,

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

, and

Suddenly, Last Summer

earned her Academy Award nominations.

In 1955, she appeared in the Texas oil tale

Giant

opposite Rock Hudson and James Dean.

Taylor had a tumultuous personal life. She was married eight times, twice to the same husband, actor Richard Burton.

At 18, she married hotel heir Nicky Hilton, but was divorced within months. In 1952, she married actor Michael Wilding, and divorced five years later.

Within months, she married producer Mike Todd, but he was killed in a crash of a private plane the following year.

In 1959, she married Eddie Fisher, and was blamed by the tabloid press for breaking up his marriage to popular singer Debbie Reynolds.

Taylor's on-screen romance with actor Richard Burton became passionate off-screen. She divorced Fisher and became forever linked with Burton in the public imagination.

They starred together in the big-screen spectacle

Cleopatra

, released in 1963.

Taylor and Burton were married in 1964.

The actress earned Academy Awards for the 1960 film

Butterfield 8

, in which she played a New York call girl, and the 1966 film

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Starring Taylor and Burton as an unhappy married couple, the film mirrored the couple’s turbulent real-life relationship.

Burton and Taylor separated and reconciled, divorced and remarried, and divorced a final time in 1976. She was married to John Warner, a former U.S. secretary of the Navy, who became a U.S. senator from Virginia, from 1976 to 1982.