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Dame Elizabeth’s many films included National Velvet, Cleopatra and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Dame Elizabeth Taylor, one of the 20th Century’s biggest movie stars, has died in Los Angeles at the age of 79.

The double Oscar-winning actress had a long history of ill health and was being treated for symptoms of congestive heart failure.

Her four children were with her when she died at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, her publicist said.

In a statement, her son Michael Wilding called her “an extraordinary woman who lived life to the fullest”.

“We know, quite simply, that the world is a better place for Mom having lived in it,” he continued.

“Her legacy will never fade, her spirit will always be with us, and her love will live forever in our hearts.”

Dame Elizabeth’s most famous films included National Velvet, Cleopatra and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

She was equally well-known for her glamour and film partnership with Richard Burton, one of seven husbands.

In her prime, she was arguably one of the world’s greatest actresses and most beautiful women.

Her colourful private life, screen success and Aids charity work ensured she was never far from the spotlight since finding fame at the age of 12.

The peak of her film career came in the 1950s and 1960s, with four Oscar nominations in a row from 1958 to 1961.

She lost out in her first three attempts – for Raintree County, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Suddenly, Last Summer – but triumphed at her fourth attempt with Butterfield 8.

Her second Oscar came in 1967 for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, one of 12 films with Burton.

She met the actor while filming 1963′s Cleopatra – which became notorious as one of the most expensive films of all time, but which also sparked one of Hollywood’s greatest romances.

Taylor had already been married four times – to Conrad Hilton Jr, Michael Wilding, Michael Todd and Eddie Fisher – before she wed Burton in 1964.

Their tempestuous relationship saw them divorce and remarry in 1975 before she moved on to further marriages with John W Warner and Larry Fortensky.

Her health problems began with a fall while filming her first hit film, National Velvet, which led to a lifetime of back problems.

A rare strain of pneumonia almost killed her in 1961 and she also battled addictions to alcohol and painkillers.
Dame Elizabeth Taylor in 1967 She won two Academy Awards over the course of her career

In the 1990s, she endured two hip replacement operations and another near-fatal bout of pneumonia and survived surgery for a benign brain tumour in 1997.

In 2004, it was revealed that she was suffering from congestive heart failure, with symptoms including fatigue and shortness of breath, and scoliosis, which twisted her spine.

But she continued to campaign for her Aids charity, which she set up in 1991 after the death of her friend and co-star Rock Hudson.

In addition to her four children – Michael Wilding, Christopher Wilding, Maria Burton-Carson and Liza Todd-Tivey – Dame Elizabeth is survived by 10 grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.

A private family funeral will be held later this week. Instead of flowers, the family has requested that contributions be made to the Elizabeth Taylor Aids Foundation.

British actress Joan Collins, who starred alongside Dame Elizabeth in the 2001 TV film These Old Broads, called her “the last of the True Hollywood Icons”.

“A great beauty, a great actress and continually fascinating to the World throughout her tumultuous life and career. She will be missed,” she added.

Singer George Michael said: “She also did a great deal in the last 25 yrs [sic] to help the world deal with the HIV epidemic. I am proud to have known her if only a little.”

One-time co-star Sir Michael Caine also paid tribute, remembering her as “a beautiful woman, a wonderful actress, and a great human being.”

SOURCE: BBC

Popularity: 68% [?]

Sagebrush Troubadour has just added 350 + screencaptures of Gene Autry in his 1949 classic, “The Cowboy and the Indians”, as well as a video clip from the same film of Gene singing his hit, “Here Comes Santa Claus”, which he co-wrote and first recorded in 1947.

Gene Autry is actually the writer, co-writer or original singer of many of today’s iconic holiday tunes such as Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer, Here Comes Santa Claus, Up on the Rooftop, and so on, all of which you can hear at Sagebrush in the jukebox located in the sidebar. Happy Holidays, everyone!

