Actress. Born February 27, 1932, in London, England. In 1939, Taylor moved with her family to Los Angeles, to escape the havoc of World War II. Her black-haired, violet-eyed charm caught the eye of the Hollywood film world, and she made her screen debut at the age of 10 in the 1942 film There’s One Born Every Minute. After she was cast opposite Roddy McDowall in Lassie Come Home (1942), Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer signed her to a studio contract. In 1944, Taylor’s performance as a young equestrian in National Velvet made her a bona fide child star. Other early films included Cynthia (1947), Life With Father (1947), and Little Women (1949).
Taylor began playing mature roles by the time she was a teenager—her first adult starring roles came in 1950, in Conspirator, co-starring Robert Taylor. She soon became a major adult star, starring in films like Father of the Bride (1950), opposite Spencer Tracy, and A Place in the Sun (1951), opposite Montgomery Clift. Generally considered one of the most beautiful women alive, Taylor earned an increased measure of critical respect as an actress in Giant (1956) and was nominated for an Oscar three times during the 1950s—for Raintree County (1957), and two film versions of Tennessee Williams plays, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), and Suddenly Last Summer (1959). She won her first Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance as a prostitute in the melodramatic Butterfield 8 (1960). At the height of her marketability as an actress, Taylor agreed to star in an upcoming film, Cleopatra, for the then-record salary of $1 million. By the time she earned her first adult role, however, Taylor’s personal life had begun to rival her film career for the public’s fascination: in 1950, at age 18, she embarked on the first of eight marriages, to hotel scion Nicky Hilton Jr. The couple divorced in 1951, and in 1952 Taylor married actor Michael Wilding, with whom she had two sons, Michael and Christopher. In 1956, she and Wilding divorced, and in 1957 Taylor married producer Mike Todd. The couple had a daughter, Elizabeth. In March 1958, Todd was killed in a plane crash in New Mexico. The flood of public sympathy for Taylor after this tragedy was cut off abruptly in 1959, when she began an affair with singer Eddie Fisher, who was married at the time to actress Debbie Reynolds.