Family and friends gathered Thursday for the funeral of Hollywood legend Elizabeth Taylor, in the same celebrity cemetery as her long-time friend pop icon Michael Jackson. A day after the actress died aged 79, guests arrived in a fleet of black stretch limos at the Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale outside Los Angeles, live television coverage showed.
A police spokesman said officers were given short notice of the private funeral, said to be held in keeping with Jewish practice shortly after her death from congestive heart failure. "The interment and the services are fairly quick ... within a day or two, because of the Jewish faith," Glendale police spokesman Tom Lorenz told the KCAL9 TV station.
The ceremony was strictly private. Photographers and media were kept at a distance outside the front gates of the cemetery, and a white tent shielded guests from view as they arrived. Taylor died six weeks after being admitted to Los Angeles' Cedars-Sinai hospital with congestive heart failure.
A spokeswoman for Taylor did not immediately return requests for information about the funeral ceremony. Jackson was buried at Forest Lawn following his death in June 2009 aged 50, from an overdose of the powerful sedative propofol.
Taylor attended that private ceremony in September 2009, although she did not go to a larger, public memorial service, saying she wanted to keep her grief private. Taylor and Jackson shared a key formative experience in common: they were both child stars who arguably missed out on a proper childhood. The pop icon and Hollywood legend were at times inseparable, with homes near each other in the plush Bel Air and Beverly Hills neighbourhoods west of Hollywood.
"I don't think anyone knew how much we loved each other," Taylor said after his death. "I loved Michael with all my soul and I can't imagine life without him. We had so much in common and we had such loving fun together." The TMZ celebrity news website published a copy of Taylor's death certificate, which gave Forest Lawn as the burial location.
The certificate listed her causes of death as: chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, which it said she had for 10 years; congestive heart failure, which she had for five years; and cardiopulmonary arrest, against which was noted five minutes.
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