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Great video that was just uploaded to Youtube in November. It’s a 1938 Merry Christmas from favorites such as Ginger Rogers, Carole Lombard, Cecil B. DeMille, George Formby, Will Hay, Stanley Lupino and Gary Cooper. Rare gem!

There are a few holiday videos being put up right now at the mini sites for Bob Hope, Ginger Rogers, Fred Astaire and Gene Autry.

Happy Holidays, everyone!

Popularity: 64% [?]

Gloria Stuart, 100, a glamorous blond actress who starred in 1930s horror films and musicals before reviving a long-dormant career in 1997 with her Oscar-nominated performance as the older version of Kate Winslet’s character, Rose, in the box-office smash “Titanic,” died Sept. 26 at her home in West Los Angeles.

She had received a diagnosis of lung cancer several years ago, said her daughter Sylvia Thompson, who confirmed the death.

In the role of a 101-year-old Titanic survivor, Ms. Stuart narrated the James Cameron-directed film and served as the linchpin of its past and present-day story lines. Her effective portrayal of a feisty, headstrong character made her the oldest actress to ever be nominated for an Academy Award.

She lost to Kim Basinger in “L.A. Confidential,” even as “Titanic” swept many of the awards that year, including Best Picture and Best Director.

Many profiles of Ms. Stuart suggested that her nomination was largely sentimental, but she won admiration from several prominent movie critics.

“Her ease is poetic,” reviewer Elvis Mitchell wrote of Ms. Stuart in 1997. “This actress in her 80s holds the picture together, and the irony is, we come to look forward more to her scenes than we do those featuring the colossal scale of the rebuilt Titanic and its expertly milling passengers.”

Ms. Stuart had all but abandoned acting when a casting director contacted her and asked her to audition for the part in “Titanic.”

Cameron was looking for an actress whose heyday had been Hollywood’s golden era, and Ms. Stuart filled the bill.

She joked later to the New York Times that she was cast because, at 87, she was one of few actresses in her age group who was “still viable, not alcoholic, rheumatic or falling down.”

Long before that career-defining role, the blond beauty appeared in James Whale’s ”The Old Dark House” (1932) as a traveler stranded by a rainstorm who takes refuge at a creepy home with a family of mysterious characters.

The next year, Whale directed her opposite Claude Rains in ”The Invisible Man.” She played Flora Cranley, the lover of a scientist whose experiment with invisibility has turned him into a deranged killer.

Ms. Stuart said that working with Rains, an English actor who had a distinguished stage career, had difficulties stemming from his vanity.

“We were supposed to do a 50-50 profile shot,” Ms. Stuart told the Bergen Record of Hackensack, N.J., in 1997. “I noticed that when the camera started, he was gradually moving me around so that my back was to the camera and his face was there. He didn’t get that far, because I stopped and said, James, look what he’s doing. And he [Rains] said, ‘Oh, oh, oh, I’m so sorry, please forgive me, Miss Stuart.’ We did another take, and he started doing it again, and I said, ‘Mr. Rains!’ Well, that was the last time he tried it.”

Ms. Stuart appeared in more than 40 films during the 1930s that showcased her versatility. She was in the Busby Berkeley musical ”Gold Diggers of 1935″ as the love interest of crooner Dick Powell. She played the wife of the imprisoned Samuel Mudd in John Ford’s “The Prisoner of Shark Island” (1936) opposite Warner Baxter, and she took supporting roles opposite Shirley Temple in “Poor Little Rich Girl” (1936) and “Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm” (1938).

Despite many efforts, Ms. Stuart said she had been unable to break through to A-list stardom and said she “got sick and tired of fighting.” She added that her husband at the time, comedy writer Arthur Sheekman, discouraged her acting career and wanted her to stay home.

She had met Sheekman while appearing in the Eddie Cantor musical “Roman Scandals” (1933), and they married the next year, after Ms. Stuart was divorced from her first husband, sculptor Blair Gordon Newell.

