page_title: Elizabeth Taylor
section_title: Health problems and death
hierarchical_section_title: Elizabeth Taylor / Personal life / Health problems and death
caption_attribution_description: English: Memorial - Elizabeth Taylor star on Hollywood Walk of Fame.
context_page_description: Dame Elizabeth Rosemond Taylor DBE was an English-American actress, businesswoman, and humanitarian. 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 continued her career successfully into the 1960s, and remained a well-known public figure for the rest of her life. In 1999, the American Film Institute named her the seventh-greatest female screen legend.
  Born in London to socially prominent American parents, Taylor moved with her family to Los Angeles in 1939. She made her acting debut in a minor role in the Universal Pictures film There's One Born Every Minute 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. She transitioned to more mature roles in the 1950s, when she starred in the comedy Father of the Bride and received critical acclaim for her performance in the drama A Place in the Sun.
  Despite being one of MGM's most bankable stars, Taylor wished to end her career in the early 1950s.
context_section_description: 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.
  In addition, 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 about 1996. Taylor had serious bouts of pneumonia in 1990 and 2000, underwent hip replacement surgery in the mid-1990s, underwent surgery for a benign brain tumor in 1997, and was successfully treated for skin cancer in 2002. She used a wheelchair due to her back problems, and was diagnosed with congestive heart failure in 2004. Six weeks after being hospitalized, she died of the illness at age 79 on March 23, 2011, at the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. Her funeral took place the following day at the Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California. The service was a private Jewish ceremony presided over 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.
caption: Taylor's star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in the days following her death in 2011
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