Liz Taylor: Farewell to a legend

Screen legend Elizabeth Taylor died in Los Angeles. She was 79. Publicist Sally Morrison says the actress died Wednesday morning at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center from congestive heart failure. Morrison says her children were at her side.

Taylor first gained stardom as a child and appeared in more than 50 films. She won Oscars for her performances in Butterfield 8 and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

She was equally famous for her extraordinary beauty and her stormy personal life, including eight marriages and a series of physical ailments.

Elizabeth was born in Hampstead, she was the second child of Francis Lenn Taylor and Sara Viola Warmbrodt.

She had started taking ballet lessons at a very tender age of three.

Elizabeth appeared in her first motion picture There's One Born Every Minute, when she was just nine.

Elizabeth was 12 when she played Velvet Brown in the 1944 film National Velvet. The role made her a star.

In the 1951 movie A Place in the Sun, Elizabeth was appreciated for her performance as Angela Vickers, a socialite who comes between Montgomery Clift and his poor girlfriend played by Shelley Winters.

Her movies Raintree County, Cat On A Hot Tin Roof and Suddenly, Last Summer won her the Academy Award nomination for Best Actress for three consecutive years.

Elizabeth was the first actress to be paid USD 1 million for her role in the movie Cleopatra.

She won her first Academy Award in 1960 for the movie Butterfield 8.

Her second Academy Award came in 1966 for her performance in the film adaptation of the Edward Albee play Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?.

She continued to act movies like Zee and Co., Ash Wednesday, The Blue Bird and A Little Night Music throughout the 70s.

Elizabeth made her Broadway and West End debuts in 1982 with a revival of Lillian Hellman's The Little Foxes.

Her health started deteriorating and in 2004 she announced that she was suffering from congestive heart failure.

Just last year, Elizabeth Taylor @DameElizabeth, had tweeted a denial of her rumored engagement to 49-year-old Jason Winters, her manager. Jason Winters never got to be husband number eight for the 78-year-old screen icon whose colourful life off screen and legendary career on screen made her every inch the Hollywood star she truly was. (Photo: AP)

Elizabeth Taylor's drop-dead gorgeous looks were almost as memorable as her 8 marriages, including 2 to Richard Burton who she believed was her soulmate. (Photo: AP)

In 1950 her first marriage with hotel heir Conrad Hilton Jr, lasted only for nine months. Elizabeth was 18 then. (Photo: AP)

She moved on with life and got married to British actor Michael Wilding in 1952. They remained together for five years but it ended in divorce. ``In the 50s the strains on our marriage were too much for it to survive. We were so very different," `she said later. (Photo: AP)

Just a month after the second divorce, Elizabeth Taylor married a man 25 years her senior - film and theatre producer Michael Todd. (Photo: AP)

Their married life was full of bliss when misfortune hit her hard. Todd died in a plane crash in New Mexico in 1958. Ironically the name of the plane was The Lucky Liz. Elizabeth Taylor had described her short life with him as ‘intensely glorious.'

(In this March 2, 1959 file photo, actress Elizabeth Taylor, accompanied by her physician, Dr. Rexford Kennamer, walks through Waldheim Cemetery in Chicago where she attended a ceremony dedicating the grave marker of her late husband, showman Mike Todd) (Photo: AP)

After Todd's death, Elizabeth Taylor grew close to her dead husband's friend, singer Eddie Fisher. Eddie left his wife Debbie Reynolds for her and Elizabeth Taylor was accused of being the reason for their divorce. She won her first Oscar for the movie Butterfield 8 in 1959 – the same year she married Eddie Fisher. (Photo: AP)

Health problems had begun to plague Elizabeth Taylor, but she recovered. And while shooting for the movie Cleopatra, she fell in love with her co-star Richard Burton, only to go down in Hollywood history as one of the most romantic pairs on-screen. (Photo: AP)

They got married in 1964 and the two shared a stunning on-screen chemistry. They did 12 films together and many believed Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was their best. (Photo: AP)

They remained together for ten years, divorced and then remarried again a year later only to divorce again in 1976. Elizabeth Taylor's personal life appeared to be crafted for tabloids. (Photo: AP)

Her next two marriages were with Senator John W Warner and construction worker Larry Fortensky respectively. Both ended in a divorce. Fortensky was her junior by 20 years. (Photo: AP)

Apart from her seven husbands and almost-husband number 8, Elizabeth Taylor developed strong friendships with others from showbiz. After the death of her friend and co-star Rock Hudson, she was a founder of the American Foundation for AIDS Research (amfAR) and began her work as a spokesperson and fundraiser in the fight against AIDS. She did this in the early 1980s when few public personas were willing to discuss the disease. (Photo: AP)

Liza Minnelli, the late Michael Jackson and Montgomery Clift were among her very close friends. (Photo: AP)

She devoted herself to charity work which earned her the 1993 Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award. (Photo: AP)

Elizabeth Taylor had two sons from Michael Wilding and a daughter each from Todd and Burton. (Photo: AP)

In life, Elizabeth Taylor was known for her having lived life to the hilt and that's how she wanted to be remembered. A part of her legacy – synonymous with Hollywood glamour – is the passion for a life itself. @DameElizabeth shared her last tweet and the liveliness remains: My interview in Bazaar with Kim Kardashian came out!!! http://j.mp/eqQsGa 5:18 AM Feb 10th. (Photo: AP)

RIP Elizabeth Taylor - a true icon and an extraordinary woman who lived life to the fullest.