Ms. Stuart didn’t abandon acting entirely, taking small parts on television in the 1970s and in films including “My Favorite Year” (1982), where she had no lines but briefly danced with star Peter O’Toole. Meanwhile, Ms. Stuart began studying painting and had her first exhibit in 1961 at the Hammer Gallery in New York.

A few years after Sheekman’s death in 1978, Ms. Stuart became reacquainted with master printer Ward Ritchie, a friend she hadn’t seen in decades. He became her companion until his death in 1996 and taught her the art of letter-press printing, which became Ms. Stuart’s new passion and career.

Gloria Frances Stewart was born July 4, 1910, in Santa Monica, Calif. She began acting when she was a child, putting on backyard performances with children in her neighborhood. After a brief acting career at the Pasadena Playhouse, she was recruited to Universal studios.

Besides her daughter from her second marriage, of Ojai, Calif., survivors include four grandchildren; and 12 great-grandchildren.

After the success of “Titanic,” Ms. Stuart received new acting offers. Many, she said with resignation, were a variation on “sweet old ladies.” She turned them all down, instead agreeing to eccentric parts such as a bag lady in the crime drama “The Million Dollar Hotel” (2000), directed by Wim Wenders.

Ms. Stuart wrote a memoir, “I Just Kept Hoping” (1999), in which she said of her late-blooming career, “When I graduated from Santa Monica High in 1927, I was voted the girl most likely to succeed. I didn’t realize it would take so long.”

Popularity: 63% [?]

Long before the era of Brangelina, TMZ and around-the-clock celebrity obsession, Eddie Fisher had a leading role in arguably the most explosive sex scandal of Hollywood’s golden age.

He was a music superstar and household name to millions of teenage girls who adored his crooning love songs. He was married to DebbieReynolds — a megawatt movie star in her own right and the star of “Singin’ in the Rain.” They had a daughter Carrie who would one day go on to fame of her own.

Then Fisher left Reynolds for Elizabeth Taylor, and what resulted was a scandal that left no doubt about America’s love of a good-old-fashioned Hollywood romance story. The affair became a national obsession — and an early forerunner of the scandals that are now so common in the current celebrity-crazed world.

Fisher died Wednesday night at the age of 82 of complications from hip surgery, and he was remembered as much for his musical triumphs as his romances with Reynolds and Taylor.

Fisher sold millions of records in the early 1950s with 32 hit songs including “Any Time,” “Oh, My Pa-pa,” “Wish You Were Here,” “Lady of Spain” and “Count Your Blessings.” His romantic messages resonated with young girls in the pre-Elvis period.

Fisher’s fame was enhanced by his 1955 marriage to Reynolds, and they quickly became known as “America’s favorite couple.” Four years later, Fisher divorced Reynolds and married Taylor amid one sensational headline after another.

He was Taylor’s fourth husband, and the marriage lasted only five years. She fell in love with co-star Richard Burton during the Rome filming of “Cleopatra,” divorced Fisher and married Burton in one of the great entertainment world scandals of the 20th century.

An example of the obsession over the affair came in 1964 when Taylor and Burton arrived at the Los Angeles airport to what AP movie writer Bob Thomas described as a “seething, shouting, throng of newsmen.” Taylor was trying to divorce Fisher at the time, and the two camps were exchanging a war of words in the media in what Thomas called “filmdom’s most famous — and lengthiest — love epic.”

Fisher’s career never recovered from the notoriety. He married actress Connie Stevens, and they had two daughters. Another divorce followed. He married twice more.

“The world lost a true America icon,” Fisher’s family said in a statement. “One of the greatest voices of the century passed away. He was an extraordinary talent and a true mensch.”

“He was loved & will be missed by his four children as well as his six grandchildren,” Carrie Fisher said on her Twitter account.

Carrie Fisher became a film star herself in the first three “Star Wars” films as Princess Leia, and later as a best-selling author of “Postcards From the Edge” and other books.

