RIP
She led a very glamorous but troubled life. I hope she’s now at peace.
Elizabeth Taylor, the last of the great Hollywood studio stars and the first of the modern mega-celebrities, died Wednesday in Los Angeles of congestive heart failure. Although seemingly ageless, she was in fact 79.
Miss Taylor began her career as a child actress and rose to fame in the movies, but it was as herself -- or a melodramatic projection of herself the media dubbed "Liz" (a nickname she detested, incidentally) -- that she captured the often outraged attention of the world.
She was nominated for five Oscars and won twice, for "Butterfield 8" (1961) and "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" (1967). She married eight times, twice to Richard Burton. She was denounced by the Vatican for "erotic vagrancy." She stole husbands only to abandon them and became an ever larger object of fascination as a result.
In her final decades, as her stardom outgrew the need for movies, Miss Taylor sailed on in a state of perpetual celebrity buoyed by personalized perfumes, a diet book, AIDS charity work, illnesses, and romance, always romance. Her final husband was a construction worker she had met in rehab. She called her close friend Michael Jackson "the most normal person I know." She had her 60th birthday party at Disneyland, and irony was not on the menu. By Ty Burr Globe Staff / March 23, 2011