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Elizabeth Taylor

Dame Elizabeth Rosemond Taylor (27 February 1932 – 23 March 2011) was a British and American actress. She began her career as a child actress in the early 1940s and was one of the most popular stars of classical Hollywood cinema in the 1950s. She then became the world's highest paid movie star in the 1960s, remaining a well-known public figure for the rest of her life. In 1999, the American Film Institute ranked her seventh on its greatest female screen legends list.

Born in London to socially prominent American parents, Taylor moved with her family to Los Angeles in 1939 at the age of 7. She made her acting debut with a minor role in the Universal Pictures film There's One Born Every Minute (1942), but the studio ended her contract after a year. She was then signed by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and became a popular teen star after appearing in National Velvet (1944). She transitioned to mature roles in the 1950s, when she starred in the comedy Father of the Bride (1950) and received critical acclaim for her performance in the drama A Place in the Sun (1951). She starred in the historical adventure epic Ivanhoe (1952) with Robert Taylor and Joan Fontaine. Despite being one of MGM's most bankable stars, Taylor wished to end her career in the early 1950s. She resented the studio's control and disliked many of the films to which she was assigned.

She began receiving more enjoyable roles in the mid-1950s, beginning with the epic drama Giant (1956), and starred in several critically and commercially successful films in the following years. These included two film adaptations of plays by Tennessee Williams: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), and Suddenly, Last Summer (1959); Taylor won a Golden Globe for Best Actress for the latter. Although she disliked her role as a call girl in BUtterfield 8 (1960), her last film for MGM, she won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance. During the production of the film Cleopatra in 1961, Taylor and co-star Richard Burton began an extramarital affair, which caused a scandal. Despite public disapproval, they continued their relationship and were married in 1964. Dubbed "Liz and Dick" by the media, they starred in 11 films together, including The V.I.P.s (1963), The Sandpiper (1965), The Taming of the Shrew (1967), and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966). Taylor received the best reviews of her career for Woolf, winning her second Academy Award and several other awards for her performance. She and Burton divorced in 1974 but reconciled soon after, remarrying in 1975. The second marriage ended in divorce in 1976.

Taylor's acting career began to decline in the late 1960s, although she continued starring in films until the mid-1970s, after which she focused on supporting the career of her sixth husband, United States Senator John Warner. In the 1980s, she acted in her first substantial stage roles and in several television films and series. She became the second celebrity to launch a perfume brand after Sophia Loren. Taylor was one of the first celebrities to take part in HIV/AIDS activism. She co-founded the American Foundation for AIDS Research in 1985 and the Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation in 1991. From the early 1990s until her death, she dedicated her time to philanthropy, for which she received several accolades, including the Presidential Citizens Medal.

Throughout her career, Taylor's personal life was the subject of constant media attention. She was married eight times to seven men, converted to Judaism, endured several serious illnesses, and led a jet set lifestyle, including assembling one of the most expensive private collections of jewelry in the world. After many years of ill health, Taylor died from congestive heart failure in 2011, at the age of 79.

Early life

Elizabeth Rosemond Taylor was born on 27 February 1932, at Heathwood, her family's home at 8 Wildwood Road in Hampstead Garden Suburb, northwest London, England. She received dual British–American citizenship at birth as her parents, art dealer Francis Lenn Taylor (1897–1968) and stage actress Sara Sothern (1895–1994), were United States citizens, both originally from Arkansas City, Kansas.

They moved to London in 1929 and opened an art gallery on Bond Street; their first child, a son named Howard (died 2020), was born the same year. The family lived in London during Taylor's childhood. Their social circle included artists such as Augustus John and Laura Knight and politicians such as Colonel Victor Cazalet. Cazalet was Taylor's unofficial godfather and an important influence in her early life. She was enrolled in Byron House School, a Montessori school in Highgate, and was raised according to the teachings of Christian Science, the religion of her mother and Cazalet.

In early 1939, the Taylors decided to return to the United States due to fear of impending war in Europe. United States ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy contacted her father, urging him to return to the US with his family. Sara and the children left first in April 1939 aboard the ocean liner SS Manhattan and moved in with Taylor's maternal grandfather in Pasadena, California. Francis stayed behind to close the London gallery and joined them in December. In early 1940, he opened a new gallery in Los Angeles. After briefly living in Pacific Palisades, Los Angeles, with the Chapman family, the Taylor family settled in Beverly Hills, California, where the two children were enrolled in Hawthorne School.

1941–1949: Early roles and teenage stardom
In California, Taylor's mother was frequently told that her daughter should audition for films. Taylor's eyes in particular, drew attention; they were blue, to the extent of appearing violet, and were rimmed by dark double eyelashes caused by a genetic mutation. Sara was initially opposed to Taylor appearing in films, but after the outbreak of war in Europe made return there unlikely, she began to view the film industry as a way of assimilating to American society. Francis Taylor's Beverly Hills gallery had gained clients from the film industry soon after opening, helped by the endorsement of gossip columnist Hedda Hopper, a friend of the Cazalets. Through a client and a school friend's father, Taylor auditioned for both Universal Pictures and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in early 1941. Both studios offered Taylor contracts, and Sara Taylor chose to accept Universal's offer.

Taylor began her contract in April 1941 and was cast in a small role in There's One Born Every Minute (1942). She did not receive other roles, and her contract was terminated after a year. Universal's casting director explained her dislike of Taylor, stating that "the kid has nothing ... her eyes are too old, she doesn't have the face of a child." Biographer Alexander Walker agrees that Taylor looked different from the child stars of the era, such as Shirley Temple and Judy Garland. Taylor later said that, "apparently, I used to frighten grown ups, because I was totally direct."

Taylor received another opportunity in late 1942, when her father's acquaintance, MGM producer Samuel Marx, arranged for her to audition for a minor role in Lassie Come Home (1943), which required a child actress with an English accent. After a trial contract of three months, she was given a standard seven-year contract in January 1943. Following Lassie, she appeared in minor uncredited roles in two other films set in England – Jane Eyre (1943) playing Helen Burns, and The White Cliffs of Dover (1944).

Taylor was cast in her first starring role at the age of 12, when she was chosen to play a girl who wants to compete as a jockey in the exclusively male Grand National in National Velvet. She later called it "the most exciting film" of her career. MGM had been looking for a suitable actress with a British accent and the ability to ride horses since 1937, and chose Taylor at the recommendation of White Cliffs director Clarence Brown, who knew she had the required skills. As she was deemed too short, filming was pushed back several months to allow her to grow; she spent the time practicing riding. In developing her into a new star, MGM required her to wear braces to correct her teeth, and had two of her baby teeth pulled out. The studio also wanted to dye her hair and change the shape of her eyebrows, and proposed that she use the screen name "Virginia", but Taylor and her parents refused.

National Velvet became a box-office success upon its release on Christmas 1944. Bosley Crowther of The New York Times stated that "her whole manner in this picture is one of refreshing grace", while James Agee of The Nation wrote that she "is rapturously beautiful... I hardly know or care whether she can act or not."

Taylor later stated that her childhood ended when she became a star, as MGM started to control every aspect of her life. She described the studio as a "big extended factory", where she was required to adhere to a strict daily schedule: days were spent attending school and filming at the studio lot, and evenings in dancing and singing classes, and in practicing the following day's scenes. Following the success of National Velvet, MGM gave Taylor a new seven-year contract with a weekly salary of $750, and cast her in a minor role in the third film of the Lassie series, Courage of Lassie (1946). The studio also published a book of Taylor's writings about her pet chipmunk, Nibbles and Me (1946), and had paper dolls and coloring books made after her.

When Taylor turned 15 in 1947, MGM began to cultivate a more mature public image for her by organizing photo shoots and interviews that portrayed her as a "normal" teenager attending parties and going on dates. Film magazines and gossip columnists also began comparing her to older actresses such as Ava Gardner and Lana Turner. Life called her "Hollywood's most accomplished junior actress" for her two film roles that year. In the critically panned Cynthia (1947), Taylor portrayed a frail girl who defies her over-protective parents to go to the prom; in the period film Life with Father (1947), opposite William Powell and Irene Dunne, she portrayed the love interest of a stockbroker's son.

They were followed by supporting roles as a teenaged "man-stealer" who seduces her peer's date to a high school dance in the musical A Date with Judy (1948), and as a bride in the romantic comedy Julia Misbehaves (1948). This became a commercial success, grossing over $4 million in the box office. Taylor's last adolescent role was as Amy March in Mervyn LeRoy's Little Women (1949), a box-office success. The same year, Time featured Taylor on its cover, and called her the leader among Hollywood's next generation of stars, "a jewel of great price, a true sapphire."

1950–1951: Transition to adult roles

Taylor made the transition to adult roles when she turned 18 in 1950. In her first mature role, the thriller Conspirator (1949), she plays a woman who begins to suspect that her husband is a Soviet spy. Taylor had been only 16 at the time of its filming, but its release was delayed until March 1950, as MGM disliked it and feared it could cause diplomatic problems. Taylor's second film of 1950 was the comedy The Big Hangover (1950), co-starring Van Johnson. It was released in May. That same month, Taylor married hotel-chain heir Conrad "Nicky" Hilton Jr. in a highly publicized ceremony. The event was organized by MGM, and used as part of the publicity campaign for Taylor's next film, Vincente Minnelli's comedy Father of the Bride (1950), in which she appeared opposite Spencer Tracy and Joan Bennett as a bride preparing for her wedding. The film became a box-office success upon its release in June, grossing $6 million worldwide ($0 in dollars ), and was followed by a successful sequel, Father's Little Dividend (1951), ten months later.

Taylor's next film release, George Stevens' A Place in the Sun (1951), marked a departure from her earlier films. According to Taylor, it was the first film in which she had been asked to act, instead of simply being herself, and it brought her critical acclaim for the first time since National Velvet. Based on Theodore Dreiser's novel An American Tragedy (1925), it featured Taylor as a spoiled socialite who comes between a poor factory worker (Montgomery Clift) and his pregnant girlfriend (Shelley Winters). Stevens cast Taylor as she was "the only one ... who could create this illusion" of being "not so much a real girl as the girl on the candy-box cover, the beautiful girl in the yellow Cadillac convertible that every American boy sometime or other thinks he can marry."

