on a hot tin roof

Yeah, it would be really irritating if I said something like "they don't make movie stars like they used to"...

... I remember back when I was in my early teens -- which means that Elizabeth Taylor was still probably in her late twenties -- one night hearing on the radio that she was in the hospital and possibly near death.  Whatever it was that had her so ill, I don't remember, but she obviously survived that illness and other serious physical bouts over the year.  She, like a cat, may have had "nine lives" (one more than her number of marriages), but she just finished the last one of the nine, and people are genuinely sad over her passing.

My favorite Elizabeth Taylor film was Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, maybe followed by Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, but her greatest performances may have been her very public personal life, especially those wonderful love-hate years of her affair with and then later her two marriages to Richard Burton.