Liz Taylor gets coveted award
2005-07-22 09:48
Los Angeles - The Los Angeles branch of Britain's Bafta film academy is to honour London-born American screen legend Elizabeth Taylor with its Britannia award for excellence, it said on Thursday.
The 72-year-old double Oscar-winner, once hailed as the world's most beautiful woman and seen as the last great star of Hollywood's golden age, will receive the award at a ceremony in Hollywood on November 10.
Also being honoured by the body on that date will be Hollywood heartthrob Tom Cruise, who will receive Bafta's Stanley Kubrick Britannia for film, and director Mike Newell, who gets the John Schlesinger Britannia for directing.
Steering clear of the limelight
Taylor, who first sprang to worldwide fame at the age of 12 in National Velvet, has only rarely appeared in public in recent years and said in an interview last year she was suffering from congestive heart failure and crippling spinal problems.
She has difficulty breathing and walking and has a nurse constantly by her side, Taylor, who now devotes most of her time to her two-decade-old crusade against the scourge of Aids and HIV, told W Magazine.
The star of films such as Cleopatra, Butterfield 8 and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf is perhaps best known for her exotic love life, which kept her on front pages for decades.
The most celebrated among her eight marriages were her two unions with Welsh actor Richard Burton, whom she married and divorced twice.
The pair began a torrid affair on the set of their movie Cleopatra in 1962 amid an unprecedented blaze of publicity that spawned a scandal that saw Taylor condemned by the pope.