Elizabeth Taylor

Elizabeth Taylor 1932-, Anglo-American film actress, b. London. Regarded as one of the world's most beautiful women, Taylor went from child star to a series of ladylike roles to playing worldly, sometimes shrewish women. She won Academy Awards for her work in Butterfield 8 (1960) and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966). Her other films include National Velvet (1944), A Place in the Sun (1951), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), Cleopatra (1963), and The Mirror Crack'd (1979). She has also appeared on Broadway in such productions as The Little Foxes (1981). Taylor has been married nine times, twice to Richard Burton , with whom she co-starred in many films. She has been active in raising money for AIDS research, and was made a Dame Commander, Order of the British Empire, in 2000.

Bibliography: See her autobiography (1965); biographies by C. D. Heymann and D. Spoto (both: 1995).

Taylor, Elizabeth (1932– ) US film actress, b. England. She became a child star in National Velvet (1944). Taylor's early mature roles include A Place in the Sun (1951) and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958). She won two Academy Awards for best supporting actress: Butterfield 8 (1960) and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966). Taylor was married eight times, twice to Richard Burton. She was an active campaigner for AIDS charities. Other films include Raintree County (1957), Suddenly Last Summer (1959), and Cleopatra (1963).

Taylor, Elizabeth (1912–75), novelist and short- story writer, was educated in Reading. Her first novel, At Mrs Lippincote's (1945), was followed by 11 more: shrewd observations of middle-class life in which self-deceit is always exposed, while compassion is afforded to loneliness and vulnerability. Among her best-known novels are A Wreath of Roses (1950), about a school secretary on the brink of middle age who becomes involved with a handsome but suspect young man, and Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont (1971), a study of the pathos of impoverished but genteel old age. Her collections of short stories, Hester Lilly (1954), The Blush (1958), A Dedicated Man (1965), and The Devastating Boys (1972), are also much admired for what Angus Wilson described as her ‘warm heart and sharp claws’. Dangerous Calm (1995, ed. Lynn Knight) contains a selection of her stories (including two previously uncollected).