Elizabeth Taylor dies, aged 79

Curtain falls on life of Hollywood great remembered for three Oscars, a turbulent love life and 8 marriages.

Elizabeth Taylor, the violet-eyed film goddess whose sultry screen persona, stormy personal life and enduring fame and glamour made her one of the last of the old-fashioned movie stars and a template for the modern celebrity, died overnight at age 79.
She was surrounded by her four children when she died of congestive heart failure, at Cedars-Sinai Medical Centre, in Los Angeles, where she had been hospitalised for about six weeks, said publicist Sally Morrison.
"My mother was an extraordinary woman who lived life to the fullest, with great passion, humour, and love," her son, Michael Wilding, said.
"We know, quite simply, that the world is a better place for mum having lived in it.
"Her legacy will never fade, her spirit will always be with us, and her love will live forever in our hearts."
"We have just lost a Hollywood giant," said Elton John, a longtime friend of Taylor. "More importantly, we have lost an incredible human being."
Taylor was the most blessed and cursed of actresses, the toughest and the most vulnerable. She had extraordinary grace, wealth and voluptuous beauty, and won three Academy Awards, including a special one for her humanitarian work.
She was the most loyal of friends and a defender of gays in Hollywood when Aids was still a stigma in the industry and beyond. But she was afflicted by ill health, failed romances (eight marriages, seven husbands) and personal tragedy.
"I think I'm becoming fatalistic," she said in 1989.
"Too much has happened in my life for me not to be fatalistic."
Her more than 50 movies included unforgettable portraits of innocence and of decadence, from the children's classic National Velvet and the sentimental family comedy Father of the Bride to Oscar-winning transgressions in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Butterfield 8.
The historical epic Cleopatra is among Hollywood's greatest on-screen fiascos and a landmark of off-screen monkey business, the meeting ground of Taylor and Richard Burton, the "Brangelina" of their day.
She played enough bawdy women on film for critic Pauline Kael to deem her "Chaucerian Beverly Hills".
But her defining role, one that lasted long past her moviemaking days, was "Elizabeth Taylor", ever marrying and divorcing, in and out of hospitals, gaining and losing weight, standing by Michael Jackson, Rock Hudson and other troubled friends, acquiring a jewellery collection that seemed to rival Tiffany's.
She was a child star who grew up and aged before an adoring, appalled and fascinated public.
She arrived in Hollywood when the studio system tightly controlled an actor's life and image, had more marriages than any publicist could explain away and lasted long enough to no longer require explanation.
She was the industry's great survivor, and among the first to reach that special category of celebrity - famous for being famous, for whom her work was inseparable from the gossip around it. The London-born actress was a star at age 12, a bride and a divorcee at 18, a superstar at 19 and a widow at 26.
She was a screen sweetheart and martyr later reviled for stealing Eddie Fisher from Debbie Reynolds, then for dumping Fisher to bed Burton, a relationship of epic passion and turbulence, lasting through two marriages and countless attempted reconciliations.
She was also forgiven. Reynolds would acknowledge voting for Taylor when she was nominated for Butterfield 8. She underwent at least 20 major operations and she nearly died from a bout with pneumonia in 1990.
In 1994 and 1995, she had both hip joints replaced, and in 1997, she underwent surgery to remove a benign brain tumour.
In 1983, she acknowledged a 35-year addiction to sleeping pills and pain killers. Taylor was treated for alcohol and drug abuse problems at the Betty Ford Clinic in Rancho Mirage, California.
Her troubles bonded her to her peers and the public, and deepened her compassion.
Her advocacy for AIDS research and for other causes earned her a special Oscar, the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award, in 1993.
As she accepted it, to a long ovation, she declared, "I call upon you to draw from the depths of your being - to prove that we are a human race, to prove that our love outweighs our need to hate, that our compassion is more compelling than our need to blame."