AS Elizabeth Taylor donned her voluminous velvet gown and covered her throat with diamonds for a fund raising spectacular and a somewhat premature birthday party last Sunday evening, it was not difficult to discern what was on her mind.
Three days later, Liz Taylor, who will be 65 next week, checked into a Beverley Hills hospital to enable doctors operate on a benign tumour which for some time now has been nestling at the base of her brain.
True to form, Taylor overcame her personal demons and rose to the occasion in the Pantages Hotel, Los Angeles. Fluttering her still lustrous lashes and flashing her legendary violet eyes, she managed to raise over £750,000 for victims of AIDS.
Madonna turned up to honour the "most beautiful woman in the world". Michael Jackson, who recently asked Taylor to act as god mother for his son, peered from under his black fringe and smiled.
More than 10 biographies have been written about the British born star since her unforgettable role in MGM's National Velvet, a sentimental tale of equestrian ambition, catapulted her into the limelight at 13 years of age. For an actress who, for the past 15 years, has done little acting apart from some unremarkable TV movies and embarrassing cameos in American sitcoms, she is one of a dwindling number of ageing stars still guaranteed to generate acres of newspaper coverage.
Taylor has always been steeped in contradiction. On the one hand her unique brand of beauty lent her a diaphanous air, a vulnerability that encouraged no less than seven suitors to offer her the safe haven of matrimonial union.
On the other hand, her eight subsequent divorces and much publicised battles with drink and drugs, teamed with a weight problem, suggested a more complex personality, with as many internal conflicts and some of the more recalcitrant characters she has portrayed on the silver screen.
Her life has also been characterised by excess - Elizabeth Taylor has never done things by halves. In the 1950s and 1960s her beauty bowled Hollywood over, although she believed her colleague, Ava Gardner, was much more attractive.
In the 1970s, this glamour became more elusive as the troubled star ballooned to 182 lbs. Throughout her career she earned and disposed of millions of dollars, which she spent on designer clothing, expensive gifts and some of the world's largest diamonds. Ill health meant that she has been operated on more than 40 times. Her well documented addictions to pain killers, sleeping pills and alcohol spanned 35 years.
The public's almost perverse fascination with her personal life has by now all but overshadowed the very reason Taylor rose to prominence in the first place. Sometimes unfairly imagined as a mediocre actress. Taylor won two Oscars and was nominated for many more Academy awards.
The first was for her performance in Butterfield 8 (1960), a role she is said to have detested. The second Oscar was for her distinctly unglamorous role in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
ELIZABETH Rosemund Taylor was born in London in 1932 and brought up in the wealthy suburb of Hampstead. At the age of eight, she already had notions of becoming "a serious actress like my mother was". In reality, Taylor's American mother Sara had only enjoyed a brief flirtation on the London stage.
The second World War saw the Taylor family move back to southern California. It was the 1940s, boom time in Hollywood, when the small but exclusive brigade of cinematic royalty were starting to flex their well tanned muscles. At nine, Taylor was featured in the MGM classic Lassie Come Home and National Velvet followed.
Unlike many of her fellow stars, she had no problem making the transition from fussed over child star to sought after femme fatale.
When she first met Welsh actor Richard Burton - whom she would wed and divorce twice - on the set of Cleopatra in 1961, Taylor already had four marriages behind her. She had divorced Nick Hilton, Michael Wilding and Eddie Fisher, a Michael Todd, whom she was married to for just one year, died in a plane crash. But it was Burton, her biographers agree, who was the one and perhaps only love of her life.
Some 30 years after her first encounter with Burton, she told an incredulous world that she was going to marry construction worker Larry Fortensky, whom she had met on a visit to the Betty Ford Clinic for substance abuse. They married in the grounds of her friend Michael Jackson's Neverland Estate. "This time, with God's blessing, it's for keeps," she told reporters. The union lasted 52 months.
It was the death of her close friend, actor Rock Hudson, in 1985, that inspired Taylor to undertake what has arguably been her most successful role to date, that of a crusader on behalf of AIDS sufferers worldwide. In 1993, she won the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award for her work to fund research into the disease.
And Taylor has the sense not to mention the scents (Passion, White Diamonds and Black Pearls) to take solace from the fact that her public suffering, bravery and highly successful fund raising have elevated her to icon status, particularly among the gay community.
Taylor's recuperation should provide the "living legend" with plenty of time to reflect. "I've been through it all, baby," she once famously said. "I am Mother Courage."