A Place in the Sun was a critical and commercial success, grossing $3 million. Herb Golden of Variety said that Taylor's "histrionics are of a quality so far beyond anything she has done previously, that Stevens' skilled hands on the reins must be credited with a minor miracle." A.H. Weiler of The New York Times wrote that she gives "a shaded, tender performance, and one in which her passionate and genuine romance avoids the pathos common to young love as it sometimes comes to the screen."

1952–1955: Continued success at MGM

Taylor next starred in the romantic comedy Love Is Better Than Ever (1952). According to Alexander Walker, MGM cast her in the "B-picture" as a reprimand for divorcing Hilton in January 1951 after only eight months of marriage, which had caused a public scandal that reflected negatively on her. After completing Love Is Better Than Ever, Taylor was sent to Britain to take part in the historical epic Ivanhoe (1952), which was one of the most expensive projects in the studio's history. She was not happy about the project, finding the story superficial and her role as Rebecca too small. Regardless, Ivanhoe became one of MGM's biggest commercial successes, earning $11 million in worldwide rentals.

Taylor's last film made under her old contract with MGM was The Girl Who Had Everything (1953), a remake of the pre-code drama A Free Soul (1931). Despite her grievances with the studio, Taylor signed a new seven-year contract with MGM in the summer of 1952. Although she wanted more interesting roles, the decisive factor in continuing with the studio was her financial need; she had recently married British actor Michael Wilding, and was pregnant with her first child. In addition to granting her a weekly salary of $4,700 ($0 in dollars ), MGM agreed to give the couple a loan for a house, and signed her husband for a three-year contract. Due to her financial dependency, the studio now had even more control over her than previously.

Taylor's first two films made under her new contract were released ten days apart in early 1954. The first was Rhapsody, a romantic film starring her as a woman caught in a love triangle with two musicians. The second was Elephant Walk, a drama in which she played a British woman struggling to adapt to life on her husband's tea plantation in Ceylon. She had been loaned to Paramount Pictures for the film after its original star, Vivien Leigh, fell ill.

In the fall, Taylor starred in two more film releases. Beau Brummell was a Regency era period film, another project in which she was cast against her will. Taylor disliked historical films in general, as their elaborate costumes and make-up required her to wake up earlier than usual to prepare. She later said that she gave one of the worst performances of her career in Beau Brummell. The second film was Richard Brooks' The Last Time I Saw Paris, based on F. Scott Fitzgerald's short story. Although she had wanted to be cast in The Barefoot Contessa (1954) instead, Taylor liked the film, and later stated that it "convinced me I wanted to be an actress instead of yawning my way through parts." While The Last Time I Saw Paris was not as profitable as many other MGM films, it garnered positive reviews. Taylor became pregnant again during the production, and had to agree to add another year to her contract to make up for the period spent on maternity leave.

1956–1960: Critical acclaim

By the mid-1950s, the American film industry was beginning to face serious competition from television, which resulted in studios producing fewer films, and focusing instead on their quality. The change benefited Taylor, who finally found more challenging roles after several years of career disappointments. After lobbying director George Stevens, she won the female lead role in Giant (1956), an epic drama about a ranching dynasty, which co-starred Rock Hudson and James Dean. Its filming in Marfa, Texas, was a difficult experience for Taylor, as she clashed with Stevens, who wanted to break her will to make her easier to direct, and was often ill, resulting in delays. To further complicate the production, Dean died in a car accident only days after completing filming; the grieving Taylor still had to film reaction shots to their joint scenes. When Giant was released a year later, it became a box-office success, and was widely praised by critics. Although not nominated for an Academy Award like her co-stars, Taylor garnered positive reviews for her performance, with Variety calling it "surprisingly clever", and The Manchester Guardian lauding her acting as "an astonishing revelation of unsuspected gifts." It named her one of the film's strongest assets.

MGM re-united Taylor with Montgomery Clift in Raintree County (1957), a Civil War drama which it hoped would replicate the success of Gone with the Wind (1939). Taylor found her role as a mentally disturbed Southern belle fascinating, but overall disliked the film. Although the film failed to become the type of success MGM had planned, Taylor was nominated for the first time for an Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance. Taylor considered her next performance as Maggie the Cat in the screen adaptation of the Tennessee Williams play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958) a career "high point." But it coincided with one of the most difficult periods in her personal life. After completing Raintree Country, she had divorced Wilding and married producer Mike Todd. She had completed only two weeks of filming in March 1958, when Todd was killed in a plane crash. Although she was devastated, pressure from the studio and the knowledge that Todd had large debts led Taylor to return to work only three weeks later. She later said that "in a way ... [she] became Maggie", and that acting "was the only time I could function" in the weeks after Todd's death.

During the production, Taylor's personal life drew more attention when she began an affair with singer Eddie Fisher, whose marriage to actress Debbie Reynolds had been idealized by the media as the union of "America's sweethearts." The affair – and Fisher's subsequent divorce – changed Taylor's public image from a grieving widow to a "homewrecker". MGM used the scandal to its advantage by featuring an image of Taylor posing on a bed in a slip in the film's promotional posters. Cat grossed $10 million in American cinemas alone, and made Taylor the year's second-most profitable star. She received positive reviews for her performance, with Bosley Crowther of The New York Times calling her "terrific", and Variety praising her for "a well-accented, perceptive interpretation." Taylor was nominated for an Academy Award and a BAFTA.

Taylor's next film, Joseph L. Mankiewicz's Suddenly, Last Summer (1959), was another Tennessee Williams adaptation, with a screenplay by Gore Vidal and also starring Montgomery Clift and Katharine Hepburn. The independent production earned Taylor $500,000 for playing the role of a severely traumatized patient in a mental institution. Although the film was a drama about mental illness, childhood traumas, and homosexuality, it was again promoted with Taylor's sex appeal; both its trailer and poster featured her in a white swimsuit. The strategy worked, as the film was a financial success. Taylor received her third Academy Award nomination and her first Golden Globe for Best Actress for her performance.

By 1959, Taylor owed one more film for MGM, which it decided should be BUtterfield 8 (1960), a drama about a high-class call girl, in an adaptation of a John O'Hara 1935 novel of the same name. The studio correctly calculated that Taylor's public image would make it easy for audiences to associate her with the role. She hated the film for the same reason, but had no choice in the matter, although the studio agreed to her demands of filming in New York and casting Eddie Fisher in a sympathetic role. As predicted, BUtterfield 8 was a major commercial success, grossing $18 million in world rentals. Crowther wrote that Taylor "looks like a million dollars, in mink or in negligée", while Variety stated that she gives "a torrid, stinging portrayal with one or two brilliantly executed passages within." Taylor won her first Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance.

1961–1967: Cleopatra and other collaborations with Richard Burton
After completing her MGM contract, Taylor starred in 20th Century-Fox's Cleopatra (1963). According to film historian Alexander Doty, this historical epic made her more famous than ever before. She became the first movie star to be paid $1 million for a role; Fox also granted her 10% of the film's gross profits, as well as shooting the film in Todd-AO, a widescreen format for which she had inherited the rights from Mike Todd. The film's production – characterized by costly sets and costumes, constant delays, and a scandal caused by Taylor's extramarital affair with her co-star Richard Burton – was closely followed by the media, with Life proclaiming it the "Most Talked About Movie Ever Made." Filming began in England in 1960, but had to be halted several times because of bad weather and Taylor's ill health. In March 1961, she developed nearly fatal pneumonia, which necessitated a tracheotomy; one news agency erroneously reported that she had died. Once she had recovered, Fox discarded the already filmed material, and moved the production to Rome, changing its director to Joseph Mankiewicz, and the actor playing Mark Antony to Burton. Filming was finally completed in July 1962. The film's final cost was $62 million (equivalent to $ million in ), making it the most expensive film made up to that point.

Cleopatra became the biggest box-office success of 1963 in the United States; the film grossed $15.7 million at the box office (equivalent to $ million in ). Regardless, it took several years for the film to earn back its production costs, which drove Fox near to bankruptcy. The studio publicly blamed Taylor for the production's troubles and unsuccessfully sued Burton and Taylor for allegedly damaging the film's commercial prospects with their behavior. The film's reviews were mixed to negative, with critics finding Taylor overweight and her voice too thin, and unfavorably comparing her with her classically trained British co-stars. In retrospect, Taylor called Cleopatra a "low point" in her career, and said that the studio had cut out the scenes which she felt provided the "core of the characterization."

Taylor intended to follow Cleopatra by headlining an all-star cast in Fox's black comedy What a Way to Go! (1964), but negotiations fell through, and Shirley MacLaine was cast instead. In the meantime, film producers were eager to profit from the scandal surrounding Taylor and Burton, and they next starred together in Anthony Asquith's The V.I.P.s (1963), which mirrored the headlines about them. Taylor played a famous model attempting to leave her husband for a lover, and Burton her estranged millionaire husband. Released soon after Cleopatra, it became a box-office success. Taylor was also paid $500,000 (equivalent to $ million in ) to appear in a CBS television special, Elizabeth Taylor in London, in which she visited the city's landmarks and recited passages from the works of famous British writers.

After completing The V.I.P.s, Taylor took a two-year hiatus from films, during which she and Burton divorced their spouses and married each other. The supercouple continued starring together in films in the mid-1960s, earning a combined $88 million over the next decade; Burton once stated, "They say we generate more business activity than one of the smaller African nations." Biographer Alexander Walker compared these films to "illustrated gossip columns", as their film roles often reflected their public personae, while film historian Alexander Doty has noted that the majority of Taylor's films during this period seemed to "conform to, and reinforce, the image of an indulgent, raucous, immoral or amoral, and appetitive (in many senses of the word) 'Elizabeth Taylor. Taylor and Burton's first joint project following her hiatus was Vincente Minelli's romantic drama The Sandpiper (1965), about an illicit love affair between a bohemian artist and a married clergyman in Big Sur, California. Its reviews were largely negative, but it grossed a successful $14 million in the box office (equivalent to $ million in ).

