Elizabeth Taylor: 'You don't get over men like the flu - every divorce is like a little death'

WAGS called her Mrs Hilton Wilding Todd Fisher Burton Burton Warner Fortensky. Indeed, Elizabeth Taylor was prolific as a bride. "I think I ended up being the scarlet woman partly because of my rather puritanical upbringing and beliefs," she once said. "I couldn't just have a romance; it had to be marriage."

Her husbands were a hotel chain heir, an English actor, a flamboyant producer, a pop crooner, a Welsh actor (twice), a US senator and a construction worker. Her romances over the years included a football legend, a billionaire publisher and a Mexican lawyer.

The wedding of Elizabeth Taylor, 18, to Conrad Nicholson "Nicky" Hilton, 23, in May, 1950, was hailed as the Hollywood social event of the year. After the two-week honeymoon, Taylor went home to her mother and filed for divorce.

Of her marriage to British actor Michael Wilding, Taylor wrote: "We had a lovely, easy life, very simple, very quiet. Two babies were born. We had friends. We didn't do much."

That all changed when she met producer Mike Todd. He swept Taylor off her feet and out of her marriage to Wilding.

Todd died on a New Mexico mountain top in the 1958 crash of his private plane. Among those who consoled the widow was singer Eddie Fisher. Their romance caused the biggest Hollywood scandal of the time.

Taylor was branded a "home wrecker" for allegedly breaking up Fisher's marriage to Debbie Reynolds, mother of his two children.

Two years after her 1959 marriage to Fisher, Taylor met Richard Burton on the set of Cleopatra. "Has anybody ever told you that you're a very pretty girl?" said the hard-living actor. Her reaction: "Here's the great lover, the great wit, the great intellectual of Wales, and he comes out with a line like that!" They were soon madly in love, and the world's press trumpeted every development of the affair. After divorces from their spouses, Taylor and Burton were married on 15 March, 1964. They divorced in 1974, remarried in 1975 and divorced finally the following year.

In 1976 she married John W Warner and helped his campaign for the US Senate in 1978. They divorced in 1982. She married 37-year-old construction worker Larry Fortensky in October 1991 at friend Michael Jackson's ranch. In August 1995, they announced a trial separation; and in February 1996 she filed for divorce.

"You don't get over men like the flu," Taylor said of her relationships. "Every divorce is like a little death."