A London childhood
Elizabeth Rosemond Taylor was born on February 27, 1932, at her family’s home in Hampstead Garden Suburb, in northwest London. Her parents were Americans from Arkansas City, Kansas: her father, Francis Taylor, was an art dealer who ran a gallery on Bond Street, and her mother, Sara Sothern, had been a stage actress. Because her parents were American citizens and she was born in England, Elizabeth held both British and American citizenship from birth. She was raised in Christian Science, her mother’s faith.
In the spring of 1939, with war looming in Europe, the family returned to the United States, settling in Los Angeles, where Francis opened a new gallery. His clients soon included people from the film industry, and before long the studios noticed his striking daughter, with her dark hair and deep blue eyes that looked almost violet.
Child star to screen legend
Taylor signed her first film contract at the age of nine. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer cast her in Lassie Come Home (1943), and at twelve she became a star in National Velvet (1944), playing a girl who rides her horse in the Grand National. She made the difficult jump to adult roles in Father of the Bride and A Place in the Sun, then gave some of her best performances in Giant (1956), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), opposite Paul Newman, and Suddenly, Last Summer (1959).
She won the Academy Award for Best Actress for BUtterfield 8 (1960) and again for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), in which she played opposite Richard Burton. Her role in Cleopatra (1963) made her the highest-paid film star in the world. Her private life, including eight marriages to seven men, was followed by the press as closely as her films, and she became one of the first modern celebrities whose every move was news. That fame, which she often resented, would later become her most powerful tool.
Choosing Judaism
In March 1958 Taylor’s third husband, the producer Mike Todd, was killed in a plane crash. In her grief she began studying Judaism with Rabbi Max Nussbaum of Temple Israel of Hollywood, a refugee from Nazi Europe, and in 1959, after months of study, she converted, taking the Hebrew name Elisheba Rachel. Two of her husbands, Todd and the singer Eddie Fisher, were Jewish, but she insisted that her conversion had nothing to do with either marriage and was something she had wanted for a long time. She spoke of finding comfort, dignity and hope in an ancient faith that had survived for thousands of years, and said she felt as if she had been a Jew all her life.
Her commitment was public and sometimes costly. In 1959 she bought $100,000 of Israel Bonds, and Arab countries responded by banning her films. She raised money for the Jewish National Fund, served on the board of trustees of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, supported the right of Soviet Jews to emigrate, and narrated Genocide (1981), an Academy Award-winning documentary about the Holocaust. In 1976, when more than a hundred Israeli and Jewish hostages were held at Entebbe in Uganda, she offered herself in exchange for them. She remained Jewish for the rest of her life and was buried after a private Jewish service.
Facing a new plague
In the early 1980s a mysterious disease began killing young men in American cities. By 1984 scientists had identified the virus behind it, but the disease carried a terrible stigma. Many people believed it could be caught from a handshake or a toilet seat, politicians avoided the subject, and many in Hollywood, whose own ranks were being devastated, kept silent for fear of being associated with a disease linked to gay men and drug users.
Taylor later said she kept watching the news reports and asking why nobody was doing anything, until she realised that she was doing nothing either. She threw herself into fundraising for AIDS Project Los Angeles, chairing its Commitment to Life benefit in 1985. Then, in July 1985, her friend and Giant co-star Rock Hudson announced that he had AIDS. He died that October. Taylor decided, as she put it, that she would use her name to open doors and her fame, which she had spent years trying to escape, to do some good.
Building amfAR
In August 1985, with Dr. Michael Gottlieb, the Los Angeles physician who had first reported the disease in 1981, Taylor founded the National AIDS Research Foundation, launched with a $250,000 gift from Rock Hudson. The following month it merged with the AIDS Medical Foundation of the New York researcher Dr. Mathilde Krim to form the American Foundation for AIDS Research, amfAR. Taylor became its Founding National Chairman, its public face and its most effective fundraiser. She made countless appearances, secured several gifts of $1 million, travelled to Thailand, Japan and Europe on its behalf, and came up with the idea for the glamorous international galas, above all the annual Cinema Against AIDS evening during the Cannes Film Festival, that would become amfAR’s biggest source of money.