Their next project, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), an adaptation of a play of the same name by Edward Albee, featured the most critically acclaimed performance of Taylor's career. She and Burton starred as Martha and George, a middle-aged couple going through a marital crisis. In order to convincingly play 50-year-old Martha, Taylor gained weight, wore a wig, and used make-up to make herself look older and tired – in stark contrast to her public image as a glamorous film star. At Taylor's suggestion, theatre director Mike Nichols was hired to direct the project, despite his lack of experience with film. The production differed from anything she had done previously, as Nichols wanted to thoroughly rehearse the play before beginning filming. Woolf was considered ground-breaking for its adult themes and uncensored language, and opened to "glorious" reviews. Variety wrote that Taylor's "characterization is at once sensual, spiteful, cynical, pitiable, loathsome, lustful, and tender." Stanley Kauffmann of The New York Times stated that she "does the best work of her career, sustained and urgent." The film also became one of the biggest commercial successes of the year. Taylor received her second Academy Award, and BAFTA, National Board of Review, and New York City Film Critics Circle awards for her performance. In 1966, Taylor and Burton performed Doctor Faustus for a week in Oxford to benefit the Oxford University Dramatic Society; he starred and she appeared in her first stage role as Helen of Troy, a part which required no speaking. Although it received generally negative reviews, Burton produced it as a film, Doctor Faustus (1967), with the same cast. It was also panned by critics and grossed only $600,000 in the box office (equivalent to $ million in ). Taylor and Burton's next project, Franco Zeffirelli's The Taming of the Shrew (1967), which they also co-produced, was more successful. It posed another challenge for Taylor, as she was the only actor in the project with no previous experience of performing Shakespeare; Zeffirelli later stated that this made her performance interesting, as she "invented the part from scratch." Critics found the play to be fitting material for the couple, and the film became a box-office success by grossing $12 million (equivalent to $ million in ).

Taylor's third film released in 1967, John Huston's Reflections in a Golden Eye, was her first without Burton since Cleopatra. Based on a novel of the same name by Carson McCullers, it was a drama about a repressed gay military officer and his unfaithful wife. It was originally slated to co-star Taylor's old friend Montgomery Clift, whose career had been in decline for several years owing to his substance abuse problems. Determined to secure his involvement in the project, Taylor even offered to pay for his insurance. But Clift died from a heart attack before filming began; he was replaced in the role by Marlon Brando. Reflections was a critical and commercial failure at the time of its release. Taylor and Burton's last film of the year was the adaptation of Graham Greene's novel, The Comedians, which received mixed reviews and was a box-office disappointment.

1968–1979: Career decline

Taylor's career was in decline by the late 1960s. She had gained weight, was in her late 30s and did not fit in with New Hollywood stars such as Jane Fonda and Julie Christie. After several years of nearly constant media attention, the public was tiring of Burton and her, and criticized their jet set lifestyle. In 1968, Taylor starred in two films directed by Joseph Losey – Boom! and Secret Ceremony – both of which were critical and commercial failures. The former, based on Tennessee Williams' The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore, features her as an ageing, serial-marrying millionaire, and Burton as a younger man who turns up on the Mediterranean island on which she has retired. Secret Ceremony is a psychological drama that also stars Mia Farrow and Robert Mitchum. Taylor's third film with George Stevens, The Only Game in Town (1970), in which she played a Las Vegas showgirl who has an affair with a compulsive gambler, played by Warren Beatty, was unsuccessful.

The three 1972 films in which Taylor acted were somewhat more successful. X Y & Zee, which portrayed Michael Caine and her as a troubled married couple, won her the David di Donatello for Best Foreign Actress. She appeared with Burton in the adaptation of Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood; although her role was small, the producers decided to give her top-billing to profit from her fame. Her third film role that year was playing a blonde diner waitress in Peter Ustinov's Faust parody Hammersmith Is Out, her tenth collaboration with Burton. Although it was overall not successful, Taylor received some good reviews, with Vincent Canby of The New York Times writing that she has "a certain vulgar, ratty charm", and Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times saying, "The spectacle of Elizabeth Taylor growing older and more beautiful continues to amaze the population." Her performance won the Silver Bear for Best Actress at the Berlin Film Festival.

Taylor and Burton's last film together was the Harlech Television film Divorce His, Divorce Hers (1973), fittingly named as they divorced the following year. Her other films released in 1973 were the British thriller Night Watch (1973) and the American drama Ash Wednesday (1973). For the latter, in which she starred as a woman who undergoes multiple plastic surgeries in an attempt to save her marriage, she received a Golden Globe nomination. Her only film released in 1974, the Italian Muriel Spark adaptation The Driver's Seat (1974), was a failure.

Taylor took fewer roles after the mid-1970s, and focused on supporting the career of her sixth husband, Republican politician John Warner, a US senator. In 1976, she participated in the Soviet-American fantasy film The Blue Bird (1976), a critical and box-office failure, and had a small role in the television film Victory at Entebbe (1976). In 1977, she sang in the critically panned film adaptation of Stephen Sondheim's musical A Little Night Music (1977).

1980–2007: Stage and television roles; retirement

After a period of semi-retirement from films, Taylor starred in The Mirror Crack'd (1980), adapted from an Agatha Christie mystery novel and featuring an ensemble cast of actors from the studio era, such as Angela Lansbury, Kim Novak, Rock Hudson, and Tony Curtis. Wanting to challenge herself, she took on her first substantial stage role, playing Regina Giddens in a Broadway production of Lillian Hellman's The Little Foxes. Instead of portraying Giddens in negative light, as had often been the case in previous productions, Taylor's idea was to show her as a victim of circumstance, explaining, "She's a killer, but she's saying, 'Sorry fellas, you put me in this position'."

The production premiered in May 1981, and had a sold-out six-month run despite mixed reviews. Frank Rich of The New York Times wrote that Taylor's performance as "Regina Giddens, that malignant Southern bitch-goddess ... begins gingerly, soon gathers steam, and then explodes into a black and thunderous storm that may just knock you out of your seat", while Dan Sullivan of the Los Angeles Times stated, "Taylor presents a possible Regina Giddens, as seen through the persona of Elizabeth Taylor. There's some acting in it, as well as some personal display." She appeared as evil socialite Helena Cassadine in the day-time soap opera General Hospital in November 1981. The following year, she continued performing The Little Foxes in London's West End, but received largely negative reviews from the British press.

Encouraged by the success of The Little Foxes, Taylor and producer Zev Buffman founded the Elizabeth Taylor Repertory Company. Its first and only production was a revival of Noël Coward's comedy Private Lives, starring Taylor and Burton. It premiered in Boston in early 1983, and although commercially successful, received generally negative reviews, with critics noting that both stars were in noticeably poor health – Taylor admitted herself to a drug and alcohol rehabilitation center after the play's run ended, and Burton died the following year. After the failure of Private Lives, Taylor dissolved her theatre company. Her only other project that year was the television film Between Friends. From the mid-1980s, Taylor acted mostly in television productions. She made cameos in the soap operas Hotel and All My Children in 1984, and played a brothel keeper in the historical mini-series North and South in 1985. She also starred in several television films, playing gossip columnist Louella Parsons in Malice in Wonderland (1985), a "fading movie star" in the drama There Must Be a Pony (1986), and a character based on Poker Alice in the eponymous Western (1987). She re-united with director Franco Zeffirelli to appear in his French-Italian biopic Young Toscanini (1988), and had the last starring role of her career in a television adaptation of Sweet Bird of Youth (1989), her fourth Tennessee Williams play. During this time, she also began receiving honorary awards for her career – the Cecil B. DeMille Award in 1985, and the Film Society of Lincoln Center's Chaplin Award in 1986.

In the 1990s, Taylor focused her time on HIV/AIDS activism. Her few acting roles included characters in the animated series Captain Planet and the Planeteers (1992) and The Simpsons (1992, 1993), and cameos in four CBS series – The Nanny, Can't Hurry Love, Murphy Brown, and High Society – all airing on February 26, 1996, to promote her new fragrance.

Her last theatrically released film was in the critically panned, but commercially successful, The Flintstones (1994), in which she played Pearl Slaghoople in a brief supporting role. Taylor received American and British honors for her career: the AFI Life Achievement Award in 1993, the Screen Actors Guild honorary award in 1997, and a BAFTA Fellowship in 1999. In 2000, she was appointed a Dame Commander in the chivalric Order of the British Empire in the millennium New Year Honours List by Queen Elizabeth II. After supporting roles in the television film These Old Broads (2001) and in the animated sitcom God, the Devil and Bob (2001), Taylor announced that she was retiring from acting to devote her time to philanthropy. She gave one last public performance in 2007, when she performed the play Love Letters at an AIDS benefit at the Paramount Studios with James Earl Jones,.

HIV/AIDS activism
Taylor was one of the first celebrities to participate in HIV/AIDS activism and helped to raise more than $270 million for the cause since the mid-1980s. She began her philanthropic work after becoming frustrated with the fact that very little was being done to combat the disease despite the media attention. She later explained for Vanity Fair that she "decided that with my name, I could open certain doors, that I was a commodity in myself – and I'm not talking as an actress. I could take the fame I'd resented and tried to get away from for so many years – but you can never get away from it – and use it to do some good. I wanted to retire, but the tabloids wouldn't let me. So, I thought: If you're going to screw me over, I'll use you."

Taylor began her philanthropic efforts in 1984, helping to organize and by hosting the first AIDS fundraiser to benefit the AIDS Project Los Angeles. In August 1985, she and Michael Gottlieb founded the National AIDS Research Foundation after her friend and former co-star Rock Hudson announced that he was dying of the disease. The following month, the foundation merged with Mathilde Krim's AIDS foundation to form the American Foundation for AIDS Research (amfAR). As amfAR's focus is on research funding, Taylor founded the Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation (ETAF) in 1991 to raise awareness and to provide support services for people with HIV/AIDS, paying for its overhead costs herself. Since her death, her estate has continued to fund ETAF's work, and donates 25% of royalties from the use of her image and likeness to the foundation. In addition to her work for people affected by HIV/AIDS in the United States, Taylor was instrumental in expanding amfAR's operations to other countries; ETAF also operates internationally.

