Elizabeth Taylor's Eight Marriages and One Enduring Legacy

A lifetime of public romance can eclipse everything else, but Elizabeth Taylor never let it. Her marriages made headlines for decades, yet the legacy that endures is the one she built when the cameras stopped rolling: a star who turned heartbreak, scandal, and reinvention into a life of purpose.

Elizabeth Taylor's love life ran alongside her career like a second blockbuster: seven husbands, eight marriages, and enough drama to keep the cameras trained on her even when she was nowhere near a set.

Glamorous, impulsive, and intensely devoted when she fell, Taylor became a symbol of a certain kind of old-Hollywood freedom: a woman who refused to apologize for wanting love on her own terms, even when the world treated her choices like public property.

Her first marriage began when she was still a teenager. On May 6, 1950, at 18, Taylor married Conrad "Nicky" Hilton Jr., heir to the Hilton hotel fortune. He was 24, and the match looked like a fairy tale. It was not. The marriage quickly turned dark, marked by mental and physical abuse that led to a miscarriage.

Taylor filed for divorce just eight months after saying "I do," an early sign that she would choose survival over optics, even when it meant dismantling a dream in full view of the public.

A Search for Stability, Then a Sudden Loss

Actor Michael Wilding, 20 years older than Taylor, brought something different: steadiness. They married and remained together for five years, welcoming two sons, Michael Howard Wilding and Christopher Edward Wilding. Yet the age gap was not the pressure point that ultimately cracked them.

Taylor's stardom was already towering, and as she became the primary financial provider, Wilding struggled with the reversal of traditional roles. Their marriage ended in 1957. Still, Taylor spoke warmly of him afterward, keeping him close as a cherished presence rather than an erased chapter.

That same year, Taylor married producer Mike Todd, a relationship she would later describe as a once-in-a-lifetime love. They had a daughter, Liza Todd, and Taylor maintained that Todd was the man she would have stayed with forever.

But their happiness lasted barely long enough to feel real before it was ripped away. In March 1958, Todd died in a plane crash, just a year after their wedding and seven months after Liza was born.

Scandal, Scrutiny, and the Love That Would Not Stay Finished

Grief pushed Taylor into the arms of Eddie Fisher, a celebrated singer and Todd's close friend. Fisher left his wife, Debbie Reynolds, for Taylor, and the scandal detonated.

The public fascination was relentless, and the backlash was sharp enough to change how many people viewed her. Under constant media pressure and moral outrage, Taylor became the center of a global spectacle. When the initial frenzy cooled, the relationship did too, and their marriage began to unravel.

Then came Richard Burton, the love story that refused to fit neatly inside one marriage license. Their relationship was famously volatile, fiercely passionate, and lit with diamonds.

They starred in eleven films together and became one of the most recognizable couples on the planet. After roughly a decade of turbulence, they divorced, remarried, and divorced again.

Taylor and Burton proved that some romances do not end so much as loop, becoming too large, too dramatic, too magnetic for a single ending.

Politics, Recovery, and a Final Public "Yes"

Taylor's sixth husband arrived through an unlikely doorway: politics. She met John Warner on a blind date when he escorted her to a dinner hosted by Queen Elizabeth at the British Embassy in Washington, D.C..

Warner had previously served as Secretary of the Navy, and Taylor later played an outsized role in his path to the U.S. Senate. He credited her influence on his success, but the political world was not built for her spirit. They married the year they met and divorced six years later, with Taylor feeling stifled by the life she had stepped into.

Her final marriage had a different origin story, rooted in recovery and reinvention. During her second visit to the Betty Ford Center in 1988, Taylor met construction worker Larry Fortensky, who was 20 years younger.

Their wedding on October 6, 1991 was pure Hollywood theater: nearly 200 high-profile guests, 13 paparazzi helicopters overhead, and vows exchanged beneath a white gazebo at Michael Jackson's Neverland Ranch.

Marianne Williamson officiated. They divorced in 1996, but Taylor never stopped caring for him, a quiet coda to a relationship staged in the loudest possible way.

The Legacy That Outshines the Rings

Taylor's fame was never only romantic. She was also one of film's most celebrated stars, winning two Academy Awards for "Butterfield 8" and "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?".

Born in Britain and embraced as an American icon, she made her movie debut at age 10 in 1942's "One Born Every Minute" and became a sensation two years later in "National Velvet."

The 1950s and 1960s kept her at a white-hot peak through films including "Giant," "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof," "Suddenly, Last Summer," and "Cleopatra." Across more than six decades of acting, she proved she could do far more than dazzle: she could carry emotionally demanding roles with real weight.

As her screen work slowed, Taylor's focus shifted toward philanthropy, and this is where her most enduring legacy took root. After her close friend Rock Hudson died in 1985 following his battle with HIV/AIDS, Taylor began working toward better treatments and a cure.

In 1991, she launched the Elizabeth Taylor HIV/AIDS Foundation to support people living with the disease and to fund research.

Taylor was famous for her violet eyes, her jewelry, and the way she lived as if the world could not tell her no. She died in 2011 at 79. But the lasting imprint of her life is not the number of times she walked down an aisle.

It is that she took the power of attention and redirected it toward something larger than herself, making sure her name would mean more than romance long after the flashbulbs faded.