Anglo-American actress and activist Elizabeth Taylor was BOTD in 1932. Born in London, her family moved to Los Angeles in 1939. She became a child actor, becoming a star in the 1944 girl-meets-horse drama National Velvet. She transitioned to adult roles in A Place In the Sun and Father of the Bride, becoming one of Hollywood’s greatest stars, admired for her extraordinary beauty, charisma and sexual chemistry with her male co-stars. She burned through the 1950s with roles in Giant, the Tennessee Williams adaptations Cat On a Hot Tin Roof and Suddenly Last Summer and the trashily enjoyable BUtterfield-8, for which she won her first Oscar. During the making of Cleopatra, she had an affair with her co-star Richard Burton, whom she later married. A star couple of mythic proportions, complete with jet-set lifestyles, opulent jewellery and spectacular arguments, their explosive chemistry was well-displayed onscreen in The Taming of the Shrew, The Sandpiper and the sensational Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, adapted from Edward Albee’s play. Her many affairs and marriages became tabloid fodder, and her career was punctuated by health scares, drug and alcohol problems and weight binges. Her late film career was erratic, including Boom!, a Kabuki version of Williams’ play The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore, co-starring Burton and Noël Coward, and a bizarre adaptation of Muriel Spark‘s novel The Driver’s Seat. Taylor was close friends with many gay men, particularly her co-star Montgomery Clift, whom she once saved from a car accident. In the 1980s, she harnessed her star power to advocate for HIV/AIDS care and research, raising awareness about the disease during the virulently homophobic and AIDS-phobic Reagan administration. Less well-advised was her defence of Michael Jackson from accusations of child sex abuse. Taylor died in 2011, aged 79. Her legacy as a feminist and queer icon has been extensively discussed, notably by academic Camille Paglia, and she has been portrayed in TV biopics by Sherilyn Fenn and Helena Bonham-Carter.