Taylor testified before the Senate and House for the Ryan White Care Act in 1986, 1990, and 1992. She persuaded President Ronald Reagan to acknowledge the disease for the first time in a speech in 1987, and publicly criticized presidents George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton for lack of interest in combatting the disease. Taylor also founded the Elizabeth Taylor Medical Center to offer free HIV/AIDS testing and care at the Whitman-Walker Clinic in Washington, DC, and the Elizabeth Taylor Endowment Fund for the UCLA Clinical AIDS Research and Education Center in Los Angeles. In 2015, Taylor's business partner Kathy Ireland claimed that Taylor ran an illegal "underground network" that distributed medications to Americans suffering from HIV/AIDS during the 1980s, when the Food and Drug Administration had not yet approved them. The claim was challenged by several people, including amfAR's former vice-president for development and external affairs, Taylor's former publicist, and activists who were involved in Project Inform in the 1980s and 1990s.

Taylor was honored with several awards for her philanthropic work. She was made a Knight of the French Legion of Honour in 1987, and received the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award in 1993, the Screen Actors' Guild Lifetime Achievement Award for Humanitarian service in 1997, the GLAAD Vanguard Award in 2000, and the Presidential Citizens Medal in 2001.

Fragrance and jewelry brands

Taylor created a collection of fragrances whose unprecedented success helped establish the trend of celebrity-branded perfumes in later years. In collaboration with Elizabeth Arden, Inc., she began by launching two best-selling perfumes – Passion in 1987, and White Diamonds in 1991. Taylor personally supervised the creation and production of each of the 11 fragrances marketed in her name. According to biographers Sam Kashner and Nancy Schoenberger, she earned more money through the fragrance collection than during her entire acting career, and upon her death, the British newspaper The Guardian estimated that the majority of her estimated $600 million-$1 billion estate consisted of revenue from fragrances. In 2005, Taylor also founded a jewelry company, House of Taylor, in collaboration with Kathy Ireland and Jack and Monty Abramov.

Marriages, relationships, and children
Throughout her adult years, Taylor's personal life, especially her eight marriages (two to the same man), drew a large amount of media attention and public disapproval. According to biographer Alexander Walker, "Whether she liked it or not ... marriage is the matrix of the myth that began surrounding Elizabeth Taylor from [when she was sixteen]." In 1948, MGM arranged for her to date football champion Glenn Davis and she announced plans for them to marry once he returned from Korea. The following year, Taylor was briefly engaged to William Pawley Jr., son of US ambassador William D. Pawley. Film tycoon Howard Hughes also wanted to marry her, and offered to pay her parents a six-figure sum of money if she were to become his wife. Taylor declined the offer, but was otherwise eager to marry young, as her "rather puritanical upbringing and beliefs" made her believe that "love was synonymous with marriage." Taylor later described herself as being "emotionally immature" during this time due to her sheltered childhood, and believed that she could gain independence from her parents and MGM through marriage.

Taylor was 18 years old when she married Conrad "Nicky" Hilton Jr., heir to the Hilton Hotels chain, at the Church of the Good Shepherd in Beverly Hills on May 6, 1950. MGM organized the large and expensive wedding, which became a major media event. In the weeks after their wedding, Taylor realized that she had made a mistake; not only did she and Hilton have few interests in common, but he was also abusive and a heavy drinker. Taylor suffered a miscarriage during one of his violent outbursts. She announced their separation on December 14, 1950, and was granted a divorce on the grounds of mental cruelty on January 29, 1951, eight months after their wedding.

Taylor married her second husband, British actor Michael Wilding – a man 20 years her senior – in a low-key ceremony at Caxton Hall in London on February 21, 1952. She had first met him in 1948 while filming The Conspirator in England, and their relationship began when she returned to film Ivanhoe in 1951. Taylor found their age gap appealing. She wanted "the calm and quiet and security of friendship" from their relationship; he hoped that the marriage would aid his career in Hollywood. They had two sons: Michael Howard (born 1953) and Christopher Edward (born 1955). As Taylor grew older and more confident in herself, she began to drift apart from Wilding, whose failing career was also a source of marital strife. When she was away filming Giant in 1955, gossip magazine Confidential caused a scandal by claiming that he had entertained strippers at their home. Taylor and Wilding announced their separation on July 18, 1956, and were divorced on January 26, 1957.

Taylor was three months pregnant when she married her third husband, theatre and film producer Mike Todd, in Acapulco, Guerrero, Mexico, on February 2, 1957. They had one daughter, Elizabeth "Liza" Frances (born 1957). Todd, known for publicity stunts, encouraged the media attention to their marriage; for example, in June 1957, he threw a birthday party at Madison Square Garden, which was attended by 18,000 guests and broadcast on CBS. His death in a plane crash on 22 March 1958, left Taylor devastated. She was comforted by a friend of hers and Todd's, singer Eddie Fisher, with whom she soon began an affair. Fisher was still married to actress Debbie Reynolds. The affair resulted in a public scandal, with Taylor being branded a "homewrecker." Taylor and Fisher were married at the Temple Beth Sholom in Las Vegas on May 12, 1959; she later stated that she married him only due to her grief.

While filming Cleopatra in Italy in 1962, Taylor began an affair with her co-star, Welsh actor Richard Burton, although Burton was also married. Rumors about the affair began to circulate in the press, and were confirmed by a paparazzi shot of them on a yacht in Ischia. According to sociologist Ellis Cashmore, the publication of the photograph was a "turning point", beginning a new era in which it became difficult for celebrities to keep their personal lives separate from their public images. The scandal caused Taylor and Burton to be condemned for "erotic vagrancy" by the Vatican, with calls also in the US Congress to bar them from re-entering the country. Taylor was granted a divorce from Fisher on March 5, 1964, in Puerto Vallarta, Jalisco, Mexico, and married Burton 10 days later in a private ceremony at the Ritz-Carlton Montreal. Burton subsequently adopted Liza Todd and Maria McKeown (born 1961), a German orphan whose adoption process Taylor had begun while married to Fisher.

Dubbed "Liz and Dick" by the media, Taylor and Burton starred together in 11 films, and led a jet-set lifestyle, spending millions on "furs, diamonds, paintings, designer clothes, travel, food, liquor, a yacht, and a jet." Sociologist Karen Sternheimer states that they "became a cottage industry of speculation about their alleged life of excess. From reports of massive spending [...] affairs, and even an open marriage, the couple came to represent a new era of 'gotcha' celebrity coverage, where the more personal the story, the better." They divorced for the first time in June 1974, but reconciled, and remarried in Kasane, Botswana, on 10 October 1975. The second marriage lasted less than a year, ending in divorce in July 1976. Taylor and Burton's relationship was often referred to as the "marriage of the century" by the media, and she later stated, "After Richard, the men in my life were just there to hold the coat, to open the door. All the men after Richard were really just company." Soon after her final divorce from Burton, Taylor met her sixth husband, John Warner, a Republican politician from Virginia. They were married on 4 December 1976, after which Taylor concentrated on working for his electoral campaign. Once Warner had been elected to the Senate, she started to find her life as a politician's wife in Washington, D.C. boring and lonely, becoming depressed, overweight, and increasingly addicted to prescription drugs and alcohol. Taylor and Warner separated in December 1981, and divorced on 5 November 1982.

After the divorce from Warner, Taylor dated actors Anthony Geary and George Hamilton, and was engaged to Mexican lawyer Victor Luna in 1983–1984, and New York businessman Dennis Stein in 1985. She met her seventh and last husband, construction worker Larry Fortensky, at the Betty Ford Center in 1988. They were married at the Neverland Ranch of her close friend Michael Jackson on October 6, 1991. The wedding was again subject to intense media attention, with one photographer parachuting to the ranch and Taylor selling the wedding pictures to People for $1 million (equivalent to $ million in ), which she used to start her AIDS foundation. Taylor and Fortensky divorced on October 31, 1996, but remained in contact for life. She attributed the split to her painful hip operations and his obsessive-compulsive disorder. In the winter of 1999, Fortensky underwent brain surgery after falling off a balcony and was comatose for six weeks; Taylor immediately notified the hospital she would personally guarantee his medical expenses. At the end of 2010, she wrote him a letter that read: "You’re a part of my life that cannot be carved out nor do I ever wish it to be." Taylor's last phone call with Fortensky was on February 7, 2011, one day before she checked into the hospital for what turned out to be her final stay. He told her she would outlive him. Although they had been divorced for almost 15 years, Taylor left Fortensky $825,000 in her will.

Judaism
Taylor was raised as a Christian Scientist, and converted to Judaism in 1959. Although two of her husbands – Mike Todd and Eddie Fisher – were Jewish, Taylor stated that she did not convert because of them, and had wanted to do so "for a long time", and that there was "comfort and dignity and hope for me in this ancient religion that [has] survived for four thousand years... I feel as if I have been a Jew all my life." Walker believed that Taylor was influenced in her decision by her godfather, Victor Cazalet, and her mother, who were active supporters of Zionism during her childhood.

Following her conversion, Taylor became an active supporter of Jewish and Zionist causes. In 1959, she purchased $100,000 worth of Israeli bonds, which led to her films being banned by Muslim countries throughout the Middle East and Africa. She was also barred from entering Egypt to film Cleopatra in 1962, but the ban was lifted two years later after the Egyptian officials deemed that the film brought positive publicity for the country. In addition to purchasing bonds, Taylor helped to raise money for organizations such as the Jewish National Fund, and sat on the board of trustees of the Simon Wiesenthal Center.

Taylor also advocated for the right of Soviet Jews to emigrate to Israel, cancelled a visit to the USSR because of its condemnation of Israel due to the Six-Day War, and signed a letter protesting the United Nations General Assembly Resolution 3379 of 1975. In 1976, she offered herself as a replacement hostage after more than 100 Israeli civilians were taken hostage in the Entebbe skyjacking. She had a small role in the television film made about the incident, Victory at Entebbe (1976), and narrated Genocide (1981), an Academy Award-winning documentary about the Holocaust.

