Friday, April 29, 2011

Prohibición a tomar fotos de monumentos y parques publicos en San Juan, llena de ira al publico en general.



Imagínese que usted va a sacar una foto de su familia en un parque publico en San Juan, y lo próximo es que un Policía Municipal te lo impida, ya que hay un estatuto que lo prohíbe.

Esto es lo que reseña El Nuevo Día.

Si se casa, se gradúa o tiene un quinceañero pronto y planificaba llegar hasta las diversas y hermosas plazas de la Ciudad Capital a tomar fotos con un trípode o tal vez algún lente profesional, sepa que para hacerlo necesita permiso del gobierno.

Y, claro está, como toda oficina gubernamental o municipal, sólo lo obtendrá de lunes a viernes en horario regular de oficina en las instalaciones de la Compañía de Turismo en el Viejo San Juan o en las oficinas de los centros urbanos de cada región de la Capital.

Un reglamento firmado por el hoy gobernador Luis Fortuño en 1994, cuando dirigía Turismo, y el Código de Desarrollo Económico del Municipio de San Juan, así lo estipulan, o al menos así es interpretado por los funcionarios.

La situación de los permisos de este tipo la vivió una pareja de jóvenes que llegó con un fotógrafo a Ventana al Mar, en el Condado, para retratarse donde él le pidió matrimonio.

No pudieron hacerlas, un sábado, porque allí se enteraron que necesitaban autorización y por ser fin de semana no pudieron tramitarla.

“No sabíamos nada, me molesté pero cambiamos de lugar porque el guardia no tiene la culpa. Pero pasó lo mismo en otros sitios”, contó molesta, aunque resignada, Raquel Bonilla, oriunda de Yauco, pero que reside en Manatí.

La situación fue constatada por INS al conversar con un guardia de seguridad en ese lugar.

“Ya no se puede retratar con trípodes, flash, lentes extendidos… Así como lo estás haciendo tú sí (con la cámara en mano), pero lo demás, para Turismo, es comercial”, indicó.

Los ciudadanos tienen que solicitar el permiso con, al menos, cinco días de anticipación.

Pero para los turistas, según testigos, en ocasiones la realidad es otra.

Jackmarie Ortiz, que trabaja en producciones teatrales y está colaborando en la producción de un largometraje local, sostuvo que, con incredulidad, observó cómo permiten a los turistas recién bajados de un barco crucero tomar fotos con sus cámaras profesionales, trípodes y demás, sin resistencia, contrario con lo que ocurre con los residentes locales.

“A los turistas no les dicen nada ni les piden permisos y lo que tienen por lente es el ‘supertubo’…”, recordó Ortiz del tiempo que trabajó en la taquilla del Teatro Tapia.

Además, contó cuán difícil se les hizo conseguir un permiso “para grabar una escena en la plaza del edificio donde está la Lotería Electrónica (en Hato Rey). Ni el policía que me lo prohibió supo decirme dónde conseguir el permiso”.

De hecho, en algunos casos los permisos tienen que estar acompañados por seguros de responsabilidad pública a favor de Turismo o el municipio de San Juan, para poder responder en casos de accidentes o daños.

La portavoz de Turismo, Annie Rodríguez, explicó que se trata de una medida para evitar el vandalismo, el terrorismo y otros delitos en la zona y proteger la propiedad que maneja la agencia.

Turismo cobra, según el reglamento, por pie cuadrado a utilizar y dependerá del tipo de actividad que se realice, si es privada, cultural, cívica o promocional.

Reacciona el Municipio de San Juan

Por su parte, Suyín Huertas, del municipio de San Juan, explicó que siempre se piden los permisos y se exige un seguro en caso de algún accidente, pero afirmó que nunca se ha cobrado (a ciudadanos o compañías) porque la exposición de las plazas sanjuaneras representa aumento en el turismo para la Capital.

