Taylor was a movie star who for a half-century was as famous for her personal attractiveness and sensational personal life as she was for her many films. A London-born beauty who never lost her clipped, clean way of speaking, Ms. Taylor possessed vivid features known to three generations of filmgoers: Raven hair, dark eyebrows, ivory skin, a near-perfect figure and, most remarkably, violet eyes that were among the most commented-on physical attributes in Hollywood history.

Elizabeth Rosemund Taylor became a movie star when she was 12. Having spent her first seven years in England, she moved with her American parents to Los Angeles in 1939. Soon after, she was noticed by the film studios and signed by first Universal and then MGM. After a few minor appearances in movies like "Lassie Come Home" and "Jane Eyre," she burst forth as the young heroine of the 1944 English horse-racing drama "National Velvet." Thereafter, she became M-G-M's top child star, winning another huge hit with the comedy "Father of the Bride" and its sequel "Father's Little Dividend." Under George Stevens' direction in 1951's "A Place in the Sun," she delivered what many consider her best performance, as a rich girl in love with the poor, conflicted Montgomery Clift. Other notable films include Giant, Raintree Country and the popular Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

Much later, in the 1980s, she ventured into stage work. The announcement that she would make her Broadway debut in a 1981 revival of Lillian Hellman's The Little Foxes set off a wildfire of media attention and box-office sales. Ms. Taylor returned to Broadway in 1983 with a revival of Noel Coward's comedy of divorced spouses in love, Private Lives, in which she starred as Amanda opposite her real-life ex-husband Richard Burton. She continued to dabble in theatre until the end.

On Dec. 1, 2007, she and James Earl Jones gave a benefit performance of the A. R. Gurney play Love Letters. Gurney recalled the event: "James Earl Jones has done it many times. He's a first-rate actor and very at home in the part. With her, she was very nervous about it. She couldn't even finish rehearsing the ending, she'd get so nervous and tired and say, 'I can't do this.' But she came out and did it, and as the play continued, she grew into the part in a most amazing way. At the end the audience rose to its feet, and she, who had been in a wheelchair all evening, got up on her feet and applauded the audience. I've never seen that play work so well therapeutically before."

Source: Playbill.com