Hollywood icon, Elizabeth Taylor (79), who died last Wednesday, succumbed to the accumulative effective of congestive heart failure after being hospitalized for six weeks at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. She had undergone a surgical intervention to repair a leaky heart valve two years ago.
Taylor had endured several illnesses and injuries throughout her life. At the age of 12 she sustained injuries when she fell off a horse.
- According to media archives, she had been a regular smoker well into her fifties. An x-ray scan revealed spots on her lungs in 1975, but lung cancer was eventually ruled out.
- She broke her back five times
- She had two hip replacements
- She survived skin cancer
- She underwent a brain tumor operation (benign)
- Twice she had life-threatening pneumonia
- She received treatment for alcoholism in the 1980s
- She received drug addiction treatment in 1983 and 1988 at the Betty Ford Clinic
- She was diagnosed with congestive heart failure in 2004
- When seen in a wheelchair she explained that it was due to her osteoporosis and that she was born with scoliosis (sideways curving of the spine)
During her last years of life she had to cancel several scheduled appearances for health or personal reasons.
Name: Elizabeth Rosemond Taylor
Born: 27th February, 1932. In London, England
Died: March 23rd, 2011, aged 70, in California, USA
Nationality: English-American
Married to:
- Conrad Hilton, Jr. (1950-1951) Michael Wilding (1952-1957) Mike Todd (1957-1958) Eddie Fisher (1959-1964) Richard Burton (1964-1974, 1975-1976) John Warner (1976-1982) Larry Fortensky (1991-1996)
Awards: Two Academy Awards:
- Best actress – Butterfield 8 (1960)
Best actress – Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966)
Efforts in fighting AIDS – Jean Herscholt Humanitarian Academy Award (1992)
Queen Elizabeth II named her Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (2000)
Inducted into the California Hall of Fame, California Museum of History, Women and the Arts (2007)
Written by Christian Nordqvist