Elizabeth Taylor is the latest icon to be buried in Forest Lawn Cemetery, a memorial park in Los Angeles which is home to Hollywood’s late and great.

The cemetery is world famous for housing celebrities like Walt Disney, Humphrey Bogart and Nat King Cole. It inspired Evelyn Waugh’s ‘The Loved One’ and has been described as the “New World’s Westminster Abbey” by Time Magazine.

Taylor, who died of congestive heart failure on Wednesday, was buried in a quiet, Jewish ceremony the day after she died. Her body rests in the Great Mausoleum, where public access to her tomb is very restricted.

Elizabeth Taylor’s eyes had a unique violet color and she was born with distinctive double-eyelashes. The English-born star moved to the USA as a child to escape from the Second World War in Europe, and soon appeared in the 1942 movie ‘There’s One Born Every Minute’. Taylor went on to star in films like ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf’ and ‘Butterfield 8’, for which she won Academy Awards, and Cleopatra, for which she was paid a staggering $1m in 1963. She was married eight times to seven husbands and insisted on being late to her own funeral, a request upheld by the mourners.

Taylor was a close friend of Michael Jackson – also buried at the cemetery – whose funeral she attended in 2009. His funeral drew the attention of the world’s media to the cemetery and its emphasis on privacy and dignity.

Reported by Mike Jordison.

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