Elizabeth Taylor, the violet-eyed femme fatale whose smoldering talent and eight marriages made her a legend of Hollywood’s golden era, died on Wednesday March 23, 2011  in Los Angeles. She was 79.

The two-time Oscar winner suffered from congestive heart failure and had been hospitalized in Los Angeles  at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center since mid-February.

“We know, quite simply, that the world is a better place for Mom having lived in it,” her son Michael Wilding said in a statement to The Times. “Her legacy will never fade, her spirit will always be with us, and her love will live forever in our hearts.” He and Taylor’s other children, Christopher Wilding, Liza Todd and Maria Burton, were with their mom when she died, publicist Sally Morrison said.

Taylor, child actress turned adult Academy Award-winner and AIDS/HIV activist, was also known for her beauty and her love life — married eight times to seven men, with Richard Burton the one with whom she once said the love “was just too much” — as well as her friendship with the late Michael Jackson. While movie critic Kenneth Turan, in an appreciation, remembers the violet-eyed actress as being in “a class by herself”:

Her astonishingly dramatic personal life, characterized by full-throttle romantic love and later recriminations, serious illnesses and tragic deaths, matched the drama of her on-screen roles stride for stride and maybe even bested it.

Her movies — to name but a few — included “Lassie Come Home” and “National Velvet” as a tween ; “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” with Paul Newman; “Giant” with Rock Hudson and James Dean; “Cleopatra,” “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” and more with Richard Burton; and “Butterfield 8” with Eddie Fisher. “Virginia Woolf” and “Butterfield 8” had her winning lead actress Oscars.

Source: nydailynews.com