Style and jewelry collection

Taylor is considered a fashion icon both for her film costumes and personal style. At MGM, her costumes were mostly designed by Helen Rose and Edith Head, and in the 1960s by Irene Sharaff. Her most famous costumes include a white ball gown in A Place in the Sun (1951), a Grecian dress in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), a green A-line dress in Suddenly Last Summer (1959), and a slip and a fur coat in BUtterfield 8 (1960). Her make-up look in Cleopatra (1963) started a trend for "cat-eye" make-up done with black eyeliner.

Taylor collected jewelry through her life, and owned the 33.19 carat Krupp Diamond, the 69.42 carat Taylor-Burton Diamond, and the 50 carat La Peregrina Pearl, all three of which were gifts from husband Richard Burton. She also published a book about her collection, My Love Affair with Jewelry, in 2002. Taylor helped to popularise the work of fashion designers Valentino Garavani and Halston. She received a Lifetime of Glamour Award from the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) in 1997. After her death, her jewelry and fashion collections were auctioned by Christie's to benefit her AIDS foundation, ETAF. The jewelry sold for a record-breaking sum of $156.8 million, and the clothes and accessories for a further $5.5 million.

Illness and death

Taylor struggled with health problems for most of her life. She was born with scoliosis and broke her back while filming National Velvet in 1944. The fracture went undetected for several years, although it caused her chronic back problems. In 1956, she underwent an operation in which some of her spinal discs were removed and replaced with donated bone. Taylor was also prone to other illnesses and injuries, which often necessitated surgery; in 1961, she survived a near-fatal bout of pneumonia that required a tracheotomy. She was treated for the pneumonia with bacteriophage. In 1968 she underwent an emergency hysterectomy, which exacerbated her back problems and contributed to hip problems. Perhaps self-medicating, she was addicted to alcohol and prescription pain killers and tranquilizers. She was treated at the Betty Ford Center for seven weeks from December 1983 to January 1984, becoming the first celebrity to openly admit herself to the clinic. She relapsed later in the decade and entered rehabilitation again in 1988. Taylor also struggled with her weight – she became overweight in the 1970s, especially after her marriage to Senator John Warner, and published a diet book about her experiences, Elizabeth Takes Off (1988). Taylor was a heavy smoker until she experienced a severe bout of pneumonia in 1990.

Taylor's health increasingly declined during the last two decades of her life and she rarely attended public events after 1996. Taylor had serious bouts of pneumonia in 1990 and 2000, two hip replacement surgeries in the mid-1990s, a surgery for a benign brain tumor in 1997, and successful treatment for skin cancer in 2002. She used a wheelchair due to her back problems and was diagnosed with congestive heart failure in 2004. She died of the illness aged 79 on March 23, 2011, at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, six weeks after being hospitalized. Her funeral took place the following day at the Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California. The service was a private Jewish ceremony presided by Rabbi Jerome Cutler. At Taylor's request, the ceremony began 15 minutes behind schedule, as, according to her representative, "She even wanted to be late for her own funeral." She was entombed in the cemetery's Great Mausoleum.

Los Angeles residence
Taylor lived at 700 Nimes Road in the Bel Air district of Los Angeles from 1982 until her death in 2011. The art photographer Catherine Opie created an eponymous photographic study of the house in 2011.

Legacy
Taylor was one of the last stars of classical Hollywood cinema and one of the first modern celebrities. During the era of the studio system, she exemplified the classic film star. She was portrayed as different from "ordinary" people, and her public image was carefully crafted and controlled by MGM. When the era of classical Hollywood ended in the 1960s, and paparazzi photography became a normal feature of media culture, Taylor came to define a new type of celebrity whose real private life was the focus of public interest. "More than for any film role," Adam Bernstein of The Washington Post wrote, "she became famous for being famous, setting a media template for later generations of entertainers, models, and all variety of semi-somebodies."

Regardless of the acting awards she won during her career, Taylor's film performances were often overlooked by contemporary critics; according to film historian Jeanine Basinger, "No actress ever had a more difficult job in getting critics to accept her onscreen as someone other than Elizabeth Taylor... Her persona ate her alive." Her film roles often mirrored her personal life, and many critics continue to regard her as always playing herself, rather than acting. In contrast, Mel Gussow of The New York Times stated that "the range of [Taylor's] acting was surprisingly wide", despite the fact that she never received any professional training. Film critic Peter Bradshaw called her "an actress of such sexiness it was an incitement to riot – sultry and queenly at the same time", and "a shrewd, intelligent, intuitive acting presence in her later years." David Thomson stated that "she had the range, nerve, and instinct that only Bette Davis had had before – and like Davis, Taylor was monster and empress, sweetheart and scold, idiot and wise woman." Five films in which she starred – Lassie Come Home, National Velvet, A Place in the Sun, Giant, and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? – have been preserved in the National Film Registry, and the American Film Institute has named her the seventh greatest female screen legend of classical Hollywood cinema.

Taylor has also been discussed by journalists and scholars interested in the role of women in Western society. Camille Paglia writes that Taylor was a "pre-feminist woman" who "wields the sexual power that feminism cannot explain and has tried to destroy. Through stars like Taylor, we sense the world-disordering impact of legendary women like Delilah, Salome, and Helen of Troy." In contrast, cultural critic M.G. Lord calls Taylor an "accidental feminist", stating that while she did not identify as a feminist, many of her films had feminist themes and "introduced a broad audience to feminist ideas." Similarly, Ben W. Heineman Jr. and Cristine Russell write in The Atlantic that her role in Giant "dismantled stereotypes about women and minorities."

Taylor is considered a gay icon, and received widespread recognition for her HIV/AIDS activism. After her death, GLAAD issued a statement saying that she "was an icon not only in Hollywood, but in the LGBT community, where she worked to ensure that everyone was treated with the respect and dignity we all deserve", and Sir Nick Partridge of the Terrence Higgins Trust called her "the first major star to publicly fight fear and prejudice towards AIDS." According to Paul Flynn of The Guardian, she was "a new type of gay icon, one whose position is based not on tragedy, but on her work for the LGBTQ community." Speaking of her charity work, former President Bill Clinton said at her death, "Elizabeth's legacy will live on in many people around the world whose lives will be longer and better because of her work and the ongoing efforts of those she inspired."

Since Taylor's death, House of Taylor, Elizabeth Taylor's estate, has preserved Taylor's legacy through content, partnerships, and products. The estate is managed by three trustees selected by Elizabeth prior to her death. They continue to be involved with The Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation and oversee The Elizabeth Taylor Archive.

In 2022, House of Taylor released Elizabeth The First, a 10-part podcast series with Imperative Entertainment and Kitty Purry Productions and narrated by Katy Perry. In December 2022, Elizabeth Taylor: The Grit & Glamour of an Icon by Kate Andersen Brower, the first Elizabeth Taylor biography authorized by the estate, was released.

In 2019, it was announced that Rachel Weisz would portray Taylor in A Special Relationship, an upcoming film about Taylor's journey from actress to activist written by Simon Beaufoy.

In 2024, it was announced that Kim Kardashian would executive produce and feature in a docuseries about Taylor. Commissioned by the BBC, it's been given the working title Elizabeth Taylor: Rebel Superstar.

General sources

 * Dye, David (1988). Child and Youth Actors: Filmography of Their Entire Careers, 1914-1985. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., pp. 226–227.
 * Dye, David (1988). Child and Youth Actors: Filmography of Their Entire Careers, 1914-1985. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., pp. 226–227.
 * Dye, David (1988). Child and Youth Actors: Filmography of Their Entire Careers, 1914-1985. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., pp. 226–227.
 * Dye, David (1988). Child and Youth Actors: Filmography of Their Entire Careers, 1914-1985. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., pp. 226–227.
 * Dye, David (1988). Child and Youth Actors: Filmography of Their Entire Careers, 1914-1985. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., pp. 226–227.
 * Dye, David (1988). Child and Youth Actors: Filmography of Their Entire Careers, 1914-1985. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., pp. 226–227.
 * Dye, David (1988). Child and Youth Actors: Filmography of Their Entire Careers, 1914-1985. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., pp. 226–227.

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title: Elizabeth Taylor


text:
Talk:Elizabeth Taylor

Ancestors

 * Google Search:
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69.181.23.220 (talk) 00:10, 22 September 2018 (UTC)

Long lead
This lead for this article is really long, longer than those of most other film stars and should probably be reduced by between 5 and 10 lines. User:Informed analysis (talk | contribs) 14:02, 4 October 2019

Sterilized / Hysterectomy
Should her entry mention that her husband, Mike Todd, had her sterilized?

The IMDb entry of her daughter, Liza Todd, mentions this:

https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0123654/bio?ref_=nm_ov_bio_sm

As does an Express UK article (spelled sterilised):

https://www.express.co.uk/expressyourself/237051/How-Elizabeth-Taylor-lived-life-to-the-full

The above article also states that her sterilization led her to adopt her fourth child, Maria.

Neither article mentions if she was given any say in the matter, and husbands back then could unilaterally decide things like this, so she may have been unwillingly sterilized.

It may also be worth noting that hysterectomies have been linked to higher rates of heart disease, which was the cause of Liz Taylor's death, and also back pain (which afflicted Liz Taylor):

https://www.health.harvard.edu/heart-health/hysterectomy-linked-to-increase-in-heart-disease

https://www.hersfoundation.org/2011/03/elizabeth-taylor-was-also-one-in-three-women/ (note that this is a third source mentioning her sterilization)

This page states that her hysterectomy was a decade after Liza Todd's birth -- well after Mike Todd was dead, and also after the adoption of her fourth child, Maria -- but she may have been sterilized first by some method other than hysterectomy at the direction of Mike Todd, then received the hysterectomy a decade later:

https://www.khou.com/article/entertainment/elizabeth-taylor-spent-a-life-in-and-out-of-hospitals/285-320708562 — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2605:A601:ACA4:1100:D98F:94DB:6FFD:909 (talk) 05:50, 12 November 2020 (UTC)

 * Point of order: The Express article does not say husband Mike Todd "had her sterilized". It says "Taylor had been sterilised by 1964 after Liza’s difficult birth..." your description strongly implies a lack of agency, and coersion.

 * Your comment includes a lot of speculation. You wrote she may have been forced.  Well, speculation, on the part of RS, can merit a place in articles.  But would have to be properly attributed to the RS doing the speculation.  Neither my speculation or your speculation belongs in article space.

