Dame Elizabeth Rosemond Taylor was a British and American actress. 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 then became the world's highest paid movie star in the 1960s, remaining a well-known public figure for the rest of her life. In 1999, the American Film Institute ranked her seventh on its greatest female screen legends list.
Publicity photo, late 1950s
Two-year old Taylor, mother Sara Sothern, and brother Howard, in 1934
Mickey Rooney and Taylor in National Velvet (1944), her first major film role
Taylor and Jane Powell in A Date with Judy (1948)
Classical Hollywood cinema
Classical Hollywood cinema is a term used in film criticism to describe both a narrative and visual style of filmmaking that first developed in the 1910s to 1920s during the later years of the silent film era. It then became characteristic of American cinema during the Golden Age of Hollywood, between roughly 1927 and 1960. It eventually became the most powerful and pervasive style of filmmaking worldwide.
Film classic Gone with the Wind (1939) starring Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh
Still from the silent film The Birth of a Nation (1915), starring Lillian Gish (second from right)
Theatrical release poster for Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1925)