Screen legend Elizabeth Taylor dies at 79

Screen legend Elizabeth Taylor, the violet-eyed film
goddess whose sultry screen life was often upstaged by her stormy
personal life, died Wednesday at age 79.
She died of congestive heart failure at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center,
where she had been hospitalized for about six weeks, publicist Sally
Morrison said.
"All her children were with her," Morrison said.
Taylor had extraordinary grace, fame and wealth, and won three Oscars,
including a special one for her humanitarian work. But she was tortured
by ill health, failed romances 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 eight marriages — including two to actor Richard Burton — and a
lifelong battle with substance abuse, physical ailments and overeating
made Taylor as popular in supermarket tabloids as in classic film
festivals.
Taylor disclosed in November 2004 that she had congestive heart
failure. But she still periodically dismissed reports that she was at
death's door, saying she used a wheelchair only because of chronic back
problems that began at age 12 when she fell from a horse.
"Oh, come on, do I look like I'm dying?" she said in May 2006 in a rare
television interview on CNN's "Larry King Live." "Do I look like or
sound like I have Alzheimer's?" Tabloids report such things "because
they have nothing else dirty to write about anybody else," she said.
When she turned 75 the following year, she was asked about the secret
to her longevity and quipped: "Hangin' in."
The London-born actress was a star at age 12, a bride and a divorcee at
18, a screen goddess at 19 and a widow at 26.
She appeared in more than 50 films, and won Oscars for her performances
in "Butterfield 8" (1960) and "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" (1966),
in which she starred opposite Burton.
In later years, she was a spokeswoman for several causes, most notably
AIDS research. Her work gained her a special Oscar, the Jean Hersholt
Humanitarian Award, in 1993.
As she accepted it, she told a worldwide television audience: "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."
She accepted her many health problems with a stoic attitude.
"My body's a real mess," Taylor told W magazine in 2004. "If you look
at it in the mirror, it's just completely convex and concave." MAY HER
SOUL REST IN PERFECT PEACE.