Mientras, los residentes en el país deberán recordar acudir, de lunes a viernes, a las oficinas correspondientes de Gobierno para solicitar sus permisos, algunos pagando, para tomarse sus fotos en la concurrida y turística ciudad principal de la Isla, de lo contrario, pueden exponerse a multas por usar los espacios que pagaron y mantienen con sus contribuciones.

Indignación general La prohibición de sacar fotos en monumentos de San Juan generó ayer indignación y muestra de ello son los cientos de comentarios que colgaron ayer los usuarios de la página de El Nuevo Día en Facebook. “¿El gobierno es dueño de San Juan? ¿Qué nos pasa?”, reclamó una lectora. “¿No se supone que vivimos en una democracia? ¿Quién es el gobierno para hacer esto? Se trata de nuestra Isla. Y luego dicen que Puerto Rico lo hace mejor!!!! Ja”, comentó otra persona.“Me dan ganas de sacar la cámara y retratar todo en San Juan”, lanzó como reto otra lectora.

“¡No había escuchado estupidez más grande que esta!!!! Ah, ya sé, es que no hay nada que hacer... Puerto Rico no tiene problemas de criminalidad, drogas, asesinatos, la economía, la EDUCACIÓN!!!! y por eso, PIERDEN el tiempo en estupideces como esta...”, ironizó otro lector.

“¡Lean bien!!! Es si vas hacer sesión de fotos o utilizar equipo profesional, no cámaras comunes! Además, esto es un país democrático y libre de expresión. Qué los policías se pongan para su número, ellos están allí para seguridad, y no para velar cámaras! ¿Qué le pasa? ¡Están locos! ¡Todos en este gobierno!”, reclamó otra persona.


Por eso ¡A PROTESTAR!
El domingo 15 de Mayo, todos los que somos ciudadanos y fotógrafos amateurs y profesionales vamos a invadir las plazas y parques de San Juan y Condado y vamos a fotografiar. Para mas información y unirte a la manifestación ve a este enlace; La Gran Jornada Fotográfica en San Juan.

¡Yo voy a decir presente!

Thursday, April 28, 2011

The new Dr. Kerworkian? 91 year old woman sells suicide kits over the Internet!


Ah...The Internet. You can find almost anything on it! Including suicide kits!

