Elizabeth Taylor is perhaps the most beautiful actress in Hollywood while Marilyn Monroe is the sexiest. But who is really Elizabeth Taylor? We knew her as the best friend of Michael Jackson, as humanitarian being and who married eight times. Well here is an article about the last star in Hollywood.
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| Elizabeth Taylor |
Taylor's legendary beauty preceded her first films. According to legend, a talent scout spotted her playing as a child and tried to interest her mother in putting her up for the role of Bonnie Blue Butler in Gone with the Wind (1939). She started dancing at three in her native London, where she performed in a recital for Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret. When World War II started, her art dealer father sent the girl and her mother to California to escape the Blitz.
She made her big-screen debut opposite "Our Gang" star Carl "Alfalfa" Switzer in There's One Born Every Minute (1942).Her first Metro film was Lassie Come Home (1943), which started a lifelong friendship with co-star Roddy McDowall.Taylor worked out for months to win the role of Velvet Brown in National Velvet (1944), a project that years earlier had been planned for Katharine Hepburn. The critical and box-office success made it clear that Taylor was a very special child indeed.
Taylor's first grown-up roles were mainly built around her beauty. All she had to do was look good while Robert Taylor fought for her honor in Ivanhoe (1952) or Stewart Granger tried to make his fortune in Beau Brummell (1954). But the talents that had made National Velvet so successful were still there, waiting for the right vehicle. She found one such part when MGM loaned her to Paramount for A Place in the Sun (1951). Taylor realized how much she wanted to be respected as an actress,and such hints of a more mature approach to her work can be seen in Rhapsody (1954), in which she plays an heiress involved with the classical music world, and Elephant Walk (1954), as a plantation owner's wife torn between her husband and his plantation manager.The film made her more beautiful than ever, which may have blinded critics to the quality of her work.
Taylor took another stab at a Tennessee Williams adaptation, co-starring with Clift and Katharine Hepburn in Suddenly, Last Summer (1959). The film brought her third Oscar® nomination. 20th Century-Fox had offered her the title role in their epic Cleopatra (1963), prompting her to jokingly demand $1 million, the highest fee ever paid an actor at that time. When they compromised on $750,000 and a percentage, she couldn't say, "No." But she still owed MGM one more film. With no time to turn anything down, they stuck her in Butterfield 8 (1960), a turgid adaptation of John O'Hara's novel about a high-priced call girl. When the studio screened it for her, she threw a drink at the screen. Still, she gave a respectable performance and won her fourth Oscar® nomination in as many years.
The Sandpiper (1965), a turgid romance with bohemian artist Taylor falling for married priest Burton, and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), are their best film together. Her searing performance brought her a second Oscar®, and this time she could feel that it was deserved.
When it came to her work with HIV/AIDS-related charities, including the American Foundation for AIDS Research, better known as amfAR, and her own Elizabeth Taylor HIV/AIDS Foundation, the actress was an unstoppable force committed to doing all she could to see the public educated about the realities of the disease.
Taylor testified before Congress to ensure Senate support for the Ryan White CARE Act of 1990, which continues to be a primary source of federal funding for HIV/AIDS programs nationwide, and in 1991, started The Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation to complement amfAR's work as well as provide more direct AIDS-related
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