Elizabeth Taylor, 79, Dies in Los Angeles

Film star and gay icon Elizabeth Taylor has died in Los Angeles at age 79, a March 23 Associated Press story said.

Her publicist Sally Morrison announced Taylor's death. The star had been in the hospital with congestive heart failure for a month and a half. She died at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center on March 23. Her children were with her.

"My Mother was an extraordinary woman who lived life to the fullest, with great passion, humor, and love," son Michael Wilding, said. "We know, quite simply, that the world is a better place for Mom 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."

Plagued by ill health

The London-born actress' legendary career, spanning six decades, was punctuated with bouts of ill health and occasional rumors that she was near death. Throughout her career, Taylor always rallied and returned to form, embracing the fans who loved her in turn. Taylor delivered one of the most famous Oscar acceptance speeches in the history of the Academy Awards when in 1961, just out of the hospital after having nearly died of pneumonia, she took the statuette for her role in Butterfield 8.

"I guess I will just have to thank you with all my heart," Taylor told the audience.

"Taylor was the most blessed and cursed of actresses, the toughest and the most vulnerable," the AP article, written by film critic David Germain with Hillel Italie, recounted. "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," the article added. "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 jewelry collection that seemed to rival Tiffany's.

"Elizabeth Taylor is considered one of the last, if not the last major star, to have come out of the old Hollywood studio system," a biographical note at the International Movie Database says, noting that Taylor's career started at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayor. In the days of the old studio system, MGM was regarded as "the top of the heap," the biographical blurb noted.

As a child star, Taylor achieved success with the film National Velvet, in 1944. At the time, she had already appeared in four previous films over two years. More successes followed, including Father of the Bride (1950), A Place in the Sun (1951), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), Butterfield 8 (1960), and one of the most extravagant films of all time, Cleopatra (1963).

Her later career included TV movies, appearances on soap operas, a turn in the big-screen, live-action version of The Flintstones, and a cameo on The Simpsons in 1992, when Taylor voiced the first word spoken by infant daughter Maggie.

Taylor made a public announcement in 2004 that she was suffering from congestive heart failure. She suffered a series of health crises, but was able to appear on last time on stage in 2007, in a one-night-only performance of Love Letters with co-star James Earl Jones. The production was mounted as a fundraising for the Elizabeth Taylor Aids Foundation. Taylor also took a role in the establishment of the American Foundation for AIDS Research (amfAR).

The GLBT response

The GLBT community responded with expressions of grief at the news of Taylor's death.

"We are deeply saddened by the death Elizabeth Taylor," said Joe Solmonese, the head of the Human Rights Campaign. "Ms. Taylor was a true ally to the LGBT community. She was one of the first public voices to speak up about the AIDS crisis while many others stayed silent in the 1980s and she helped raise millions of dollars to fight the disease.

"Our thoughts and prayers go out to her family, and to all those whose lives have been positively impacted by the life and work of Elizabeth Taylor," Solmonese added.

"Her advocacy for AIDS research and for other causes earned her a special Oscar, the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award, in 1993," the AP article noted.

But it was as the jewel-bedraped icon of style and Hollywood glamor that Taylor was best known. Her love of jewelry, and her scandalous affair with Cleopatra co-star Richard Burton--whom she married twice, once in 1964, and again in 1975, a year after divorcing him the first time--confirmed her status as a figure of romance and uncontested beauty.

Taylor biographer William J. Mann, author of How to Be A Movie Star: Elizabeth Taylor in Hollywood, noted of Taylor that she, "more than anybody else, showed us how to be a movie star," creating a persona for public consumption and dealing with fame on her own terms. "In many ways, what Elizabeth Taylor created in the 1960s is the same template, the same blueprint, that people like Britney Spears and Miley Cyrus and Madonna have been using for the last 20 years," Mann told EDGE in an interview published in 2010.

Mann also addressed Taylor's love of large precious stones.

"She said once, 'Big girls need big diamonds.' ...[T]here's that wonderful story where Richard Burton gave her the Krupp Diamond. It's a huge thing, and she's wearing it in a ring on her finger. It's so huge that Princess Margaret sees her at some event and says, 'It's so vulgar! May I try it on?' And Elizabeth Taylor takes it off her finger, puts in on Princess Margaret, and says, 'It doesn't look so vulgar now, does it?' "

By the same token, however, Taylor also offered her public a common touch that endeared her to her fans as much as did her love of expensive adornment. Mann noted in How to Be A Movie Star that Taylor loved to eat cold chicken with her bare hands.

The AP article said that Taylor's surviving family includes four children, ten grandchildren, and four great-grandchildren. Her funeral will take place later this week.