A shadowy online company selling suicide kits recently claimed its first confirmed victim. Winston Ross talks exclusively with the entrepreneur behind it: a grieving 91-year-old woman.
The paramedics who showed up to Nick Klonoski’s house on Highland Drive four months ago discovered the 29-year-old’s lifeless body, covered up to the neck by a blanket. It was his brother Jake, detectives learned, who’d found Nick lying in his bed less than an hour beforehand, a clear plastic bag over his head, and a plastic tube running from the bag to an orange metal helium tank. Next to the tank was a white box, decorated with a butterfly, the box the plastic bag and tube had arrived in the mail in, with a book titled Final Exit inside.
“Is it the book and the kit?” asked the first police officers to arrive on the scene. The paramedics nodded knowingly. “Yep.”
These materials were assembled and sold to Klonoski last June for $60 by a company that calls itself the Gladd Group, which is not really a group at all. It’s a woman from the San Diego suburb of La Mesa, California, named Sharlotte Hydorn. She is 91 years old.
Each of the kits Hydorn assembles by hand is a simple contraption designed for a single purpose: people kill themselves with it by encasing their head in a bag of helium, which is lethal in pure form. People like Klonoski, the son of a U.S. district judge and whose funeral was attended by more than a thousand people. The Gladd Group’s estimated annual sales are $98,000. That means Sharlotte Hydorn sells more than 1,600 suicide kits every year.
“I’m too busy to cash the bloody checks,” she told The Daily Beast. “I haven’t made a deposit in three months.”
You have probably never heard of the helium-hood kit. Neither had Oregon State Sen. Floyd Prozanski, until he read a newspaper story published last month about Klonoski’s death. The horrified legislator quickly floated a bill to make it a Class C felony to sell such a kit. The first to testify at his April 11 hearing was one of Klonoski’s four brothers, Zach. Zach told the state senate judiciary panel that “my brother Nick was a beautiful person...It would be a disservice to him to remember him only for the way he died.”
Zach didn’t discuss his brother’s reasons for killing himself, but Nick’s mother, U.S. District Court Judge Ann Aiken, told police he’d been running every day and had been in an upbeat mood, despite battling a severe cold over the past several weeks. Klonoski’s brothers told the Eugene Register-Guard that he’d battled bouts of pain and fatigue for years without a diagnosis, that he was depressed about the effect that had on his life, and that he was worried he’d never regain his normal health.
“This is analogous to putting a gun-vending machine next to a depression clinic.”
Klonoski wasn’t terminally ill, so he wouldn’t have qualified for lethal prescriptions provided to eligible Oregonians under the state’s Death With Dignity Act, one of only two states that allow assisted suicide. But he was able to buy Hydorn’s kit on the Internet, to rent a helium tank from nearby Party City for $175, and do the job himself.
This, an emotional Zach testified at the hearing earlier this month, should be illegal.
“In a society where so many people suffer from depression and other mental-health disorders,” Zach said, “this company has found their niche in the market by peddling death. This is analogous to putting a gun-vending machine next to a depression clinic. The Gladd company, so named as to avoid suspicion in case family members happen to sign for or come across the package, made $60 off my brother’s death.”
Though Hydorn admits she did sell Zach’s brother his implement of death, she makes no apology for it. She has a story of her own.
It was 30 years ago, Hydorn said in an exclusive interview with The Daily Beast, that her husband, “a six-foot-four, wonderful, handsome, loving, intelligent man,” was dying of colon cancer. After several operations, the cancer had spread to his brain, and surgeons had cut a hole in his stomach, out of which came his excrement, into a bag.
“It was my duty, and I did it willingly, to empty that thing every three or four hours,” she said. “One time I ran out of bags and went all over town looking for a pharmacy that sold them. Even years after my husband died, I would wake up and say, ‘I’ve got to go get those bags.’ ”
No one should have to go through that, Hydorn said, to die a slow, painful death in a hospital bed. “Death should be with loved ones beside you, holding your hand."
Not long after her husband died, Hydorn met a man named Derek Humphry, a longtime advocate of assisted suicide and founder of the Hemlock Society, which has worked to change laws prohibiting the practice around the country. It was Humphry, in 1992, who penned Final Exit: The Practicalities of Self-Deliverance and Assisted Suicide for the Dying, which effectively serves as a manual for how to kill yourself and which Humphry told The Register-Guard sold 500,000 copies in the first six weeks.

Monday, April 25, 2011

And the Box Office Champion this week is...


Via Deadline Hollywood / Nikki Finke

SATURDAY PM/SUNDAY AM, 5TH UPDATE: Studios tell me this Easter Weekend began and ended with rain and storms in 2/3s of the U.S. and the first huge "up" weekend of $125M, which is +34% from last year. Twentieth Century Fox's Rio 3D may be about a bird, but Friday and Saturday numbers showed "it's holding like a rock," a studio exec emailed me.

Lionsgate's latest in Tyler Perry's franchise, Madea's Big Happy Family, had the best per screen average of all the top-grossing pictures. This is, after all, Perry's sixth cross-dressing film; still, the last one opened to a $41M weekend and the one before to $30M and this will be even lower by end of day Sunday. scoring an "A-" CinemaScore was Fox 2000's Water For Elephants based on Sara Gruen's best-selling book and written by Richard LaGravenese and directed by Francis Lawrence.

