Elizabeth Taylor had a full life, if not one foreign to most of us.  She was a child actress in the early 1940s. She became an icon of classical Hollywood cinema in the 1950s, and in the 60s, she was world’s highest paid movie star. She was nominated five times for an Oscar, and won twice for Best Actress. A savvy businesswoman, she negotiated the first $1 million dollar contract for an actor (for her role in Cleopatra). She was the first celebrity to launch a hit fragrance brand, the first female social entrepreneur, and used her fame to educate an ignorant public about HIV/AIDS. She was the recipient of the Légion d’honneur, the Presidential Citizens Medal, the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award at the 65th Academy Awards, and in 2000, Queen Elizabeth II named her a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire.

And she was a sucker for dogs.

Her canine relationships were with purebred dogs starting with “Monty,” the Golden Retriever her family had in the 1930s when Elizabeth was young. Later as an adult, she would say, “Some of my best leading men have been dogs and horses.”

Taylor once owned a Cocker Spaniel and Springer Spaniel, “Twinkle” and “Spot,” respectively, and had Poodles but more breeds were to follow. For her 60th birthday, she was given a Collie puppy as a gift, a great grandchild of “Pal,” the dog who played the original “Lassie” with whom she appeared in, “Lassie Come Home.” When Taylor’s 8th (and final) marriage ended in divorce, the Collie became an custody issue because her soon to be ex-husband, Larry Fortensky, wanted the dog. Though the breed wasn’t going to prove to be her first choice in dogs for the remainder of her life, Taylor liked this dog a lot, and successfully sued to have custody.

And then there were the Pekingese. When a movie in which she and then husband, Richard Burton, was set to be filmed in England, Elizabeth was faced with the country’s six month quarantine law at the time. Money can’t buy everything, but it solved the problem of how to keep her dogs with her. Taylor and Burton acquired a yacht, and kept it moored on the Thames, the Pekes on-board 

Taylor and Burton would divorce (twice), and she soon acquired a Lhasa Apso named Elsa, but her all-time favorite dog was a Maltese named “Sugar,” whom she got later in life. Sugar was her constant companion until the dog died in 2005 at the age of twelve. “I’ve never loved a dog like this in my life,” said Elizabeth in 2004. “It’s amazing. Sometimes I think there’s a person in there. There’s something to say for this kind of love—it’s unconditional.”  Famous ornament designer, Christopher Radko, even created “Sugar Christmas ornament” in 1998 with proceeds going to AIDS.

Sugar went everywhere, from press tours for Taylor’s perfumes to the hospital bedside when Elizabeth was hospitalized in for congestive heart failure in 2004. After Sugar’s death, Elizabeth got “Daisy” and “Delilah,” descendants of Sugar, and when Elizabeth Taylor was in the hospital to repair a leaky heart valve in 2009, she tweeted her friend, Kathy Ireland. ‘“Thanks Darling for the beautiful flowers and all the prayers. Now can you just get my puppy past hospital security?”

Seventy-nine year old Elizabeth Taylor passed away in 2011 of congestive heart failure. Described as having a lifelong wicked sense of humor, her funeral ceremony began 15 minutes behind schedule per her request because according to her representative, “She even wanted to be late for her own funeral.”

It seems, however, that one more custody battle was fought even after her death. Several sources, including the UK’s Daily Mail, reported that the Maltese, “Daisy” (no one seemed to know what became of Delilah) was the focus of an ownership battle. Her son, Christopher Wilding, took the dog, but Elizabeth’s former manager, Jason Winters, had wanted the dog for himself. The Daily Mail also reported that Daisy’s breeder felt the dog should go back to her. The story seems to have dried up at that point, and we infer that Daisy remained with Wilding.