The Oprah Winfrey Show

Elizabeth made her second appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show—this time taped at Winfrey’s Harpo Studios in Chicago—less than a week after celebrating her milestone sixtieth birthday.

Introduced as Elizabeth Taylor Fortensky, she told Oprah and her viewers about her big birthday bash at Disneyland, her friendship with Michael Jackson, life with Larry Fortensky, and more. One of the highlights was an account of Elizabeth’s near-death experience more than thirty years earlier in London, during the making of Cleopatra.

She described the sensation, adding that “Mike Todd was there, and I wanted to be with him more than anything in the world. He’d been dead [for] about three years and I was still mourning him. And he said, ‘No, baby, you can’t. It’s not your time. You can’t come over, you have to fight to go back. You have to fight to go back. And I said, ‘But I want to be with you.’ He said, ‘You can’t now, I’ll be here, you have to fight to go back.’”

“I didn’t talk about it for years,” Elizabeth continued. “When I came out of it, [...] there were about eleven doctors in the room and I told them all what I’d experienced [...] so I wouldn’t later on think I was crazy.” She said she didn’t talk about it for years until she read of others having experienced something similar. Following the experience, Elizabeth said she no longer feared death.

Elizabeth also took questions from Oprah’s audience and, at the end of the interview, the talk show host asked her viewers to donate to The Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation.