Elizabeth Taylor

How Elizabeth Taylor Raised Our Consciousness and We Were Too Distracted by Her Beauty to Notice By M.G. Lord Walker & Co. 224 pp. $23 Reviewed by Meredith Broussard I picked up The Accidental Feminist , the new book about Elizabeth Taylor by cultural critic M.G. Lord, because I hoped it signaled a new wave of feminism emerging in America. The time is right for a fourth wave; It's been a little more than 20 years since Susan Faludi's Backlash , and hemlines are up and heels are sky-high.

Elizabeth Taylor suffered a seizure and was hospitalized yesterday, nine days after surgeons removed a brain tumor, her publicist said. "She's fine now. She was OK and talking in a few minutes [after the seizure]," her spokeswoman said. Taylor, who turned 65 on Thursday, was stricken at her Los Angeles home and was taken to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. The actress underwent a four-hour operation Feb. 20 to remove a benign brain tumor above and behind her left ear. She went home Wednesday.

Elizabeth Taylor's body still isn't working right. Beset by years of physical problems, she has a serious limp because of her second hip replacement. Liz is planning to have another operation next month. Taylor told her doctor that one of her legs is now shorter than the other, placing a strain on her back and first hip replacement. "I will not be a cripple," Taylor told columnist Liz Smith. "I will not use crutches or a walker. I will get over this and get on with my life.

Elizabeth Taylor was doing well yesterday, two days after brain surgery, and was moved from the intensive-care unit to a private room, her publicist said. "She's in great spirits," said Shirine Ann Coburn, her New York publicist. Taylor's children and some of her grandchildren have been visiting her at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. She is expected to be home for her 65th birthday Thursday. Doctors Thursday removed a benign tumor from her brain. STRIPED BASS CHEF RESIGNS Striped Bass executive chef Will Ternay has served up his resignation, effective shortly.

Elizabeth Taylor, 59, will take her eighth walk down the aisle on Oct. 5, to marry her blue-collar boyfriend. Pop star Michael Jackson will give her away at Neverland Valley, his estate in California's Santa Ynez Valley. The groom is Larry Fortensky, 39, who met Taylor during their treatment at the Betty Ford drug-abuse center in Rancho Mirage, Calif. Fortensky, a divorcee, is a construction worker. "Life is good and sweet, and we love each other and each day as it comes, and want to share our happiness with family and friends," Taylor said yesterday.

NOT ONLY WAS Elizabeth Taylor beautiful and glamorous, she could act, too. Angela Lansbury said, "Elizabeth Taylor has a great imagination, dazzling color" and was "the most glorious-looking girl" she'd ever seen. Plus, "Liz slid into acting like eating a piece of cake . . . as Taylor grew older and couldn't act, just her presence was needed. " This is the mark of a great movie star - and Hollywood royalty. Doug Leaman Oaks

GLENDALE, Calif. - Elizabeth Taylor's family mourned the screen legend at a brief private funeral Thursday afternoon at a Southern California cemetery famous for being the final resting place of Hollywood celebrities, including her good friend Michael Jackson. Inside the sprawling Forest Lawn Cemetery, barricades blocked access to the funeral, where about four dozen family members mourned the actress during a service that lasted about an hour, said Glendale police spokesman Tom Lorenz.

OF ALL the marvelous objects - real or manufactured - that cinema has provided us, I don't know that any surpass the violet eyes of Elizabeth Taylor. Taylor died yesterday at age 79, and while she left behind an insanely large and varied legacy as both an actress and storm-tossed celebrity, it was her made-for-technicolor, midcentury visage that comes to mind when you think of her. "Without question one of the most beautiful women to ever grace the screen," wrote Leonard Maltin, adding, perhaps as an afterthought, that the two-time Oscar winner was a better actress than acknowledged.

Charles Shyer, co-writer and director of Disney's remake of Father of the Bride, had given Kimberly Williams strict instructions: Don't go out and rent the original. Plucked from the campus of Northwestern University, where she was a sophomore theater major, Williams had been cast in the Elizabeth Taylor role: the college-age daughter who waltzes into her parent's house one day and announces she's engaged. Dad has conniptions, but finally accepts the inevitable - and goes through all sorts of comic trauma as he girds for the dreaded ritual of giving away his only girl.

How Elizabeth Taylor Raised Our Consciousness and We Were Too Distracted by Her Beauty to Notice By M.G. Lord Walker & Co. 224 pp. $23 Reviewed by Meredith Broussard I picked up The Accidental Feminist , the new book about Elizabeth Taylor by cultural critic M.G. Lord, because I hoped it signaled a new wave of feminism emerging in America. The time is right for a fourth wave; It's been a little more than 20 years since Susan Faludi's Backlash , and hemlines are up and heels are sky-high.