 * Coverage of this requires compliance with WP:UNDUE. If RS hardly touch it, it probably merits very little coverage.   Geo Swan (talk) 20:39, 28 December 2020 (UTC)

Casa Kimberly
Should Casa Kimberly be linked or mentioned anywhere in the article? --- Another Believer ( Talk ) 17:27, 31 January 2023 (UTC)

Hypertrichosis
This might have come up before, but is there a reason why Taylor's reported hypertrichosis hasn't been mentioned in the section about her early life? - Jack Sebastian (talk) 04:17, 11 May 2023 (UTC)

title: Talk:Elizabeth Taylor


text:
On the Waterfront

On the Waterfront is a 1954 American crime drama film, directed by Elia Kazan and written by Budd Schulberg. It stars Marlon Brando, and features Karl Malden, Lee J. Cobb, Rod Steiger, Pat Henning and Eva Marie Saint in her film debut. The musical score was composed by Leonard Bernstein. The black-and-white film was inspired by "Crime on the Waterfront" by Malcolm Johnson, a series of articles published in November–December 1948 in the New York Sun which won the 1949 Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting, but the screenplay by Budd Schulberg is directly based on his own original story. The film focuses on union violence and corruption among longshoremen, while detailing widespread corruption, extortion, and racketeering on the waterfronts of Hoboken, New Jersey.

On the Waterfront was a critical and commercial success and is considered one of the greatest films ever made. It received twelve Academy Award nominations and won eight, including Best Picture, Best Actor for Brando, Best Supporting Actress for Saint, and Best Director for Kazan. In 1997, it was ranked by the American Film Institute as the eighth-greatest American movie of all time; in AFI's 2007 list, it was ranked 19th. It is Bernstein's only original film score not adapted from a stage production with songs.

In 1989, On the Waterfront was one of the first 25 films to be deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" by the Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry.

Plot
New York prize fighter Terry Malloy's career was cut short when he purposely lost a fight at the request of mob boss Johnny Friendly. Terry now works for Friendly's labor union as a longshoreman while his older, more educated brother Charley is Friendly's right-hand man. Terry is coerced into luring fellow worker Joey Doyle onto a rooftop, where he believes Friendly's henchmen want to talk Joey out of testifying to the Waterfront Crime Commission. When they instead murder Joey by throwing him off the roof, Terry confronts Friendly, but is threatened and bribed into acquiescence.

Joey's sister Edie shames priest Father Barry into calling the dockworkers to a meeting, where he tries unsuccessfully to persuade them to stand together. Terry attends as a snitch for Friendly, but when the meeting is violently broken up by Friendly's men he helps Edie escape and misses Father Barry convincing one worker to testify. Friendly and Charley are angry at Terry's involvement with Edie and for not informing them of the testimony. The worker who testified is killed in a staged workplace accident.

Father Barry makes a speech comparing the murders to Christ's crucifixion. Terry's unwillingness to testify lessens with his growing feelings for Edie and her pursuit of justice. He confesses his role in Joey's death to Father Barry and later to Edie, who runs from him.

Friendly sends Charley with a job offer to keep Terry quiet. Knowing Friendly will have Terry killed if he refuses, Charley tries to persuade his brother, eventually threatening him with a gun. Terry waves him away and expresses regret about throwing his best fight, blaming Charley for setting up the fix. Charley gives Terry the gun and tells him to run. Terry finds Edie and they kiss. Hearing Terry's name called, they run out and find Charley's body hung in the alley.

Terry goes to a bar to shoot Friendly, but Father Barry persuades him to instead testify in court. Following Terry's damning testimony Friendly is cut off from his powerful friends and facing indictment. Friendly bars Terry from union jobs. At the dock everyone is called to work except Terry, who taunts Friendly, shouting that he is proud to have testified.

Friendly goads Terry into attacking him. He calls for his thugs, who severely beat Terry. The longshoremen refuse to work unless Terry is also allowed to work. Father Barry tells Terry that he lost the battle but can win the war if he can walk into the warehouse. Terry stumbles to the warehouse, where the boss nods to Terry and tells them to get to work. The men follow Terry inside, ignoring Friendly as he berates them. The door closes, leaving Friendly outside.

Screenplay and political context
The film is widely considered to be Elia Kazan's answer to those who criticized him for identifying eight Communists in the film industry before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) in 1952. One of Kazan's critics was his friend and collaborator, the noted playwright Arthur Miller, who had earlier written the first version of the script, originally titled The Hook. Kazan had agreed to direct it, and in 1951 they met with Harry Cohn at Columbia Pictures about making the picture. Cohn agreed in principle to make The Hook, but there were concerns about the portrayal of corrupt union officials. When Cohn asked that the antagonists be changed to Communists, Miller refused. Cohn sent a letter telling Miller it was interesting he had resisted Columbia's desire to make the movie "pro-American". Kazan asked Miller to rewrite the script; Miller declined due to his disenchantment with Kazan's friendly testimony before the HUAC. Kazan then replaced Miller with Budd Schulberg.

Cobb's character of Johnny Friendly was partly modeled on Johnny Dio, a real-life mobster known for involvement in labor racketeering.

Casting
According to Richard Schickel in his biography of Kazan, Marlon Brando initially refused the role of Terry Malloy, and Frank Sinatra (a native of Hoboken, where the film was being made) then had "a handshake deal" –but no formally signed contract –to play the part, even attending an initial costume fitting. But Kazan still favored Brando for the role, partly because casting Brando would assure a larger budget for the picture. While Brando's agent, Jay Kanter, attempted to persuade Brando to change his mind, Kazan enlisted actor Karl Malden, whom Kazan considered more suited to a career as a director than as an actor, to direct and film a screen test of a "more Brando-like" actor as Terry Malloy, in an effort to persuade producer Sam Spiegel that "an actor like Marlon Brando" could perform the role more forcefully than Sinatra. To that end, Malden filmed a screen test of Actors Studio members Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward performing the love scene between Terry and Edie. Persuaded by the Newman/Woodward screen test, Spiegel agreed to reconsider Brando for the role, and shortly afterward, Kanter convinced Brando to reconsider his refusal. Within a week, Brando signed a contract to perform in the film. At that point, a furious Sinatra demanded to be cast in the role of Father Barry, the waterfront priest. It was left to Spiegel to break the news to Sinatra that Malden had been signed for this role.

Filming locations
On the Waterfront was filmed over 36 days on location in various places in Hoboken, New Jersey, including the docks, workers' slum dwellings, bars, littered alleys, and rooftops. The church used for exterior scenes in the film was the historic Our Lady of Grace, built in 1874, while the interiors were shot at the Church of St. Peter and St. Paul at 400 Hudson Street.

Reception
Upon its release, the film received positive reviews from critics, and was a commercial success, earning an estimated $4.2 million at the North American box office in 1954. In his July 29, 1954, review, New York Times critic A. H. Weiler called the film "an uncommonly powerful, exciting, and imaginative use of the screen by gifted professionals".

On Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds a score of 99% from 111 reviews, with an average rating of 9.2/10. The website's critics consensus reads, "With his electrifying performance in Elia Kazan's thought-provoking, expertly constructed melodrama, Marlon Brando redefined the possibilities of acting for film and helped permanently alter the cinematic landscape". On Metacritic, the film holds a weighted average score of 91 out of 100 based on 15 critics, indicating "universal acclaim".

Gaining the Academy Award for Best Actor and being named the greatest and second-greatest film performance of all time by Aaron West of Criterion and by Premiere respectively,  Brando's performance is regarded as one of the watershed moments in the history of movies. Through his portrayal of Terry Malloy, Brando popularized method acting and conclusively exemplified the power of Stanislavski-based approach in cinema. Praising Brando in 2004, director Martin Scorsese noted: "Everything that we know about the power of great screen acting relates back to him: when you watch his work in On the Waterfront ... you're watching the purest poetry imaginable, in dynamic motion". Kazan, the director of the film, would later write in his book, "If there is a better performance by a man in the history of film in America, I don't know what it is."

Al Pacino, recounting his own memories on first seeing On the Waterfront, told Playboy in a 1979 interview that he concentrated more on the lead actor than the film itself, "I couldn't move. I couldn't leave the theatre. I'd never seen the like of it." Anthony Hopkins said, "When you see Brando in the famous cab scene in On the Waterfront, it's still breathtaking." In a eulogy for Brando, Jack Nicholson described his display "probably the height of any age", and added that, "You just couldn't take your eyes off the guy. He was spellbinding."

Awards and nominations
In 1989, the film was deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" by the Library of Congress, and selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry.

In 1995, it made it on the Vatican's list of 45 greatest films.

American Film Institute recognition
 * AFI's 100 Years... 100 Movies – #8
 * AFI's 100 Years... 100 Heroes and Villains:
 * Terry Malloy – #23 Hero
 * AFI's 100 Years... 100 Movie Quotes:
 * "You don't understand! I coulda had class. I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody instead of a bum, which is what I am." – #3
 * AFI's 100 Years of Film Scores – #22
 * AFI's 100 Years... 100 Cheers – #36
 * AFI's 100 Years... 100 Movies (10th Anniversary Edition) – #19

Home media
The first home video release of the film was by Columbia Pictures Home Entertainment in 1982, on VHS and Beta. RCA/Columbia Pictures Home Video later re-released it in 1984, 1986, and 1990, respectively, the latter being a part of the Columbia Classics line-up. Columbia TriStar later reissued the film on VHS in 1995 as part of the line-up's "Studio Heritage Collection", and the first DVD version was released in 2001. Among the special features is the featurette "Contender: Mastering the Method", a video photo gallery, an interview with Elia Kazan, an audio commentary, filmographies, production notes, and theatrical trailers. The film has been added to the Criterion Collection.