The money went into science. amfAR has raised more than $950 million since 1985 and awarded more than 3,900 grants to research teams around the world. Its grantees did early work on the protease enzyme that led to a new class of anti-HIV drugs, research that helped prevent mothers from passing HIV to their babies, and the discovery that HIV needs the CCR5 protein to infect cells. It built TREAT Asia, a network to improve HIV treatment across Asia and the Pacific, and funded research that confirmed the first cure of a person with HIV.
Taking the fight to Washington
Taylor took the cause to the people who controlled public money. She testified before Congress more than once, including in 1986 and 1987, pleading for funding for emergency AIDS care in the hardest-hit cities. She pressed President Ronald Reagan, who had said little about the epidemic, to speak about it, and in May 1987 he gave a major speech on AIDS at an amfAR dinner in Washington. She publicly criticised the American ban on visitors with HIV, and later criticised Presidents George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton for not doing enough.
In 1990 she returned to Congress with Jeanne White, the mother of Ryan White, a teenager who had been shunned by his town after contracting HIV from a blood product used to treat his haemophilia and who had died that spring. They urged lawmakers to pass the Ryan White CARE Act, which became law that August and grew into the largest federal program for people living with HIV in the United States, serving hundreds of thousands of people each year. When the promised money was slow to arrive, she went back to Washington to fight for it.
Her own foundation
Because amfAR focused on research, Taylor founded the Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation in 1991 to pay for direct care, support services and prevention education for people living with HIV. She covered its overhead costs herself, so that donations went to the work, and used the $1 million she was paid for the photographs of her 1991 wedding to help start it. She also founded the Elizabeth Taylor Medical Center at the Whitman-Walker Clinic in Washington, D.C., offering free HIV testing and care, and an endowment for AIDS research and education at UCLA.
Altogether she is credited with helping to raise more than $270 million for the fight against AIDS. After her death her estate kept the foundation going and gives it a quarter of the royalties from the use of her image and likeness. It works in the United States and abroad, from AIDS service organisations to campaigns against laws that criminalise people with HIV.
A woman of appetites and courage
Taylor never pretended to be a saint. She admitted to being ruled by her passions, struggled with dependence on alcohol and painkillers, and in 1983 became the first celebrity to check herself openly into the Betty Ford Center, a step that helped others seek treatment without shame. She was in pain for much of her life from a back injured in childhood, survived a near-fatal bout of pneumonia in 1961, and later had a benign brain tumour removed and both hips replaced.
What set her AIDS work apart was timing and nerve. She lent the most famous face in the world to a cause that most stars avoided, at a time when people with AIDS were widely shunned. The Terrence Higgins Trust in Britain called her the first major star to publicly fight fear and prejudice towards AIDS. Her honours for that work included the French Legion of Honour in 1987, the Academy’s Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award in 1993, appointment as a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2000, and the Presidential Citizens Medal from President Clinton in 2001.
Last years and legacy
In her last two decades Taylor rarely acted and gave most of her time to her AIDS work. She was diagnosed with congestive heart failure in 2004 and died of it at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles on March 23, 2011, at the age of 79. Her funeral was a private Jewish ceremony led by Rabbi Jerome Cutler, and at her request it began fifteen minutes late.
She is remembered as one of the last great stars of classical Hollywood, but her greatest role was played off screen. At a time of fear and silence she turned celebrity into a public health weapon, helping to make AIDS something people could talk about, fund and fight. On her death, Bill Clinton said that many people around the world would live longer and better lives because of her work. The research she paid for, the care her foundation provides and the federal program she helped create continue to save lives.
Sources & further reading
Elizabeth Taylor, Wikipedia · amfAR, Wikipedia · A Brief History of amfAR, amfAR · Elizabeth Taylor, An AIDS Activist To Remember, NPR (2011) · Elizabeth Taylor, the first globally recognized celebrity HIV and AIDS activist, House of Taylor · Elizabeth Taylor, Jewish Virtual Library · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
A life of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.