Edwin Jack Fisher was born Aug. 10, 1928, in Philadelphia, one of seven children of a Jewish grocer. At 15 he was singing on Philadelphia radio.

After moving to New York, Fisher was adopted as a protege by comedian Eddie Cantor, who helped the young singer become a star in radio, television and records.

Fisher had legions of teenage fans. Publicist-manager Milton Blackstone helped the publicity by hiring girls to scream and swoon at Fisher’s appearances.

After getting out of the Army in 1953 following a two-year hitch, hit records, his own TV show and the headlined marriage to Reynolds made Fisher a top star. The couple costarred in a 1956 romantic comedy, “Bundle of Joy,” that capitalized on their own parenthood.

In 1960 he played a role in “Butterfield 8,” for which Taylor won an Academy Award. But that film marked the end of his movie career.

After being discarded by Taylor, Fisher became the butt of comedians’ jokes. He began relying on drugs to get through performances, and his bookings dwindled. He later said he had made and spent $20 million during his heyday, and much of it went to gambling and drugs.

In 1983, Fisher attempted a full-scale comeback. But his old fans had been turned off by the scandals, and the tour was unsuccessful.

He had added to his notoriety that year with an autobiography, “Eddie: My Life, My Loves.” Of his first three marriages, he wrote he had been bullied into marriage with Reynolds, whom he didn’t know well; became nursemaid as well as husband to Taylor; and was reluctant to marry Connie Stevens but she was pregnant and he “did the proper thing.”

Another autobiography, “Been There, Done That,” published in 1999, was even more searing. He called Reynolds “self-centered, totally driven, insecure, untruthful, phony.” He claimed he abandoned his career during the Taylor marriage because he was too busy taking her to emergency rooms and cleaning up after her pets, children and servants. Both ex-wives were furious, and Carrie Fisher threatened to change her name to Reynolds.

At 47, Fisher married a 21-year-old beauty queen, Terry Richard. The marriage ended after 10 months. His fifth marriage, to Betty Lin, a Chinese-born businesswoman, lasted longer than any of the others. Fisher had two children with Reynolds: Carrie and Todd; and two girls with Stevens: Joely and Tricia.

Popularity: 46% [?]

Here is a list of sites that were requested previously but have now been put on the adoption list. All of these are blank sites.

Gloria Stuart
James Dean
Marilyn Monroe
Veronica Lake
Vivien Leigh

Popularity: 35% [?]

Well after the poll results it looks like the winner is Gone with the Wind (1939). I have started the page already and am doing a lot of research. I also have a ton of images that I have started collecting. I also have Gone with the Wind on DVD and will be making screen captures for that sometime this week. I have created a section in the gallery that is dedicated to Movie of the Month with a section that will belong to each movie. Everyone is welcome to add images to that section of the gallery as well or you can send what you find to me and I will upload them (celebsites.org@gmail.com). I am looking for graphics as well (icons, wallpapers, blends…). I will also be adding videos to watch as well. If anyone wants to donate anything or has a great resource they would like to suggest don’t hesitate to email me.

September’s Movie of the Month – Gone with the Wind (1939)
work in progress

Popularity: 35% [?]

Every month Golden Era Network will host a poll for a Movie of the Month. You will be able to help decide what that movie is by voting in the poll. The winning movie will be showcased throughout the month with as much information/images/videos we can find during our research. You will be able to find the poll in the original post and also in the sidebar of the site! Voting closes August 31, 2010!

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I added 186 captures of Clara Bow’s film “Kid Boots” (1926).

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The last Ziegfeld Follies Girl has died.

Doris Eaton Travis, one of the legendary Ziegfeld Follies chorus girls, who wore elaborate costumes for the series of lavish Broadway theatrical productions in the early 1900s, died Tuesday at age 106, public relations firm Boneau/Bryan-Brown said. It didn’t say where or how she died.

