Elizabeth Taylor scoffs at Alzheimer's reports

Elizabeth Taylor chats with talk show host Larry King. Picture / Reuters

LOS ANGELES - Veteran actress Elizabeth Taylor scoffed at recent tabloid reports that she is gravely ill or suffering from Alzheimer's disease but acknowledged using a wheelchair because of chronic back pain.

Appearing on Larry King Live, the 74-year-old actress and two-time Academy Award winner described herself as happy and busy with a new venture designing jewellery -- "one of my passions" -- and said she remains active in the fight against AIDS.

Asked about the recent flurry of tabloid stories on her health, a feisty Taylor answered: "Oh come on! Do I look like I'm dying? Do I look like or sound like I have Alzheimer's?"

King replied, "no," and asked what she thought prompted such headlines.

"I think they're trying to sell magazines," she said. "Some audience out there ... they like scandal. They like filth. And if they want to hear that I'm dead, sorry folks. I'm not. And I don't plan on it."

Hours earlier, Taylor's spokesman, Dick Guttman, denied to Reuters that the actress had been diagnosed with Alzheimer's, a degenerative and fatal nervous disorder.

Indeed, Taylor appeared in full control of her faculties as she parried questions on a range of topics, including her film career, past loves and her AIDS activism. She did say she uses a wheelchair to get around due to chronic back pain.

The actress became emotional when the subject turned to her longtime friend Michael Jackson, who was acquitted last June of charges that he molested a boy during overnight stays at the singer's home in central California.

"I've never been so angry in my life," she said of the case brought against Jackson. "I've been there, when his nephews were there, and we all were in the bed watching television.

"There was nothing abnormal about it. There was no touchy, feely thing going on. We laughed like children and we watched a lot of Walt Disney. There was nothing odd about it."

Taylor said she gravitated towards Jackson because "we're very much alike. We both had horrible childhoods."

Taylor first achieved stardom at age 12 in National Velvet and went on to win two Academy Awards -- for her role as a call girl in the 1960 film Butterfield 8 and for playing an alcoholic wife opposite her real-life husband at the time, Richard Burton, in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Her last screen appearance was in the 2001 television movie These Old Broads, co-starring one-time personal rival Debbie Reynolds, Shirley MacLaine and Joan Collins.

Her last feature film performance was in the 1994 live-action comedy The Flintstones, but Taylor said she was willing to return to acting if she were offered a role that was "really juicy and spicy and challenging."

Taylor's career has long competed for attention with her personal life, including eight marriages. The violet-eyed actress also has been dogged in recent years by a litany of health problems. She was treated for congestive heart failure in November 2004 and underwent radiation therapy four years ago for basal cell carcinoma, a form of skin cancer.

In the 1980s, Taylor battled weight problems and entered rehab to overcome what she described as a dependency on alcohol and prescription drugs.

- REUTERS