Clearly, the classy ad campaign was intriguing for adults who don't rush out to see films, and for Robert Pattinson's Twi-hards who do. But this beautifully filmed but searing drama was considered a hard sell. It was also a fine weekend for Universal's holdover Hop from Illumination Entertainment after passing $100M. And Disneynature's African Cats narrated by Samuel Jackson played well for a niche nature movie that truly deserves to be seen, as evidenced by its "A-" CinemaScore. Full analysis coming. Here is the Top 10:

1. Rio 3D (Blue Sky Studio/Fox) Week 2 [3,842 Theaters]
Friday $10.6M, Saturday $10M, Easter Weekend $26.6M (-32%), Cume $81.1M

2. Madea's Big Happy Family (Tyler Perry/Lionsgate) NEW [2,288 Theaters]
Friday $10.5M, Saturday $9.1M, Easter Weekend $25.7M

3. Water For Elephants (Fox 2000/Fox) NEW [2,817 Theaters]
Friday $7M, Saturday $6.5M, Easter Weekend $17.5M

4. Hop (Illumination Entertainment/Universal) Week 4 [3,616 Theaters]
Friday $4.8M, Saturday $4.5M, Easter Weekend $12.4M, Cume $100.4M

5. Scream 4 (Miramax/Dimension/Weinstein Co) Week 2 [3,314 Theaters]
Friday $2.7M, Saturday $2.7M, Easter Weekend $7.1M (-62%), Cume $31.1M

6. African Cats (Disneynature/Walt Disney Studios) NEW [1,220 Theaters]
Friday $3.3M, Saturday $1.6M, Easter Weekend $6.4M

7. Soul Surfer (FilmDistrict/Sony) Week 3 [2,240 Theaters]]
Friday $2.3M, Saturday $1.9M, Easter Weekend $5.6M, Cume $28.6M

8. Insidious (FilmDistrict) Week 4 [2,130 Theaters]
Friday $2.1M, Saturday $1.9M, Easter Weekend $5.3M, Cume $44.1M

9. Hanna (Focus Features) Week 3 [2,383 theaters]
Friday $1.8M, Saturday $2M, Easter Weekend $5.2M, Cume $31.7M

10. Source Code (Summit) Week 4 [2,363 Theaters]
Friday $1.8M, Saturday $1.9M, Easter Weekend $5M, Estimated Cume $44.6M

Tuesday, April 19, 2011

Weird Tuesday post, just for you!




Well, this happens as I'm bored to tears at my job. So in my travels thru the Intewebs, I happened to stumble upon a collection of very weird Album cover art, this from an era when music was on LP's (What's an LP? Ask your parents, you rascal and by the way; GET OFF MY PORCH!!!) Here's some smaples. The whole enchilada is right here! Click it, don't be afraid, you wuss!

Tuesday, April 5, 2011

Las mas taquilleras para el fin de semana de Abril 1-3, 2011


En Estados Unidos:

1- Hop
2- Source Code
3- Insidious
4- Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Rodrick Rules
5- Limitless

En Puerto Rico

1- Hop
2- Source Code
3- Red Riding Hood
4- Limitless
5- Battle: Los Angeles

Thursday, March 31, 2011

The world's worst music video ever?

This is Friday by Rebecca Black.
Probably the worst music video ever made, with the worst song ever made.

Why put it here...

guess...

Wednesday, March 23, 2011

Dame Elizabeth Taylor DBE-Actress "Cleopatra", "Who's Afraid of Virgina Wolf". 1932-2011


LOS ANGELES – Elizabeth Taylor, the violet-eyed film goddess whose sultry screen persona, stormy personal life and enduring fame and glamour made her one of the last of the old-fashioned movie stars and a template for the modern celebrity, died Wednesday at age 79.

She was surrounded by her four children when she died of congestive heart failure at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, where she had been hospitalized for about six weeks, said publicist Sally Morrison.

"My Mother was an extraordinary woman who lived life to the fullest, with great passion, humor, and love," her son, Michael Wilding, said in a statement.

"We know, quite simply, that the world is a better place for Mom having lived in it. Her legacy will never fade, her spirit will always be with us, and her love will live forever in our hearts."

Taylor was the most blessed and cursed of actresses, the toughest and the most vulnerable. She had extraordinary grace, wealth and voluptuous beauty, and won three Academy Awards, including a special one for her humanitarian work. She was the most loyal of friends and a defender of gays in Hollywood when AIDS was still a stigma in the industry and beyond. But she was afflicted by ill health, failed romances (eight marriages, seven husbands) and personal tragedy.

