Elizabeth Taylor died on March 23, 2011, at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, of congestive heart failure. She was seventy-nine years old. With her death, Hollywood lost its last genuine connection to the golden age of the studio system — the era of MGM contracts, manufactured stars, and the particular kind of overwhelming beauty that the studio camera had been designed to worship.

Taylor's career had three distinct phases, each remarkable in its own way. The child star who appeared in National Velvet at twelve became the actress who defined a certain kind mid-century Hollywood glamour in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Butterfield 8 — the latter winning her the first of her two Academy Awards. And then came Cleopatra, the most expensive film ever made at the time of its production, and the love affair with Richard Burton that transformed her from movie star into cultural institution.

Her eight marriages — twice to Burton, and her long, genuine friendship with Michael Jackson in later years — kept her in the tabloid conversation long after her acting career had wound down. But the tabloid version of Elizabeth Taylor was always less interesting than the actual person: the woman who became one of the most effective AIDS activists in America in the 1980s, at a moment when the disease was still being treated as shameful and unmentionable by most of the entertainment industry.

Her founding of the American Foundation for AIDS Research and her willingness to speak publicly and forcefully about AIDS at considerable potential cost to her image was, by the judgment of many historians of the epidemic, a genuinely significant contribution to changing public perception at a critical moment.

She was, in the fullest sense, irreplaceable.