She was a deeply cherished friend to our communities and despite her own struggles against debilitating illness, rallied in support of HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment funding during a profoundly conservative era. Rest in peace, Elizabeth Taylor. According to Paul Flynn's Guardian piece on her, she was last seen in a gay bar in 2008. The legendary star died of a cardiovascular condition yesterday. She was married eight times (twice to Richard Burton). She was born in Hampstead, North London, and her family moved to Hollywood, where she became a starlet at the tender age of ten. She met gay men for the first time when she co-starred alongside Rock Hudson and James Dean in Giant (1957), a western, and particularly bonded with Hudson. In 1961, she was the lead in Cleopatra, for which she won an Academy Award as Best Actress. In 1966, she won critical acclaim for the strength of her performance in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, and won a second Oscar as Best Actress for that film. She had a tempestuous relationship with Richard Burton, whatever their onscreen chemistry might have been, but there was a third party in that doomed relationship- Burton's alcoholism. When he died in 1984, she was grief stricken and mourned for some time. As if that weren't enough, Taylor lost her long-time gay male friend Rock Hudson to HIV/AIDS in 1985. But this time, she fought back and was one of the first highest profile celebrities to empathise with the gay community and vigorously lobby the Reagan and Bush administrations to end their malignant neglect of the HIV/AIDS epidemic and delivered funding for prevention and treatment. Given her empathy, we were horrified when she revealed that she had a neurological condition of her own in 1997. Thankfully, she survived that, and was made a Dame in 2000. She was also close friends with Michael Jackson, who never left her bedside while she battled that illness. When he died in 2009, that death devastated her too. Dame Elizabeth is survived by her children, Michael, Christopher, Liza and Maria, and ten grandchildren. Craig Young - 24th March 2011