"I think I'm becoming fatalistic," she said in 1989. "Too much has happened in my life for me not to be fatalistic."

Her more than 50 movies included unforgettable portraits of innocence and of decadence, from the children's classic "National Velvet" and the sentimental family comedy "Father of the Bride" to Oscar-winning transgressions in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" and "Butterfield 8." The historical epic "Cleopatra" is among Hollywood's greatest on-screen fiascos and a landmark of off-screen monkey business, the meeting ground of Taylor and Richard Burton, the "Brangelina" of their day.

She played enough bawdy women on film for critic Pauline Kael to deem her "Chaucerian Beverly Hills."

But her defining role, one that lasted long past her moviemaking days, was "Elizabeth Taylor," ever marrying and divorcing, in and out of hospitals, gaining and losing weight, standing by Michael Jackson, Rock Hudson and other troubled friends, acquiring a jewelry collection that seemed to rival Tiffany's.

She was a child star who grew up and aged before an adoring, appalled and fascinated public. She arrived in Hollywood when the studio system tightly controlled an actor's life and image, had more marriages than any publicist could explain away and lasted long enough to no longer require explanation. She was the industry's great survivor, and among the first to reach that special category of celebrity — famous for being famous, for whom her work was inseparable from the gossip around it.

The London-born actress was a star at age 12, a bride and a divorcee at 18, a superstar at 19 and a widow at 26. She was a screen sweetheart and martyr later reviled for stealing Eddie Fisher from Debbie Reynolds, then for dumping Fisher to bed Burton, a relationship of epic passion and turbulence, lasting through two marriages and countless attempted reconciliations.

She was also forgiven. Reynolds would acknowledge voting for Taylor when she was nominated for "Butterfield 8" and decades later co-starred with her old rival in "These Old Broads," co-written by Carrie Fisher, the daughter of Reynolds and Eddie Fisher.

Taylor's ailments wore down the grudges. She underwent at least 20 major operations and she nearly died from a bout with pneumonia in 1990. In 1994 and 1995, she had both hip joints replaced, and in February 1997, she underwent surgery to remove a benign brain tumor. In 1983, she acknowledged a 35-year addiction to sleeping pills and pain killers. Taylor was treated for alcohol and drug abuse problems at the Betty Ford Clinic in Rancho Mirage, Calif.

Her troubles bonded her to her peers and the public, and deepened her compassion. Her advocacy for AIDS research and for other causes earned her a special Oscar, the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award, in 1993.

As she accepted it, to a long ovation, she declared, "I call upon you to draw from the depths of your being — to prove that we are a human race, to prove that our love outweighs our need to hate, that our compassion is more compelling than our need to blame."

The dark-haired Taylor made an unforgettable impression in Hollywood with "National Velvet," the 1945 film in which the 12-year-old belle rode a steeplechase horse to victory in the Grand National.

Critic James Agee wrote of her: "Ever since I first saw the child ... I have been choked with the peculiar sort of adoration I might have felt if we were in the same grade of primary school."

"National Velvet," her fifth film, also marked the beginning of Taylor's long string of health issues. During production, she fell off a horse. The resulting back injury continued to haunt her.

Taylor matured into a ravishing beauty in "Father of the Bride," in 1950, and into a respected performer and femme fatale the following year in "A Place in the Sun," based on the Theodore Dreiser novel "An American Tragedy." The movie co-starred her close friend Montgomery Clift as the ambitious young man who drowns his working-class girlfriend to be with the socialite Taylor. In real life, too, men all but committed murder in pursuit of her.

Through the rest of the 1950s and into the 1960s, she and Marilyn Monroe were Hollywood's great sex symbols, both striving for appreciation beyond their physical beauty, both caught up in personal dramas filmmakers could only wish they had imagined. That Taylor lasted, and Monroe died young, was a matter of luck and strength; Taylor lived as she pleased and allowed no one to define her but herself.

"I don't entirely approve of some of the things I have done, or am, or have been. But I'm me. God knows, I'm me," Taylor said around the time she turned 50.