Travis, who was from West Bloomfield, Mich., also was a supporter of the Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS fundraising organization and appeared often in its Easter Bonnet Competition.

She continued to work long after her Follies days ended, with annual appearances on Broadway, a small role in a Jim Carrey movie and a memoir, “The Days We Danced: The Story of My Theatrical Family From Florenz Ziegfeld to Arthur Murray and Beyond.”

Interest in the 5-foot-2 centenarian piqued after a 1997 reunion with four other Ziegfeld Follies Girls for the reopening of the New Amsterdam Theatre, where she danced about 80 years earlier.

“I was the only one who could still dance,” she said then.

That led to her involvement in the Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS benefit, where she caught the eye of Carrey and director Milos Forman, who were making the movie “Man on the Moon,” about the life of comedian Andy Kaufman.

She played an actress who was no longer popular.

“I had to ride a stick horse and faint and then get resuscitated,” Travis recalled in 2006, laughing as she did a fake gallop.

Even after more than 90 years as a hoofer, dancing still came easy to Travis, whose extravagant Ziegfeld Follies show enchanted Broadway from 1907 into the 1930s.

“I’m the last of the Ziegfeld Follies Girls now,” she said when she was 102. “It’s an honor in a way. I certainly didn’t think that would happen.”

Travis, who owned several dance studios in Michigan and operated a horse ranch in Oklahoma, had a few wrinkles and white curly hair that framed her eyes of blue. She enrolled at Oklahoma University and earned a bachelor’s degree in history at age 88. She credited her longevity to her ongoing love affair with dancing and not drinking or smoking.

Travis was born March 14, 1904, one of seven children to newspaper linotype operator Charles Eaton and his wife, Mary, in Norfolk, Va.

Some of the children, who became known as The Eatons of Broadway, got their first break when a stock company production of “Blue Bird” appeared in Washington, D.C., in 1911. Travis and her sisters, Pearl and Mary, had only small roles, but it led to steady work in other local plays.

By then, the Ziegfeld Follies had become an entertainment staple. Inspired by the Folies Bergeres in Paris, Ziegfeld Follies was part Broadway show, part Vaudeville, featuring top entertainers such as W.C. Fields,Eddie Cantor, Fanny Brice and Will Rogers. Juicing up the show were beautiful female dancers who performed elaborate chorus numbers composed by Irving Berlin and who wore costumes by Art Deco designer and illustrator Erte.

Pearl Eaton nabbed a part in the chorus of the “Ziegfeld Follies of 1918,” and Travis became the youngest Ziegfeld Follies Girl when she was hired at age 14. She became a principal dancer in 1920.

She turned to silent movies with “At the Stage Door” and “The Broadway Peacock” in 1920 and “Tell Your Children” in 1922. But she never really got into film.

Travis’ love of dancing and musical theater was shaken when the stock market crash of 1929 ushered in the Depression and an end to many theaters.

At a friend’s suggestion, she applied for a job as a tap dance instructor at the Arthur Murray Dance Studios in New York. She got the job and branched into social dance. She eventually opened a Murray franchise in Michigan and began a second career.

Murray gave her a list of people who had taken lessons or paid for some and hadn’t completed them, and one of the first people she contacted was Paul H. Travis, whom she married in 1949. He died in 2000, a few days before his 100th birthday.

In a statement on behalf of the family, her nephew Joe Eaton Jr. said Tuesday she always loved Broadway.

“She adored dancing with the young dancers,” he said, “seeing new shows and the incredible response from the Easter Bonnet audience and Broadway community.”

The executive director of BC/EFA, Tom Viola, said Broadway Cares loved Travis, whom he first met when she was 94 and was appearing at the 12th Easter Bonnet Competition.

“When the stage lights hit Doris,” he said, “she was instantly and forever young.”

He said Broadway, which planned to dim its lights Wednesday night in her honor, would “miss her forever.”

Funeral arrangements are private. A memorial service in West Bloomfield will be announced later.

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