The 2013 Criterion Collection release presents the film in three aspect ratios: 1.66:1, 1.85:1, and 1.33:1. The accompanying booklet explains the reasoning behind this choice: "In 1953, Columbia Pictures was transitioning to the new widescreen format and declared that all its upcoming films, including On The Waterfront, would be suitable for projection in any aspect ratio from the full frame of 1.33:1 to the then widest standard of 1.85:1. The customary frame of European cinematographer Boris Kaufman (Twelve Angry Men, Baby Doll) split the difference at 1.66:1, so that all that was required was for him to leave extra room at the top and bottom of the frame and make sure that nothing essential would be lost in the widescreen presentation. At its premiere in 1954, On The Waterfront was projected at 1.85:1. Over subsequent decades, millions of television viewers became accustomed to seeing the film with the open-matte 1.33:1 framing, a presentation that has carried over into the home video era. Here, for the first time, Criterion is presenting the film in all three aspect ratios so that viewers can compare and choose the version they prefer."

Adaptations
In the same year that the film was released, Budd Schulberg published a novel simply entitled Waterfront based on his script. In the novel Terry Malloy dies. It is more heavily focused on the priest who stands up to the mob, and narrated in first person by him.

In 1984, the film script was adapted to stage by Schulberg, opening on Broadway in November. It had several technical innovations for the time, including lasers, filmlike scenic dissolves and sounds that enveloped the audience. As with Schulberg's earlier novel, the motivations of Father Barry are made more explicit, and the ending is less happy. It was revised in 1995 and lasted for only 8 performances, losing $2.6 million, a record on Broadway for a non-musical at the time.

The Indian film Kabzaa (1988) and Ghulam (1998) are inspired by On the Waterfront.

A 2009 British stage production was directed by Steven Berkoff, who also played Johnny Friendly, with Simon Merrells as Terry. It played at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket in London, after the Nottingham Playhouse and the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

title: On the Waterfront


text:
John Perry Barlow

John Perry Barlow (October 3, 1947 – February 7, 2018) was an American poet, essayist, cattle rancher, and cyberlibertarian political activist who had been associated with both the Democratic and Republican parties. He was also a lyricist for the Grateful Dead, a founding member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Freedom of the Press Foundation, and an early fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society.

Early life and education
Barlow was born in Sublette County, Wyoming near the town of Cora, the only child of Norman Walker Barlow (1905–1972), a Republican state legislator, and his wife, Miriam Adeline Barlow ( Jenkins, later Bailey; 1905–1999), who married in 1929.

Barlow's paternal ancestors were Mormon pioneers. He grew up on Bar Cross Ranch in Cora, Wyoming, a 22000 acre property his great-uncle founded in 1907, and attended elementary school in a one-room schoolhouse. Raised as a devout Mormon, he was prohibited from watching television until the sixth grade, when his parents allowed him to "absorb televangelists".

Although Barlow's academic record was erratic throughout his secondary education, he "had his pick of top eastern universities... simply because he was from Wyoming, where few applications originated". In 1969, he graduated from Wesleyan University's College of Letters. He claimed to have served as Wesleyan's student body president until the administration "tossed him into a sanitarium" following a drug-induced attempted suicide attack in Boston, Massachusetts. After two weeks of rehabilitation, he returned to his studies. In his senior year, he became a part-time resident of New York City's East Village and immersed himself in Andy Warhol's Factory demimonde, cultivating a friendship with Rene Ricard and developing a brief addiction to heroin.

As he neared graduation, Barlow was admitted to Harvard Law School and was contracted to write a novel by Farrar, Straus and Giroux at the behest of his mentor, the autodidactic Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and historian Paul Horgan. Initially supported by a $5,000 or $1,000 advance from the publisher, he decided to eschew these options in favor of spending the next two years traveling around the world, including a nine-month sojourn in India, a riotous winter in a summer cottage on Long Island Sound in Connecticut, and a screenwriting foray in Los Angeles. Barlow eventually finished the novel, but it was rejected by several publishers (including Farrar, Straus and Giroux) and remains unpublished. During this period, he also "lived beside Needle Park on New York's Upper West Side and dealt cocaine in Spanish Harlem".

Grateful Dead
At age 15, Barlow became a student at the Fountain Valley School in Colorado Springs, Colorado. There he met Bob Weir, who later co-founded the Grateful Dead. Weir and Barlow maintained a close friendship through the years.

As a frequent visitor during college to Timothy Leary's facility in Millbrook, New York, Barlow was introduced to LSD; he later claimed to have consumed the substance over 1,000 times. These transformative experiences led him to distance himself from Mormonism. He went on to facilitate the first meeting between the Grateful Dead and the Leary organization (who recognized each other as kindred souls in spite of their differing philosophical approaches) in June 1967.

While on his way to California to reunite with the Grateful Dead in 1971, Barlow stopped at his family's ranch, not intending to stay. His father had suffered a debilitating stroke in 1966 before dying in 1972, resulting in a $700,000 business debt. Dismayed by the situation, Barlow changed his plans and began practicing animal husbandry under the auspices of the Bar Cross Land and Livestock Company in Cora, Wyoming, for almost two decades. To support the ranch, he continued to write and sell spec scripts. In the meantime, Barlow was still able to play an active role in the Grateful Dead while recruiting many unconventional part-time ranch hands from the mainstream as well as the counterculture. Prior to his death in 2018, John Byrne Cooke intended to produce a documentary film (provisionally titled The Bar Cross Ranch) that documented this era.

Barlow became interested in collaborating with Weir at a Grateful Dead show at the Capitol Theatre in Port Chester, New York, in February 1971. Until then, Weir had mostly worked with resident Dead lyricist Robert Hunter. Hunter preferred that those who sang his songs stick to his "canonical" lyrics rather than improvise additions or rearrange words. A feud erupted backstage over a couplet in "Sugar Magnolia" from the band's most recent release (most likely "She can dance a Cajun rhythm/Jump like a Willys in four-wheel drive"), culminating in a disgruntled Hunter summoning Barlow and telling him "take [Weir]—he's yours".

In late 1971, with a deal for a solo album in hand and only two songs completed, Weir and Barlow began to write together for the first time. They co-wrote songs such as "Cassidy", "Mexicali Blues" and "Black-Throated Wind", all three of which remained in the repertoires of the Grateful Dead and of Weir's varied solo projects. Barlow subsequently collaborated with Grateful Dead keyboardist Brent Mydland, a partnership that culminated in four songs on 1989's Built to Last. He also wrote one song ("The Devil I Know") with Mydland's successor, Vince Welnick.

Internet activism
In 1986, Barlow joined The WELL, an online community then known for a strong Deadhead presence. He served on the company's board of directors for several years. In 1990, Barlow founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) with fellow digital-rights activists John Gilmore and Mitch Kapor.

As a founder of EFF, Barlow helped publicize the Secret Service raid on Steve Jackson Games. His involvement is documented in The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier (1992) by Bruce Sterling. EFF later sponsored the groundbreaking case Steve Jackson Games, Inc. v. United States Secret Service in support of Steve Jackson Games. Steve Jackson Games won the case in 1993.

In 1996, Barlow was invited to speak about his work in cyberspace to a middle school classroom at North Shore Country Day School. This event was highly influential upon the life of then-student Aaron Swartz: Swartz's father Robert recalls Aaron coming home that day a changed person. That year, Barlow also wrote "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace", a widely disseminated creed for the Internet.

In 2003, Barlow met the recently appointed Brazilian Minister of Culture Gilberto Gil at the event Tactic Media Brazil to discuss the perspectives of digital inclusion and political participation, which in the following years helped shape Brazilian governmental policy on intellectual property and digital media. In 2004, the two began working together to expand the availability and variety of Brazilian music to remix and share online. At the same time, as one of the "digerati", Barlow was among the first users of the invitation-only social network Orkut at its inception. He decided to send all of his 100 invitations to friends in Brazil; two years later, some 11 million internet users in that country (out of 14 million total) were on the social network.

Writing
From 1971 to 1995, Barlow wrote lyrics for the Grateful Dead, mostly through his relationship with Weir. Barlow's songs include "Cassidy" (about Neal Cassady and Cassidy Law), "Estimated Prophet", "Black-Throated Wind", "Hell in a Bucket", "Mexicali Blues", "The Music Never Stopped" and "Throwing Stones". Barlow wrote extensively for Wired magazine, as well as The New York Times, Nerve, and Communications of the ACM. In his writings, he explained the wonder of the Internet. The Internet to him was more than a computer network; he called it an "electronic frontier". "He frequently wrote in language that echoed Henry Morton Stanley's African diary. 'Imagine discovering a continent so vast that it may have no end to its dimensions. Imagine a new world with more resources than all our future greed might exhaust, more opportunities than there will ever be entrepreneurs enough to exploit, and a peculiar kind of real estate that expands with development. Imagine a place where trespassers leave no footprints, where goods can be stolen infinite number of times and yet remain in the possession of their original owners, where business you never heard of can own the history of your personal affairs.'"

Barlow's writings include "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace", written in response to the enactment of the Communications Decency Act in 1996. The EFF saw the law as a threat to the independence and sovereignty of cyberspace. He argued that the cyberspace legal order would reflect the ethical deliberation of the community instead of the coercive power that characterized real-space governance. Since online "identities have no bodies", they found it inappropriate to obtain order in the cyberspace by physical coercion. Instead, ethics, enlightened self-interest and the commonwealth were the elements they believed to create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace.

In his 1990 piece "Crime and Puzzlement: in advance of the law on the electronic frontier", Barlow wrote about his firsthand experience with Phiber Optik (Mark Abene) and Acid Phreak (Elias Ladopoulos) from the hacker group Masters of Deception, and mentioned Kevin Mitnick—all of whom were engaged in phone phreaking. The title alludes to Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky.

Barlow is credited with popularizing of the concept of pronoia (defined as the opposite of paranoia) and was considered a celebrity ally of the Zippy Pronoia Tour in 1994.

In 1998, Barlow wrote the article "Africa Rising: Everything You Know About Africa Is Wrong" for Wired, which documented the start of his extensive travels as he worked to expand Internet access across the continent: "I went from Mombasa to Tombouctou, experiencing various parts of Kenya, Ghana, the Ivory Coast, Mali, Uganda, and the Virunga volcano area where Uganda, Rwanda, and the Congo meet. Part of the idea was that I would attempt to email Wired a series of dispatches on my travels. The act of finding a port into cyberspace would be part of the adventure… Before I left, I believed Africans could proceed directly from the agricultural epoch into an information economy without having to submit to the dreary indignities and social pathologies of industrialization".