She had a remarkable and exhausting personal and professional life. Her marriage to Michael Todd ended tragically when the producer died in a plane crash in 1958. She took up with Fisher, married him, then left him for Burton. Meanwhile, she received several Academy Award nominations and two Oscars.

She was a box-office star cast in numerous "prestige" films, from "Raintree County" with Clift to "Giant," an epic co-starring her friends Hudson and James Dean. Nominations came from a pair of movies adapted from work by Tennessee Williams: "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" and "Suddenly, Last Summer." In "Butterfield 8," released in 1960, she starred with Fisher as a doomed girl-about-town. Taylor never cared much for the film, but her performance at the Oscars wowed the world.

Sympathy for Taylor's widowhood had turned to scorn when she took up with Fisher, who had supposedly been consoling her over the death of Todd. But before the 1961 ceremony, she was hospitalized from a nearly fatal bout with pneumonia and Taylor underwent a tracheotomy. The scar was bandaged when she appeared at the Oscars to accept her best actress trophy for "Butterfield 8."

To a standing ovation, she hobbled to the stage. "I don't really know how to express my great gratitude," she said in an emotional speech. "I guess I will just have to thank you with all my heart." It was one of the most dramatic moments in Academy Awards history.

"Hell, I even voted for her," Reynolds later said.

Greater drama awaited: "Cleopatra." Taylor met Burton while playing the title role in the 1963 epic, in which the brooding, womanizing Welsh actor co-starred as Mark Antony. Their chemistry was not immediate. Taylor found him boorish; Burton mocked her physique. But the love scenes on film continued away from the set and a scandal for the ages was born. Headlines shouted and screamed. Paparazzi snapped and swooned. Their romance created such a sensation that the Vatican denounced the happenings as the "caprices of adult children."

The film so exceeded its budget that the producers lost money even though "Cleopatra" was a box-office hit and won four Academy awards. (With its $44 million budget adjusted for inflation, "Cleopatra" remains the most expensive movie ever made.) Taylor's salary per film topped $1 million. "Liz and Dick" became a couple on a first name basis with millions who had never met them.

They were a prolific acting team, even if most of the movies aged no better than their relationship: "The VIPs" (1963), "The Sandpiper" (1965), "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" (1966), "The Taming of the Shrew" (1967), "The Comedians" (1967), "Dr. Faustus" (1967), "Boom!" (1968), "Under Milk Wood" (1971) and "Hammersmith Is Out" (1972).

Art most effectively imitated life in the adaptation of Edward Albee's "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" — in which Taylor and Burton played mates who fought viciously and drank heavily. She took the best actress Oscar for her performance as the venomous Martha in "Virginia Woolf" and again stole the awards show, this time by not showing up at the ceremony. She refused to thank the academy upon learning of her victory and chastised voters for not honoring Burton.

Taylor and Burton divorced in 1974, married again in 1975 and divorced again in 1976.

"We fight a great deal," Burton once said, "and we watch the people around us who don't quite know how to behave during these storms. We don't fight when we are alone."

In 1982, Taylor and Burton appeared in a touring production of the Noel Coward play "Private Lives," in which they starred as a divorced couple who meet on their respective honeymoons. They remained close at the time of Burton's death, in 1984.

Elizabeth Rosemond Taylor was born in London on Feb. 27, 1932, the daughter of Francis Taylor, an art dealer, and the former Sara Sothern, an American stage actress. At age 3, with extensive ballet training already behind her, Taylor danced for British princesses Elizabeth (the future queen) and Margaret Rose at London's Hippodrome. At age 4, she was given a wild field horse that she learned to ride expertly.

At the onset of World War II, the Taylors came to the United States. Francis Taylor opened a gallery in Beverly Hills and, in 1942, his daughter made her screen debut with a bit part in the comedy "There's One Born Every Minute."

Her big break came soon thereafter. While serving as an air-raid warden with MGM producer Sam Marx, Taylor's father learned that the studio was struggling to find an English girl to play opposite Roddy McDowall in "Lassie Come Home." Taylor's screen test for the film won her both the part and a long-term contract. She grew up quickly after that.

