This month is plenty of sad news...first the terrible tsunami on Japan, then an earthquake in New Zealand and today our last (real) Diva has died...Elizabeth Taylor.
Taylor has born for the spotlight. At age 3, she has danced before Princess Elizabeth, the future queen, then made her screen debut with a tiny part in the 1942 comedy "There's One Born Every Minute."
Her big break came a year later in "Lassie Come Home."
A star from her teen years in such films as "National Velvet," "Little Women" and "Father of the Bride," Taylor won best-actress Oscars as a high-end hooker in 1960s "BUtterfield 8" and an alcoholic shrew in a savage marriage in 1966's "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?"
In
Cleopatra she had became the most high paid actress in the world, at the time, by getting one million dollars for the role.
Elizabeth had quit on the big screen with 1994's "The Flintstones," playing caveman Fred's nagging mother-in-law.
"Acting is, to me now, artificial," Taylor told The Associated Press at the 2005 dedication of a UCLA AIDS research center. "Seeing people suffer is real. It couldn't be more real. Some people don't like to look at it in the face because it's painful. "But if nobody does, then nothing gets done," she said.
Taylor received the Legion of Honor, France's most prestigious award, in 1987 for AIDS efforts. In 2000, Queen Elizabeth II made Taylor a dame — the female equivalent of a knight — for her services to charity and the entertainment industry.
Her eyes were only part of the charms that took her to the top in Hollywood and kept her there for decades.
R.I.P ELIZABETH TAYLOR
