Elizabeth Taylor Memorial Tribute - (Billy Joel, I love You Just the Way You Are)

Long Live Elizbeth Taylor - Our Movie Queen is Dead


In a turn of fate, an Elizabeth Taylor obituary writer died six years before the death of the much-loved actress, leaving his byline as an awkward addendum to a New York Times story today about the life of the Hollywood icon.

New York Times reporter Mel Gussow died in 2005 after a battle with cancer. The Times ran his Elizabeth Taylor obituary today along with this note: "Mel Gussow, the principal writer of this article, died in 2005. William McDonald and William Grimes contributed updated reporting."

It's common for newspapers to prepare obituaries about famous people before their death, and it isn't unheard of for the author of an obituary to die first. "Oftentimes those obits just sit around for years and years and sometimes the people who wrote them are gone before the celebrity. It's one of the tricky things about writing advance obituaries," Alana Baranick, the director of the Society of Professional Obituary Writers and the author of "Life on the Death Beat: a Handbook for Obituary Writers," told AOL News by phone.

Baranick says this kind of thing has happened before. In 2009, Gayle Ronan Sims, a friend of Baranick's and a reporter at the Philadelphia Inquirer, wrote an advance obituary of famed TV personality Ed McMahon. Then, Sims died of lung cancer two months before the death of McMahon himself. "Her time came first," Baranick said.

Gussow, of course, could not have predicted Taylor would outlive him by six years. But he did, however, note that Taylor -- who once told Vanity Fair she had been pronounced dead four times and had read a number of obituaries about her life -- was a survivor.

"During a lifetime of emotional and physical setbacks, life-threatening illnesses and accidents, and several near-death experiences, Ms. Taylor was a survivor," Gussow wrote, sometime before her death and his own.
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[AGpixar2000]

0:18 is Catherine Hepburn

[40klad83]

As I'm sitting here typing this Tears are Just rolling down my face unabashedly. This is a great Tribute to An Outstanding actress, humanitarian & Person. My god Liz, I loved you from the 1st Time I saw you on screen. Farewell Friend, cause you were my friend even though you didn't know me. Till i see you again in heaven . . . . Goodbye.

[9Naethy]

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Nice video !