Still in school at 16, she would dash from the classroom to the movie set where she played passionate love scenes with Robert Taylor in "Conspirator."

"I have the emotions of a child in the body of a woman," she once said. "I was rushed into womanhood for the movies. It caused me long moments of unhappiness and doubt."

Soon after her screen presence was established, she began a series of very public romances. Early loves included socialite Bill Pawley, home run slugger Ralph Kiner and football star Glenn Davis.

Then, a roll call of husbands:

• She married Conrad Hilton Jr., son of the hotel magnate, in May 1950 at age 18. The marriage ended in divorce that December.

• When she married British actor Michael Wilding in February 1952, he was 39 to her 19. They had two sons, Michael Jr. and Christopher Edward. That marriage lasted 4 years.

• She married cigar-chomping movie producer Michael Todd, also 20 years her senior, in 1957. They had a daughter, Elizabeth Francis. Todd was killed in a plane crash in 1958.

• The best man at the Taylor-Todd wedding was Fisher. He left his wife Debbie Reynolds to marry Taylor in 1959. She converted to Judaism before the wedding.

• Taylor and Fisher moved to London, where she was making "Cleopatra." She met Burton, who also was married. That union produced her fourth child, Maria.

• After her second marriage to Burton ended, she married John Warner, a former secretary of the Navy, in December 1976. Warner was elected a U.S. senator from Virginia in 1978. They divorced in 1982.

• In October 1991, she married Larry Fortensky, a truck driver and construction worker she met while both were undergoing treatment at the Betty Ford Center in 1988. He was 20 years her junior. The wedding, held at the ranch of Michael Jackson, was a media circus that included the din of helicopter blades, a journalist who parachuted to a spot near the couple and a gossip columnist as official scribe.

But in August 1995, she and Fortensky announced a trial separation; she filed for divorce six months later and the split became final in 1997.

"I was taught by my parents that if you fall in love, if you want to have a love affair, you get married," she once remarked. "I guess I'm very old-fashioned."

Her philanthropic interests included assistance for the Israeli War Victims Fund, the Variety Clubs International and the American Foundation for AIDS Research.

She received the Legion of Honor, France's most prestigious award, in 1987, for her efforts to support AIDS research. In May 2000, Queen Elizabeth II made Taylor a dame — the female equivalent of a knight — for her services to the entertainment industry and to charity.

In 1993, she won a lifetime achievement award from the American Film Institute; in 1999, an institute survey of screen legends ranked her No. 7 among actresses.

During much of her later career, Taylor's waistline, various diets, diet books and tangled romances were the butt of jokes by Joan Rivers and others. John Belushi mocked her on "Saturday Night Live," dressing up in drag and choking on a piece of chicken.

"It's a wonder I didn't explode," Taylor wrote of her 60-pound weight gain — and successful loss — in the 1988 book "Elizabeth Takes Off on Self-Esteem and Self-Image."

She was an iconic star, but her screen roles became increasingly rare in the 1980s and beyond. She appeared in several television movies, including "Poker Alice" and "Sweet Bird of Youth," and entered the Stone Age as Pearl Slaghoople in the movie version of "The Flintstones." She had a brief role on the popular soap opera "General Hospital."

Taylor was the subject of numerous unauthorized biographies and herself worked on a handful of books, including "Elizabeth Taylor: An Informal Memoir" and "Elizabeth Taylor: My Love Affair With Jewelry." In tune with the media to the end, she kept in touch through her Twitter account.

"I like the connection with fans and people who have been supportive of me," Taylor told Kim Kardashian in a 2011 interview for Harper's Bazaar. "And I love the idea of real feedback and a two-way street, which is very, very modern. But sometimes I think we know too much about our idols and that spoils the dream."

Survivors include her daughters Maria Burton-Carson and Liza Todd-Tivey, sons Christopher and Michael Wilding, 10 grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.

A private family funeral is planned later this week.