Barlow also returned to writing lyrics, most recently with The String Cheese Incident's mandolinist and vocalist Michael Kang, including their song "Desert Dawn". He was seen many times with Carolyn Garcia (whose monologue is dubbed on the eponymous track "Mountain Girl" ) at their concerts mixing with the fans and members in the band, and was a close friend of String Cheese Incident producer Jerry Harrison. He also participated with the Chicago-based jam band Mr. Blotto on their release Barlow Shanghai. Barlow was a spiritual mentor and student of Kemp Muhl and Sean Lennon, collaborating with their band The Ghost of a Saber Tooth Tiger and making a cameo in their 2014 music video "Animals".

One of Barlow's works that has remained in circulation is his "Principles of Adult Behavior", which he wrote in 1977 on the eve of his 30th birthday and continued to use to describe his approach to life. He described his reason for writing these as he was about to enter adulthood, "my wariness of the pursuit of happiness might be a subtle form of treason". While he considered most of the 25 statements similar to the platitudes Polonius dispensed to Prince Hamlet, the 15th attracted attention: "Avoid the pursuit of happiness. Seek to define your mission and pursue that". That was counter to prevailing thought and "un-American". Barlow saw this more as a way to challenge how one perceived their life, their job, and their goals in life, and to not see achieving happiness as "an obligation [one owes] to Jefferson, the United States, or God Itself".

Politics
Barlow was chairman of the Sublette County Republican Party, and served as western Wyoming campaign coordinator of Dick Cheney’s 1978 Congressional campaign.

Barlow was president of the Wyoming Outdoor Council from 1978 to 1984.

He was chairman of the Sublette County Master Plan Design Commission and served on the Sublette County Planning and Zoning Commission for many years; in that capacity, he was one of five ranchers who administered water distribution in the New Fork Irrigation District (an area of nearly 100,000 acres serving about 35 ranchers).

Despite having once lauded Cheney as "the smartest man I've ever met [with] the possible exception of Bill Gates", Barlow renounced Cheney before his vice presidency, owing to his perceived repudiation of environmental and civil-rights issues in Congress. Barlow opined that "Dick's votes… were parts of complex deals aimed at enhancing his own power… [H]e has the least interest in human beings of anyone I have ever met".

Barlow was named "One of the 25 Most Influential People in Financial Services" in the June 1999 issue of FutureBanker Magazine. By the early 2000s, Barlow was unable to reconcile his ardent libertarianism with the prevailing neoconservative movement, and "didn't feel tempted to vote for Bush". In 2004, he said that he was "voting for John Kerry, though with little enthusiasm".

Contemporaneously, he characterized cocaine derogatorily as a "Republican drug" that "makes its users self-obsessed, aggressive, and greedy". Barlow subsequently said that he remained a Republican, most notably during an appearance on The Colbert Report on March 26, 2007, and also claimed to be an anarchist.

Barlow said he voted for Natural Law Party Presidential candidate John Hagelin in 2000 after discovering in the voting booth that his friend Nat Goldhaber was Hagelin's running mate. He said in 2004: "I'm embarrassed for my country that in my entire voting life, there has never been a major-party candidate whom I felt I could vote for. All of my presidential votes, whether for George Wallace, Dick Gregory, or John Hagelin, have been protest votes". Barlow condemned Donald Trump in November 2016, characterizing him as a "thorough creep" and "toxic asshole" in a Facebook "micromanifesto".

Later work
Until his death, Barlow served on the EFF's board of directors, where he was listed as a co-founder after previously serving as vice chairman. The EFF was designed to mediate the "inevitable conflicts that have begun to occur on the border between Cyberspace and the physical world". It tried to build a legal wall separating and protecting the Internet from territorial government, especially the US government. In 2012, Barlow was one of the founders of the EFF-related Freedom of the Press Foundation and also served on its board of directors until his death. He had several public conversations via video conference with fellow Freedom of the Press Foundation Board of Directors member Edward Snowden, and appeared in interviews with Julian Assange of WikiLeaks touting Snowden as a hero.

Barlow was a Fellow of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School (1997–2007; Fellow Emeritus thereafter); a member of the advisory board of Diamond Management & Technology Consultants (1994–2008); a member of the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences; and "professor of cyberspace" (2011) at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland.

In his final years, Barlow spent much of his time on the road, lecturing about and consulting on civil rights, freedom of speech, the state of the internet and the EFF. He delivered lectures and panel discussions at TWiT Live, TedxHamburg, Hamburg (Germany), Greenfest SF, Civitas (Norwegian think tank), Internet Society (New York Chapter), the USC Center on Public Diplomacy, and the European Graduate School. On September 16, 2012, he was a presenter at TEDxSantaCruz, in Santa Cruz, California.

On September 8, 2014, Barlow was the first speaker in the Art, Activism, and Technology: The 50th Anniversary of the Free Speech Movement colloquium series at University of California, Berkeley.

Barlow also served on the advisory boards of the Marijuana Policy Project, Clear Path International, TTI/Vanguard, the Hypothes.is project, the stakeholder engagement nonprofit Future 500 and the global company Touch Light Media founded by Anita Ondine. He was a collaborator on the WetheData project founded by Juliette Powell.

He was Vice President at Algae Systems, a Nevada-based company with a working demo-scale pilot plant in Daphne, Alabama, dedicated to commercializing novel methods at the water-energy nexus for growing microalgae offshore as a second-generation biofuels feedstock and converting it to useful crude via hydrothermal liquefaction, while simultaneously treating wastewater, reducing carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere, and producing biochar.

At Startup Grind Jackson Hole on March 13, 2015, Barlow said that he was motivated to team up with Algae Systems after undergoing back surgery to address pain from an old ranching injury, while he had been an advisor to Herb Allison (president of Merrill Lynch at the time) and working to completely "electronify" financial transactions and speculative asset assembly. The surgery successfully alleviated the pain and catalyzed Barlow to change his focus from building wealth to building infrastructure in order to do something about the "amount of alterations we are already enacting on Planet Earth… We are not necessarily making it warmer, but weirder". At Startup Grind Jackson Hole, Barlow also explained how once over tea with "Grandmother of the Conservation Movement" Mardy Murie, he was inspired by her words, "Environmentalists can be a pain in the ass… But they make great ancestors". Adopting this philosophy, he stated, "I want to be a good ancestor".

For several years, Barlow attended Burning Man. In 2013, he led a town hall meeting with Burning Man co-founder Larry Harvey about "the current state [o]f Practical Anarchy at Burning Man".

A stir in the media transpired when retired U.S. Army general Wesley Clark attended Burning Man in 2013 and spent time with Barlow and Harvey.

Barlow appeared in many films and television shows, both as an actor and as himself. Interviews with Barlow have been featured in documentaries such as the Tao Ruspoli-directed film Monogamish (under production), Bits & Bytes (under production), and Dying to Know: Ram Dass & Timothy Leary.

The iPhone app Detour, released in February 2015 by Groupon founder and ex-CEO Andrew Mason, features a 75-minute audio tour narrated by Barlow as he walks through the Tenderloin neighborhood in downtown San Francisco.

Barlow was also a self-ordained minister who performed baptisms and weddings.

Barlow's memoir, Mother American Night: My Life in Crazy Times, was published posthumously in June 2018. Written with Robert Greenfield, it is a full-length recounting of his life and times. The book was completed days before Barlow's death in February of that year.

Personal life
Barlow married Elaine Parker Barlow in 1977, and the couple had three daughters: Amelia Rose, Anna Winter, and Leah Justine. Elaine and John separated in 1992 and divorced in 1995. In 2002, he helped his friend, the realtor, entrepreneur, model and actress Simone Banos deliver her daughter Emma Victoria, whom he regarded as his surrogate daughter thereafter.

Barlow was engaged to Cynthia Horner, a doctor he met in 1993 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco while she was attending a psychiatry conference and Barlow was participating in a Steve Jobs comedy roast at a convention for the NeXT Computer. She died unexpectedly in 1994 while asleep on a flight from Los Angeles to New York City, days before her 30th birthday, from a heart arrhythmia apparently caused by undetected viral myocarditis. Barlow describes this period in his life in the This American Life episode "Conventions", from August 29, 1997.

Barlow had been a good friend and mentor to John F. Kennedy Jr., ever since his mother Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis had made arrangements for her troublesome son to be a wrangler at the Bar Cross Ranch for six months in 1978. The two men later went on many double dates in New York City with Cynthia and Kennedy's then-girlfriend Daryl Hannah. In a piece for Nerve, "A Ladies Man and Shameless: A Polygamist's Manifesto", Barlow professed his love of many women at the same time, and summarized the relationships in his personal life: "I doubt I'll ever be monogamous again ... I want to know as many more women as time and their indulgence will permit me ... There are probably twenty-five or thirty women—I certainly don't count them—for whom I feel an abiding and deep emotional attachment. They're scattered all over the planet. They range in age from less than half to almost twice my own. Most of these relationships are not actively sexual. Some were at one time. More never will be. But most of them feel as if they could become so. I love the feel of that tension, the delicious gravity of possibilities".

Barlow was a friend and former roommate of the technology entrepreneur Sean Parker.

In 2014, Barlow suffered the loss of Buck, his beloved Maine Coon cat that he believed to be a bodhisattva; the cat had many fans on social media.

After a series of illnesses, Barlow suffered a near-fatal heart attack on May 27, 2015. He later reported that he was recovering. After a prolonged hospitalization, the John Perry Barlow Wellness Fund was established in October 2016 to allay outstanding medical bills and "provide the quality and consistency of care that is critical to Barlow's recovery as he faces a variety of debilitating health conditions", including "extremely compromised mobility". A concert held on October 11, 2016, to benefit the fund at Sweetwater Music Hall in Mill Valley, California, featured Weir, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, Jerry Harrison, Les Claypool, Robin Sylvester, Jeff Chimenti, Steve Kimock, Sean Lennon, Lukas Nelson, and members of The String Cheese Incident.

Death
Barlow died in his sleep on the night of February 7, 2018, at his San Francisco home, at the age of 70.

title: John Perry Barlow