Into the living room, white carpet and chairs, a wall of important Impressionist paintings, french windows opening on to a pretty terrace, which leads down to the swimming pool. The tables are laden with great rocks of amethyst and pyramids of crystal and luminous amber obelisks - a collection so vast and impressive it would not look out of place in a museum of natural history. We look at a piece of shimmering violet on the table between us, which both contains and sheds a rainbow of colour. "Michael gave that to me," she says. "It's a major piece of crystal. That's what a pure diamond does. Reflects all the colours."

Ah, Elizabeth, and her diamonds. When did you first start liking jewellery? I ask. "When I first started opening my eyes," she says. Later Tim, who has been Taylor's personal assistant for the past seven or eight years, takes me on a tour of the house and standing in the loo, in front of an etching of a pair of lips (To Elizabeth - a big kiss Andy Warhol) he opens a box and shows me a ring on which is mounted the biggest, purest diamond I have ever seen. Shall I try it on? I ask. "Go ahead," he says - so I do. Fortunately, it does nothing for me.

The star's new management had warned me that on no account should I ask Miss Taylor about her jewels, but the first thing she says when we sit down is "Do you like my earrings?" She designed them herself and is inordinately proud of her efforts, drawing attention to them several times during the interview. They are very Liz - or Bessie, as I must now think of her, which sounds plain wrong somehow (Bessie Bunter? Bessie Smith? Queen Bessie?) - dangly, large and far from understated. They look like a string of daisies weighted down by a bell, and they do most definitely suit her. I think we can safely say that the diamonds and pearls are the real thing, I jest. "My dear. Who do you think you are talking to?" she breaks into her crazy laugh. "This is white coral (pointing to the flowers). These are white diamonds (the anthers), yellow sapphires and little pearls. I love the way they swing. They feel like they're in the breeze."

In her speech at the BAFTA awards earlier this year, Taylor said that she had never really considered herself as an actress. Even at the height of her acting fame, when she had received Oscars for Butterfield 8 and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf (her favourite performance), she always maintained that she felt more like a movie star than a serious thespian. "I know I am an actress, and that I've been paid as an actress," she says, "but when I listen to actors who are so taken away by the whole thing, I look at them and I think, get a life!" This is music to my ears. "Now I don't mean to be rude," she joins in the laughter, "but there are other things... and maybe living in Washington DC helped my perspective on that."

After the BAFTA hoopla, there had been numerous reports that Taylor was so thrilled by the tributes that she had decided to relaunch her acting career. Her name had been linked, as they say, with Rod Steiger and various projects he supposedly had in mind for her. He's a boy and a friend is how she describes him, and no, she squawks, she is not going to get hitched to him. In fact, after seven husbands, she is through with marriage altogether. "I am not going to marry anybody who is on the face of this earth or any other planet!" she says robustly.

As for the comeback, she seems decidedly half-hearted about it. I ask her about her rumoured role as Lady Bracknell. "The Importance of Being Earnest?" she asks. "That's the first I've ever heard of it." Do you want to act again or do you think you should because everyone else thinks you ought to? I ask - I can't make it out. "I can't quite either," she says, truthfully. "It'll happen when it happens. I'll just let it flow." The reason she gives for not making a major film for the past 20 years is that most of the scripts she has been sent have been dreck - "a good Jewish word. Let the reader figure it out". She continues: "If I go back, I want to go back in something worthwhile - not just because it's something to do. And the most important thing in my life is Aids."

It is Elizabeth Taylor, more than any other celebrity, politician, activist or world leader, who was responsible for turning around public opinion towards Aids, certainly in the United States and probably beyond. Her involvement came at a time when little was known about the virus and any association with it was the social kiss of death. She wheedled, coaxed and badgered her powerful, wealthy friends to support her first big fundraising event - drawing in the likes of Sammy Davis Jnr and Frank Sinatra, and making front-page news. "Here they all were attending this dinner for Aids? What's Aids?" she recalls. "Let's turn on to the inside pages to find out. So it was an enormous coup and a way of letting people know what this thing was." Since then she has raised millions of dollars for research and medical care, through her own self-funded Aids foundation as well as helping others, and she has stuck with the cause despite receiving a number of death threats. She acknowledges her position as a leader in the Aids fight, saying, "I am very proud of it, and I'll take any flak they want to give me."

In the early days, before anyone in the film community - including Elizabeth Taylor - knew that Rock Hudson had contracted the virus, she would be incensed by the kind of attitudes she encountered over the dinner table. "Well, it serves them bloody well right," she affects a pompous swagger. "They should be wiped off the face of the earth and this is God's way of doing it."

When the news got out about Hudson, Hollywood was suddenly convulsed by the implications. "My God. It's hit one of our own. It's one of the family," Taylor recalls. "And everybody loved Rock. He was one of the most enchanting, funny - ach, just so adorable. He was so cuddly and he loved to cuddle back."

For all Taylor's emotionalism on the subject, which is perfectly understandable to me, what impresses is her ruthless pragmatism about keeping the organisation lean and cost-efficient, so that every cent raised goes directly tothe Aids patients, whether in Nairobi or New York. Acting is only interpreting other people's words and work, she says, but what she wants to do is make some contribution of her own. "This is not mimicking something else. It's real tragedy. There's no Greek chorus. We're living it."

Click here for previous page
Click here for next page