Elizabeth Taylor

British-American actress, first on screen as a child in the early 1940s then as a star of classical Hollywood cinema in the 1950s. She became the world's highest paid movie star in the 1960s, remaining a well-known public figure for the rest of her life.

Born in London to socially prominent American parents residing in Britain, she trained in ballet shortly after learning to walk and once performed before the Queen. In 1939 the Taylor family emigrated back to the Los Angeles area. Her father opened up an art gallery in the Beverly Hills Hotel and this is where Elizabeth was discovered by movie scouts.

With a debut in 1942, she did a film with Universal Studios and was then signed with MGM for a long-term contract that tied her up until the early '60s. Noted as a perfect beauty, with unique violet eyes, she matured directly from child characters into adult roles.

She won her first Academy Award playing a call girl in BUtterfield 8 (1960), a role she disliked, and was nominated for multiple Oscars. One of the highest paid performers, she won a second Academy Award for Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in 1966.

Glamorous and popular as ever despite her bouts with alcohol, food and weight gains, Taylor remained in later life one of the world's most photographed and publicized celebrities. As her film roles dwindled, she redirected her interests, coming out with her own line of perfumes and becoming active in the crusade against AIDS. She personally raised millions of dollars for AIDS research. Even in her sixties and seventies, Taylor still commanded attention with every performance. By 1990 she insisted she had not had any cosmetic surgery, "just a little work on the jaw."

By 1997, she had gone through eight husbands, four children and nine grandchildren. At just 18, she married 23-year-old Nicky Hilton, heir to the hotel fortune, on 6 June 1950, and it was a disaster from the first.