Reports: Elizabeth Taylor dies at 79

Legendary actress Elizabeth Taylor has died, according to multiple reports. She was 79.

Taylor made more than 50 films over a nearly 70-year career that reached across film, television and the stage. She won two best actress Oscars, one for her turn as a less-than-virtuous woman in the 1960 melodrama “Butterfield 8,” the other for playing a wretchedly unhappy wife (opposite soon-to-be ex-husband Richard Burton), in the 1966 adaptation of Edward Albee’s play “Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”

Her other indelible performances include a precocious young jockey in “National Velvet” (1944), the tempestuous Maggie in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” (1958) and the title role in “Cleopatra” (1963), a disastrous flop almost as legendary as Taylor herself.

Elizabeth Rosemond Taylor was born in London on Feb. 27, 1932 to American parents, Francis Taylor, who owned an art gallery on London’s Old Bond Street, and Sara Sothern, a former stage actress.

It was Elizabeth’s older brother, Howard, who gave her the nickname Liz, which the tabloids loved and she abhorred. Hers was a pampered childhood that included dancing lessons and horseback riding on a godfather’s Kent estate.

Just before World War II, the Taylors returned to the United States, settling in Bevery Hills. There, young Elizabeth was discovered by the chairman of Universal Pictures, and although Louis B. Mayer of MGM also made a bid for her, she signed a seven-year contract with Universal. She was 8 years old.

After one year and one movie (“There’s One Born Every Minute”), Taylor switched to MGM, where she remained for 18 years — one of the longest relationships in her life — starting with “Lassie Comes Home” in 1943 and ending with “BUtterfield 8.” Her stormy working partnership with the volatile Mayer ended in a falling-out, and Taylor left to make “Cleopatra.”

On the set of “Cleopatra,” Taylor, then married to the actor Eddie Fisher, began an affair with Burton, who was also married. The two became one of Hollywood’s most delicious scandals, spawning the tabloid catchphrase “Liz and Dick” long before nicknames like “Brangelina” and “Bennifer.”

Still, the whopping failure of “Cleopatra” seemed to signal the end of Taylor’s sex-symbol phase. And despite her Oscar-winning turn in “Virginia Woolf,” Taylor had trouble navigating the subsequent decades.

As films in the 1970s became more experimental, realistic and downbeat, there seemed little place for a still-gorgeous older star from a bygone Hollywood. Her output included a clever but little-seen satire, “Hammersmith is Out” (1972), the television-movie “Victory at Entebbe” (1976) and the black comedy “Winter Kills” (1979).

During the 1980s she gravitated further toward television, appearing in movies-of-the-week and on the soap operas “All My Children” and “General Hospital.” Her last proper film was 1994’s “The Flintstones.” In 2001, she costarred in “These Old Broads,” a television movie also starring Shirley MacLaine, Joan Collins and her old rival Debbie Reynolds, whose daughter, Carrie Fisher, wrote the script. The story centered on four over-the-hill divas who overcome their mutual hatred to stage a reunion.

Also in the 1980s Taylor turned to AIDS activism. Following the 1985 death of Rock Hudson, her longtime friend and costar in the film “Giant,” Taylor began publicly raising awareness of the epidemic; later she established the Elizabeth Taylor Aids Foundation.

During that decade, Taylor also suffered relapses into her old ways: alcohol binges, drug dependency and visits to the Betty Ford clinic, where in 1988 she met Larry Fortensky, a construction worker 20 years her junior. That marriage, which ended in divorce in 1996, would be her last.

Taylor had a history of health problems. Her 2004 diagnosis for congestive heart failure, compounded with spinal fractures and the effects of scoliosis, left her nearly bedridden. She had also battled ulcers, amoebic dysentery, bursitis, and had a benign brain tumor removed in 1997.