ELIZABETH Taylor is an illusion. She is a pair of violet eyes, a clutch of husbands, a raft of medical work, and a CV which crystallises the golden days of Hollywood. She is a myth. The last great star in the glamorous galaxy which once had cinema audiences across the planet slavishly following its every move on and off the silver screen. Fast approaching 65, she still has the power to make us hold our collective breath to will her through her latest illness, and the charisma to draw the lesser moths of show business around her for the birthday party she celebrated, typically, not for herself but for Aids sufferers.

In the last decade, it seems to have become the exclusive province of homosexuals to admire beautiful women. Once, we all did, and Elizabeth Taylor was arguably the most beautiful of them all. The pubescent Taylor who rode into our lives on National Velvet had an exquisite face which was already worldly wise. The star of Butterfield 8 had looks to die for; and, made-up for Cleopatra, Taylor launched a kohl-eyed look which was copied by every woman in the world.

She is unique in that women have loved her while men lusted, something which Monroe never achieved. Women may have copied Monroe's peroxide hair, her pouting lips, her clothes, and even her beauty spot, but there was always the feeling that Nice Girls did not really want to emulate the whole persona. But you wanted to be Taylor, just as you would want to be the fairy queen.

The myth is that Taylor has had everything. In reality, she has had so very little. Taylor has proved that looks, stardom, fortune beyond dreams, diamonds to be envied by royalty, and eight marriages do little to feed the soul. She has been a victim of the Hollywood machine, a victim of men, perhaps a victim of her own generosity. Money and fame can buy neither happiness nor health, and throughout her life she has been in the black with the former and the red with the latter. Now, as she recovers from an operation in the Cedars-Sinai centre in California to remove what is said to be a benign brain tumour, she is alone once more to face the future. Larry Fortensky has joined the club of former husbands of Liz Taylor, perhaps more inevitably than any of the others.

And yet, why so? Incompatibility comes in many guises, and it may just have proved more possible for the megastar to live with a former truck driver who shared her alcohol abuse history than for her to share her life with the rich heir to a hotel fortune who is said to have battered her.

When she married her first husband, Nicky Hilton, it was presented as a fairy-tale romance to the fans, but they were not privy to the rumours that she was punched so hard she needed medical treatment.

The stella nova was born on February 27, 1932, in London. She was educated at Byron House in Hampstead, then went to America with her parents and was sent to Hawthorne School in Beverly Hills, followed by the Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer School and University High School, Hollywood. By then she was strait-jacketed into the Hollywood system, having made her first film, There's One Born Every Minute, in 1942. The following year she was in Lassie Come Home, and The White Cliffs of Dover, followed in 1944 by Jane Eyre and National Velvet. It was National Velvet which alerted the world to the Taylor phenomenon - the beauty, the presence, the je ne sais quois which marks out the star from the bit player.

As with fellow child actors Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney, it was during her teenage years that the physical and emotional damage was wrought. The uppers and downers, the isolation from the real world, the long hours working on such nonsense as Father Of The Bride laid the foundations for her future life.

No doubt the studio minders believed they were acting for the best, and could not have looked into a grim future in which their young star would book into the Betty Ford clinic to combat drug and alcohol abuse. Nor could they have envisaged the emotional pain of failed marriages and affairs. Stars weren't real people, but the stuff money and dreams were made of - in that strict order, and to hang with their feelings.

She married Conrad Nicholas Hilton when she was just 18. Two years later, she was the wife of director Michael Wilding, with whom she had two sons, and in 1957, she married the flamboyant Mike Todd, showman extraordinaire, with whom she had a daughter. He died in a plane crash and turned Taylor into a widow rather than a divorcee. It is probable that they would have divorced had he lived, however, because Todd apparently taped his lovemaking with the beautiful young star - and passed out copies to his friends.

Taylor fell from grace at this point, cast as the femme fatale in a relationship with sweet Debbie Reynolds' husband Eddie Fisher. Rehabilitated when she married the singer in 1959, the partnership lasted only until real love famously, or infamously, entered her life during the filming of Cleopatra. The Welsh Shakespearean actor with the voice like the finest single malt and the Hollywood star were dynamite. Sybil and Eddie were abandoned - the Burton-Taylor court was established.

It was rumbustious, rude, romantic, and ruinous. They could not live together, and divorced. They could not live apart and re-married. He described her as having a pigeon chest and bandy legs, and it was true. Taylor analysed is not perfection. She is not a cosmetic surgeon's template. Richard Burton was not looking for a Barbie doll, however. He was looking for a real woman who could match his carousing and swearing and fighting and loving, and she tried to match him all the way. From 1964 to 1976, they lavished love, hate, and diamonds on each other and neither ever recovered from the experience.

Taylor and Burton had become the king and queen of the movie world. In the late 1950s she had already proved she could handle the meaty roles as well as the light romances, starring in Cat On A Hot Tin Roof and Butterfield 8, for which she won an Academy Award for Best Actress. Now she teamed with Burton for cinema classics like Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf (another Best Actress award winner), The Taming Of The Shrew, and A Little Night Music.

Taylor was only too well aware that a Hollywood queen is only plastic royalty. When Princess Margaret suggested that one of the rock-like diamonds Burton lavished on her was vulgar, Taylor got her own back by persuading the Princess to try on the ring, commenting acidly: ''It doesn't look so vulgar now, does it?''

The couple may have divorced again in 1976, but will go down in history as one of the great love stories of the twentieth century, and as the great acting duo of twentieth century cinema. That she almost hi-jacked his funeral and certainly upstaged his widow, Sally, only served to cement the partnership in our imaginations. Taylor seemed to have so much more legitimate a claim to be there than the third Mrs Burton.

The movies tailed off after the seventies, and she made her last appearance on the big screen in The Flintstones in 1994, but she bravely made her stage debut in New York in The Little Foxes in 1981. From then on, she became more icon than star, and, of course, it was during this period that she fought her battles with booze, pills, and her wildly fluctuating weight.

There have been books and perfumes and charity work, particularly for Aids, and there have been seventh and eight marriages, of course. She almost convinced herself that she could play the supporting role to Senator John Warner, and stayed married to him for six years. She met Larry Fortensky at the Betty Ford Clinic, and married him in 1991.

Only she seemed convinced it would work, and perhaps once the honeymoon was over, even her faith failed her. She dickied him up in all the right clothes, showed him the right knives and forks, but he wasn't ever going to be able to partner her successfully on her movie star days.

Because Taylor has that amazing chameleon quality. To see her in ''real life'' is to see a dumpy little woman in rumpled clothes and frowsy hair, a woman who can glare you off the park with that one identifiable feature - the violet eyes. To see Taylor the star is to see a woman still stunning after all the babies and the back ops and the pneumonia scares and the self-abuse. At her birthday bash, wannabe star Liz Hurley described her as probably the most beautiful woman ever - pure Hollywood hype, but part of the illusion in which Taylor can still make you believe.

MARIAN PALLISTER