The Funeral and Casket Details of Elizabeth Taylor

Introduction

Elizabeth Taylor spent nearly seven decades being watched. She was a child star at MGM, a two time Academy Award winner, one of the most photographed women alive, and from the mid 1980s onward one of the first famous people anywhere to stand up for those living with HIV and AIDS. When she died on 23 March 2011 at the age of 79, the attention that had followed her since childhood turned to a cemetery in Glendale, California, where almost nothing was allowed to be seen.

Her funeral was held the very next day. It was private, it lasted about an hour, and it began fifteen minutes late because she had asked for it to begin fifteen minutes late. That one instruction tells you more about how she thought about her own ending than any announcement her family made, and it is the reason her funeral is still talked about fifteen years later.

The Life and Legacy of Elizabeth Taylor

She was born Elizabeth Rosemond Taylor in London on 27 February 1932. She made her screen debut in 1942 and won an MGM contract after testing for Lassie Come Home, and National Velvet made her a star while she was still a child. The films that followed are the spine of mid century Hollywood: Father of the Bride, A Place in the Sun, Giant, Raintree County, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Suddenly, Last Summer, Cleopatra. She won the Academy Award for Best Actress twice, for BUtterfield 8 and for Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and the Television Academy notes that Queen Elizabeth II made her a Dame in 2000.

The second half of her life was built around something else entirely. In 1985, the year her friend Rock Hudson died, she helped found amfAR, the Foundation for AIDS Research, and in 1991 she established the Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation to pay for direct care for people living with HIV. Her official site describes her lobbying presidents and chairing fundraisers at a time when almost no one with a public platform would say the word out loud. The Academy gave her its Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award for that work.

The News of Elizabeth Taylor's Passing

Taylor died on the morning of 23 March 2011 at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. She was 79. Her publicist, Sally Morrison, announced the death and gave the cause as congestive heart failure, a condition she had lived with for years. She had been in hospital for about six weeks, and her condition had stabilised enough that there had been hope she would go home. Her four children, Michael Wilding, Christopher Wilding, Liza Todd and Maria Burton, were with her when she died.

Her eldest son spoke for the family. "My Mother was an extraordinary woman who lived life to the fullest, with great passion, humor, and love," Michael Wilding said, and he asked that she be remembered for what he called her brave and relentless advocacy in the fight against HIV and AIDS. Rather than flowers, the family asked that donations go to the Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation.

The Funeral Arrangements for Elizabeth Taylor

The funeral took place on Thursday 24 March 2011, the day after she died, at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California. It was small and it was closed. The service was scheduled for 2pm Pacific time and ran for about an hour. Five black stretch limousines brought the family in, barricades kept everyone else out, and there was no procession. News helicopters circled a service nobody on the ground could see.

Then there was the delay. Taylor had left instructions that the service was not to start at the hour it had been announced for, and that somebody should say why. Sally Morrison duly announced it: "She even wanted to be late for her own funeral." The service began fifteen minutes behind its published time. Afterwards she was interred in the Great Mausoleum at Forest Lawn, in the same building where Michael Jackson lies. The Associated Press reported that her place there sits beneath a marble sculpture of an angel inspired by the work of Michelangelo.

The Casket Details of Elizabeth Taylor

What her casket was covered with is on the record. The Associated Press reported that it was draped in gardenias, violets and lilies of the valley, three flowers with the kind of old fashioned Hollywood softness she liked. What the casket itself was is not on the record. No maker, no model, no timber, no finish, no interior and no colour has ever been released by the family or the cemetery, and with a service this private it probably never will be.

That silence puts her in the larger group of stars whose funerals we can describe and whose caskets we cannot. Aretha Franklin is the rare exception, with a gold plated bronze casket and a champagne velvet lining reported in detail, while Steve Jobs was buried in a private ceremony that released nothing at all. If you want to understand what the choices actually are, our guide to celebrity casket types walks through the materials and finishes families pick from, and you can see the same range in our own caskets collection.

Attendees and Eulogies

About four dozen family members attended the burial, according to the Associated Press. The actor Colin Farrell, a close friend of Taylor's in her last years, read poetry, and ABC News reported that the poem was Gerard Manley Hopkins' "The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo". Her grandson, Rhys Tivey, played "Amazing Grace" on the trumpet. Members of her family read as well. No recording was released and no order of service was published.

