Elizabeth Taylor, Cleopatra Star and Oscar Winner, Was a Pioneering AIDS Activist
Tim Gray, provided by
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Elizabeth Taylor, who would have turned 89 on Feb. 27, lived multiple lives. She was a movie mega-star, a tabloid mega-celebrity (which are not always the same thing), an innovator in creating herself as a brand and a tireless and effective philanthropist and activist.
She was adored, admired, denounced, scandal-ridden and unpredictable, and the public couldn’t get enough of her.
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On screen, she was at her most breathtakingly beautiful in such 1950s and ‘60s films as “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” “Suddenly, Last Summer,” “Cleopatra” and “The Taming of the Shrew.” And in the 1966 “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf,” at age 34, she frumped herself up and gave a great performance, winning the second of two Oscars (after the 1960 “Butterfield 8”).