Taylor again earned a good deal of sympathy in March 1961, when she underwent a highly publicized near-death struggle with pneumonia and received an emergency tracheotomy.

By the time the lavish production of Cleopatra was finally completed in 1963, at an estimated total cost of $40 million, Taylor had fallen in love again, this time with her co-star in the film, Richard Burton, who was also married. Despite the couple’s off-screen chemistry, box office and critical reception for the film was unimpressive. As had been the case with Fisher—whom she had married in 1959—she was widely denounced for “stealing” Burton away from his wife. After divorcing their respective spouses, Taylor and Burton were married in 1964. In 1966, they starred together as a bitterly struggling middle-aged married couple in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. Taylor’s searing performance won her a second Best Actress Oscar and cemented her reputation as a serious actress as well as one of the top box office draws of the 1960s.

Near the end of the decade, however, Taylor’s film career seemed to be in decline, as she starred in a number of disappointing vehicles, including Boom (1968), The Only Game in Town (1970), Hammersmith is Out (1972), The Driver’s Seat (1974) and The Blue Bird (1976). The 1980 film The Mirror Crack’d marked her last feature film appearance for the next 14 years. In 1981, she made her debut on Broadway, in the Lillian Hellman play The Little Foxes, earning a Tony Award nomination. In 1983, Taylor co-founded the Elizabeth Theater Group, which produced several stage revivals, including Noel Coward’s Private Lives, in which she and Burton starred.

Meanwhile, Taylor’s tempestuous personal life continued to make headlines. Her marriage to Burton, whom Taylor later called the great love of her life, ended in divorce in 1974; they remarried in 1975, only to divorce again less than a year later. They had one daughter, Maria. Burton died in 1984. In 1976, Taylor married John Warner, a U.S. Republican senator from Virginia. They divorced in 1982, and in 1983, Taylor entered the Betty Ford Clinic to overcome her dependency on alcohol. She returned again to the clinic in 1988, this time for an addiction to painkillers.

Taylor made memorable appearances in several television movies, including Malice in Wonderland (1985) and Sweet Bird of Youth (1989); on TV shows like General Hospital and The Simpsons (as the voice of Baby Maggie); and had a cameo role in a film version of The Flinstones in 1994. Her limited acting career took a backseat to her pursuit of humanitarian causes—most notably AIDS research. After her good friend, Rock Hudson, died of the disease in 1985, Taylor helped start the American Foundation for AIDS Research (AmFAR) and publicly criticized the government’s lack of funding for such a worthy cause.