The larger goodbye came seven months later. In October 2011 about 400 people gathered at the Steven J. Ross Theater on the Warner Bros. lot in Burbank for a private memorial that Colin Farrell hosted. Michael Caine and her stepdaughter Kate Burton spoke about her humour and her stubbornness in defence of what she believed. Mike Nichols, who directed her to her second Oscar, sent a video message. Rhys Tivey played "Amazing Grace" again, Elton John closed the programme with "Blue Eyes", and the organisers asked everyone there to give to her AIDS foundation.

The Impact on Fans and the Industry

The response to her death was not really about the films. The Television Academy called her a widely respected leader in the fight against HIV and AIDS, and that is the sentence that kept being repeated. The memorial programme on the Warner Bros. lot made the same point by giving her advocacy and her fragrance business as much room as her screen career. Her family had set the tone the day she died by pointing mourners toward her foundation instead of a florist.

That instruction had a measurable effect, because the foundation she built kept going without her. The Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation reports that by 2013 it had put more than 17 million dollars into direct care work across 44 countries and 42 American states. For an industry used to tributes that fade in a fortnight, hers turned into a funding stream.

Legacy and Remembering Elizabeth Taylor

In December 2011, Christie's sold her jewellery in New York. The auction house said the sale set a record for a single private collection, and the star lot, La Peregrina, the pearl necklace Cartier had set for her, went for 11.8 million dollars. NPR reported that part of the proceeds from the follow up online sale of her remaining jewels, art and clothing went to her AIDS foundation.

The quieter decision matters more. Taylor arranged, in advance, for her own Trust to cover the foundation's running costs, so that money given by the public goes to the work rather than to the overheads. That is a piece of planning done while she was alive, for people she would never meet, and it sits alongside the fifteen minute delay as evidence that she thought carefully about what would happen after she was gone. Anyone can do a version of this. Our casket pre-planning and funeral planning pages exist for exactly that, and the same instinct shaped the service Alan Rickman designed for himself.

Conclusion

Elizabeth Taylor's funeral is remembered for a joke she made sure would land after she could no longer tell it. Everything else about that afternoon was deliberately kept from view: a private family service, a casket nobody has described, a crypt in a building closed to the public. Like Helen McCrory, she was a British born star whose family drew a firm line around the day itself and never moved it.

What she did leave behind was instructions, and they were followed. The service started late, the donations went where she wanted them to go, and the foundation she set up ran on her money rather than on other people's. You can read more funerals like hers on our celebrity caskets and funerals blog.

Sources

• PBS NewsHour, "Elizabeth Taylor Dies at Age 79", 23 March 2011
• ABC News, "Hollywood Icon Elizabeth Taylor Dies at 79", 23 March 2011
• Al Jazeera, "Hollywood legend Elizabeth Taylor dies", 23 March 2011
• CBS News, "Elizabeth Taylor laid to rest at Forest Lawn", 24 March 2011
• Fox News / Associated Press, "Elizabeth Taylor Buried Near Friend Michael Jackson", 24 March 2011
• Voice of America, "Elizabeth Taylor Laid to Rest During Private Service", 25 March 2011
• TIME NewsFeed, "She Even Wanted to be Late for Her Own Funeral: Elizabeth Taylor Laid to Rest", 25 March 2011
• ABC News, "Elizabeth Taylor Laid to Rest in Private Funeral Service", 24 March 2011
• The Hollywood Reporter, "Elizabeth Taylor Remembered at Private Memorial Service", 17 October 2011
• Fox News / Associated Press, "Hundreds of Friends, Family Gather at Elizabeth Taylor Memorial Service", 17 October 2011
• NPR, "Elizabeth Taylor's Jewels Bring Millions", 14 December 2011
• CBS News, "Elizabeth Taylor collection sells for $157 million", 21 December 2011
• Television Academy, "Elizabeth Taylor, Iconic Actress and Humanitarian, Dies at 79"
• amfAR, "Dame Elizabeth Taylor"
• The Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation, "About Us"
• Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, "The Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award"

Image credits

Elizabeth Taylor with Gregory Peck at the party following the Filmex tribute to her, Los Angeles, November 1981. Photograph by Alan Light, published on Flickr at flickr.com/photos/alan-light/1096428988 under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic licence (CC BY 2.0), creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/. The photograph has not been modified.