was not generated by her acting career but by her fragrance empire. White Diamonds and its companion perfumes, marketed through Elizabeth Arden, generated an estimated $200 million annually for many years.
Her estate is managed by three trustees selected before her death, who continue to oversee The Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation and The Elizabeth Taylor Archive, ensuring that both the commercial and philanthropic dimensions of her legacy remain active. In 2022, the estate released a ten-part podcast series titled Elizabeth The First, narrated by Katy Perry, bringing her life story to yet another new audience.
FAQ – Your Biggest Questions About Elizabeth Taylor Answered
What color were Elizabeth Taylor’s eyes? Elizabeth Taylor’s famous eyes were a deep blue-purple that appeared violet in certain lighting. She was born with a genetic mutation called distichiasis, which gave her an extra row of eyelashes. This natural double framing created exceptional definition around her irises and intensified their color, making them appear even more striking both on screen and in person. The combination of eye color, lash density, and the particular way her eyes photographed made them arguably the most discussed physical feature in Hollywood history.
How many times was Elizabeth Taylor married? Elizabeth Taylor was married eight times to seven different men. Her husbands were Conrad “Nicky” Hilton Jr. (1950–1951), Michael Wilding (1952–1957), Mike Todd (1957–1958), Eddie Fisher (1959–1964), Richard Burton (1964–1974 and 1975–1976, married twice), John Warner (1976–1982), and Larry Fortensky (1991–1996). After her divorce from Fortensky, she announced she would never marry again, and she kept that promise.
What did Elizabeth Taylor die of? Elizabeth Taylor died on March 23, 2011, from congestive heart failure at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. She was 79 years old and was surrounded by her four children at the time of her death. She had been hospitalized for the condition approximately six weeks before her death.
What was Elizabeth Taylor’s most famous role? Taylor’s most acclaimed performance is generally considered to be Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), directed by Mike Nichols and co-starring Richard Burton, which won her her second Academy Award for Best Actress. Her most culturally iconic role may be Cleopatra (1963), which defined her public image during her peak years of fame. Her breakthrough role was National Velvet (1944), which made her a star at age twelve.
How much did Elizabeth Taylor earn from her perfumes? Biographers Sam Kashner and Nancy Schoenberger documented that Taylor earned more money through her fragrance collection — which included eleven perfumes, most notably White Diamonds (1991) and Passion (1987) — than during her entire acting career combined. At her death, The Guardian estimated that the majority of her $600 million–$1 billion estate was derived from perfume revenue, with the fragrance line generating an estimated $200 million annually at its peak.
What did Elizabeth Taylor do for AIDS? Taylor was one of the first major celebrities to publicly engage with the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Motivated by the death of her close friend Rock Hudson in 1985, she helped co-found the American Foundation for AIDS Research (amfAR) and later established the Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation (1991). By 1999, her combined advocacy efforts had contributed an estimated $50 million to AIDS research and care. She received the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award from the Academy, the Presidential Citizens Medal, the French Légion d’honneur, and was named a Dame Commander of the British Empire partly in recognition of this work. The Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation continues to operate today.
Why did Elizabeth Taylor convert to Judaism? Taylor formally converted to Judaism in 1959, receiving the Hebrew name Elisheba Rachel. She had been raised in various Christian denominations and described Judaism as a faith she had chosen actively rather than received by birth — a distinction she considered meaningful. She participated in Jewish causes throughout her life and was buried according to Jewish tradition in 2011. While her marriage to Eddie Fisher (who was Jewish) was part of the context for the conversion, Taylor maintained that her commitment to Judaism was genuine and personal rather than circumstantial.
What is the Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation doing today? The Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation (ETAF) remains active and continues the work Taylor began in the 1980s and 1990s. The Foundation provides direct care, support, and services to people living with HIV/AIDS and funds research and advocacy. Taylor’s children and grandchildren are involved with the organization, ensuring that her humanitarian legacy continues across generations. The Foundation was also the beneficiary of the Christie’s auction of Taylor’s jewelry and fashion collections in 2011, which raised over $162 million combined.