Photo Courtesy EOnline
Liz Taylor died Wednesday 23rd March 2011 in hospital from congestive heart failure.
She was the last of the great movie goddesses, thrilling and intriguing the pre-rockstar, pre-TV soap world of the 1950s and 60s with a love life and lifestyle that any Hollywood story-editor would have rejected as impossibly far-fetched.
Taylor’s drive to succeed was the equal of her mother’s. At 10, she set her heart on the lead role in National Velvet, a romance with a horseracing background, but was told she was too short for the role.
After several weeks of punishing exercise and weight-gaining diet, she went back to the director and managed to persuade him she’d gained three inches in height.
Child stars then seldom made a comfortable transition to adult roles - witness Shirley Temple - but Taylor managed it effortlessly. With her virginal beauty went a voluptuous figure that initially worried the self-censoring movie bosses. Officials known as B.I.s (bust-inspectors) patrolled her sets, ordering higher-cut dresses if too much cleavage was visible.
At 18, she married Nicky Hilton, a good-looking and deceptively charming young man whose father, Conrad, founded the Hilton hotel-chain.
The smiling charmer proved to be an abusive drunk who battered his young bride so brutally, she lost the baby she was carrying.
Divorcing Hilton, she rebounded into the arms of British actor Michael Wilding, a man 20 years her senior. The five-year marriage with Wilding produced two sons, Michael and Christopher, but, as Taylor herself admitted, was more brother-sister relationship than love match.
In 1957, she dumped Wilding for the American producer Mike Todd, a stocky, swashbuckling figure then preparing to launch his epic screen version of Jules Verne’s Around The World In 80 Days. Todd was Taylor’s ideal man - powerful, protective, and irresistibly masculine.
Read more: http://www. dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1369180/Elizabeth-Taylor-dead-Extraordinary-life-of-Hollywoods-goddesses.html#ixzz1HS9QMAj7
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