Some believe that in 2011, the world lost its most beautiful woman. When Elizabeth Taylor , 79, took leave of this life in March, hers joined many celebrated names now in the possession of memory and history. Her beautiful face, and the Everyman face of Harry Morgan ( M*A*S*H and much else), who passed away at 96, led a cavalcade of lives completed this year. Newsmakers. By far the biggest newsmaker to die this year was Osama bin Laden , 54, terrorist leader of al-Qaeda.

GHOULISH OR NOT, the contents of the home where Michael Jackson died sold for around $1 million at auction Saturday, nearly triple the Julien's Auctions' preshow estimate of $200,000 to $400,000. Among the highlights: A kitchen chalkboard on which MJ's children wrote, "I love daddy," sold for $5,000, and an armoire upon which he wrote a message to himself on the mirror nabbed $25,750. The auction also included furniture, artwork and other items from the rented mansion at 100 N. Carolwood Drive.

In honor of Tennessee Williams' centennial birthday, South Camden Theatre Company's season celebrates all things Williams, commencing the festivities with his exercise in self-flagellation, Suddenly, Last Summer . The play, fleshed out - so to speak - by Williams and Gore Vidal in a 1959 film, starring Katharine Hepburn, Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift, really consists of two monologues, supported at key moments by other players. Those monologues sure give a gal a chance to show off, and in this production, directed at a rolling boil by Connie Norwood, in Robert Bingaman's lush garden set, the gals - steel magnolia Violet Venable (Lee Kiszonas)

NEW YORK - Elizabeth Taylor dazzled the world with her luminous beauty, lavish lifestyle - and unquenchable passion for diamonds and jewels that was fueled by the great loves of her life. Taylor, who died in March at age 79, amassed one of the foremost jewelry collections in the world, including a 33.19-carat diamond ring and a 16th-century pear-shaped pearl from one of her seven husbands, Richard Burton. Christie's auction house is selling her complete jewelry collection, valued at $30 million, Dec. 13-14 in New York.

Sunday How it looked Among the 135 images in the Phillips' Mill Photographic Exhibition is Robert Fisher's "The Luther Little," a sepia portrait of an old schooner left to rot for 65 years by a Maine dock before finally being demolished. It's this sense of time's passage and ghostly memories in photographs that draw us to shows such as this, at Phillips' Mill , 2619 River Road, Solebury Township, on display 1 to 5 p.m. Sunday, Wednesday, and Thursday and 1 to 9 p.m. Friday and Saturday.

Repertory Films Ambler Theater 108 E. Butler Ave., Ambler; 215-345-7855. www.amblertheater.com . Jurassic Park (1993) $9.50; $7 seniors and students. 6/20. 7 pm. Classic Cartoons From the Vaults of Lou D. $9.50; $7 seniors and students. 6/23. 7 pm. Bryn Mawr Film Institute 824 W. Lancaster Ave., Bryn Mawr; 610-527-9898. www.brynmawrfilm.org . BUtterfield 8 (1960) $10; $7 seniors and students with ID. 6/21. 7 pm. Coming Home (1978) $10; $7 seniors and students with ID. 6/22.

A SEER HAS come forward claiming knowledge of Elizabeth Taylor's secret love child. Psychic John Cohan , a former confidante of Elizabeth's, told the New York Post 's Cindy Adams that a young Elizabeth had a child out of wedlock (perhaps explaining why she was always so quick to marry), and that the studio and her mother paid an Irish family to bring up baby Norah . Cohan said: "Money was exchanged. Living in Ireland, the child, resenting the mother who gave her up, wanted nothing to do with Elizabeth.

NOT ONLY WAS Elizabeth Taylor beautiful and glamorous, she could act, too. Angela Lansbury said, "Elizabeth Taylor has a great imagination, dazzling color" and was "the most glorious-looking girl" she'd ever seen. Plus, "Liz slid into acting like eating a piece of cake . . . as Taylor grew older and couldn't act, just her presence was needed. " This is the mark of a great movie star - and Hollywood royalty. Doug Leaman Oaks

Before becoming a bride eight times over, Elizabeth Taylor was a 17-year-old starlet scribbling letters to her first fiance, charting on pale pink stationery his progression from her one-and-only to the one who got away. "I've never known this kind of love before - it's so perfect and complete - and mature," Taylor wrote to William Pawley on May 6, 1949. "I've never loved anyone in my life before one third as much as I love you - and I never will (well, as far as that goes - I'll never love anyone else - period)