Film legend Elizabeth Taylor dies at 79

LOS ANGELES (AP) - 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 Wednesday at age 79.

She was surrounded by her four children when she died of congestive heart failure at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, where she had been hospitalized for about six weeks, said publicist Sally Morrison.

``My Mother was an extraordinary woman who lived life to the fullest, with great passion, humor, and love,'' her son, Michael Wilding, said in a statement.

``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.''

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 jewelry 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'' and decades later co-starred with her old rival in ``These Old Broads,'' co-written by Carrie Fisher, the daughter of Reynolds and Eddie Fisher.

'세기의 여배우' 엘리자베스 테일러 타계

`세기의 여우(女優)'로 한 시대를 풍미했던 미국 할리우드의 전설적인 여배우 엘리자베스 테일러가 23일 숨졌다. 향년 79세.

테일러의 대변인인 샐리 모리슨은 이날 성명을 통해 리즈(엘리자베스의 애칭) 테일러가 로스앤젤레스(LA)에서 울혈성 심부전증으로 숨졌다고 발표했다.

모리슨은 "고인이 LA의 시더-시나이 병원에서 오늘 평화롭게 숨졌다"면서 "그녀의 모든 자녀들이 임종을 지켰다"고 밝혔다.

그는 "고인이 최근 여러 합병증으로 고생해 왔지만 상태가 안정적이어서, 집으로 돌아갈 수 있을 것으로 기대했지만 애석하게도 그렇게 되지 못했다"고 말했다. (AP-연합뉴스)