INTERVIEW : Elizabeth Taylor, the Movies : She started in Hollywood 50 years ago, but says all the scripts she’s read in the past few years are dreck. That’s OK because she spends her time raising millions for AIDS and selling her perfumes. But, let her tell you . . .

The first question inquiring minds seem to want answered is “How does she look?” The “she” is Elizabeth Taylor and two completely opposite answers are required.

Those to whom she remains a heroine and a symbol of independent spirit and romantic passion without parallel pray she is as ravishingly beautiful as ever. Then there are those who would be quite cruelly satisfied to know that the years of glamorous and envy-producing good living have caught up with her at last.

It is a pleasure to disappoint the cynics. At 61, which she reached on Feb. 27, Elizabeth Taylor looks terrific, still qualified to give fits of envy to her contemporaries and, indeed, to women considerably junior to her. She has a slight cough that persists from a lifetime of respiratory problems and both her hip joints are treasonable and will require replacement sometime in the next eight years, her doctors tell her.

But on a recent rainy afternoon in her gated home atop Bel-Air, Elizabeth Taylor was trim and peppy and the plain-speaking, self-joshing woman who now as always seems in person to contradict the rather regal and distant image her extraordinary beauty gave her, especially in the early years of her career, before the marital entanglements left no doubt that she was entirely and unapologetically human.

On this wet afternoon her new husband, Larry Fortensky, is bedded down with the flu. “This household has been yo-yo-ing around with colds and the flu for two months now,” she says. But the marriage, her eighth, to a seventh man, she and Richard Burton having been married and divorced twice, is evidently away to a congenial start.

Thursday she receives the American Film Institute’s annual Life Achievement Award, a procession that began with John Ford and has included Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, Jimmy Cagney and Lillian Gish. The ceremonies will be telecast later, as the AFI’s principal source of financing.

“Pleasing,” Taylor says, “and being only the fourth woman and, I think, the youngest person. But they’re having a terrible time finding people. Practically all of my leading men have passed on. There’s Marlon (Brando) and Paul Newman and Michael Caine. But Marlon and Paul don’t do that kind of thing. I spoke to Marlon and he was very sweet and gave me a personal message which was very meaningful.

“But it’s been so long since I’ve worked in films. I don’t know; it’s kind of strange.”

Her last film was “The Mirror Crack’d,” an all-star adaptation of an Agatha Christie novel, in 1980, and her last television appearance was in a remake of Tennessee Williams’ “Sweet Bird of Youth,” which was seen on NBC in 1989.

But, in Taylor’s words, she hasn’t been withering on the vine. Since 1987 she has been the world’s most conspicuous perfume marketer. Her scents, Elizabeth Taylor’s Passion and White Diamonds, have sold in the tens of millions of dollars and her department store appearances have attracted as many as 15,000 people (in Chicago). She is working on a third scent now. “I have a good nose, as they say in the business.” Soon there will be a full line called the House of Elizabeth Taylor.

Taylor has also been in the public eye for her work as a fund-raiser in the fight against AIDS, beginning in late 1984 when she rallied a still-reluctant Hollywood behind a major show in support of AIDS Project Los Angeles. In 1985, she co-founded AmFAR (the American Foundation for AIDS Research) with Dr. Mathilde Krim, who continues as its chairman.

In 1991, Taylor established ETAF (the Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation). So far, Taylor says, she has raised more than $2 million, mostly at star-studded concerts. There were press reports that she had grown unhappy with AmFAR, which she denies. To date, Taylor says, she has given AmFAR $400,000 for its work, $150,000 for needle exchange within the last few days. The principal focus of Taylor’s own giving is for patient care.

She is a tough giver. “I want to know that it’s going to patient care, whether it’s counseling, legal help, food, needle exchange, condoms. Whatever it is, I tag it so it doesn’t go into some executive’s pocket or for office space. Those are things that have to be paid and I’m not knocking them. But I have no staff; I pay for all the underwriting myself, and I want the money to go to the patient. “

She raised a half-million dollars from an 800 number flashed on the Oprah Winfrey show, another half-million from an Elton John-Whoopi Goldberg spectacular at Madison Square Garden, $600,000 from a benefit performance of Cirque du Soleil.

Taylor’s personal secretary (and a close friend) committed suicide a year ago when he found he was HIV-positive, although he did not yet have AIDS. His death was the latest personal blow to Taylor in a succession that began with the death of her friend Rock Hudson and now includes the illness of daughter-in-law Aileen Getty Wilding, who also has AIDS and was ostracized by several friends when the news became known. “She’s one of the strongest, bravest, sweetest people I’ve ever known,” Taylor says.

At this year’s Academy Awards, March 29, Taylor will receive the academy’s Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award for her AIDS work.

“That’s certainly nothing I ever dreamed of in my life, Horatio,” Taylor says. “I’m just doing what I have to do. It’s my nature and my need and my passion. But it’s very nice to be recognized by the academy as a human being, let alone a humanitarian.”

Would she like to act again?

“Sure, I would,” Taylor says. “But the scripts that I’m sent are such dreck that I’d rather not do them. I don’t want to work just for the sake of working and I don’t, thank God, need the money. All the actresses in this town are having a hard time, so an old broad like me is naturally going to have a worse time. I’d be happy to play parts of my own age, but I don’t get scripts.

“I wasn’t afraid of doing character parts when I was 32. I’m not afraid of them now. It makes me sad to be told I’m too glamorous-looking, which is stupid and narrow-minded.”

Taylor, who began acting at 9 and whose first film, “There’s One Born Every Minute,” was released by Universal in 1942 when she was 10, has always had a distanced and even indifferent attitude about her career as a career.

“I’m not that ambitious,” she says. “Never was, and I never fought for parts or my career or anything like that. I’ve always kind of taken it in my stride in a fatalistic manner.”

She cherishes no fond memories of Louis B. Mayer or MGM, where she first found fame as a child star in “Lassie Come Home” in 1943 and where the bulk of her career was spent.

“I was an early rebel and wanted my independence,” Taylor said the other afternoon. “The first time I ever said ‘hell’ I was 15 and it was to L. B. Mayer. He was screaming and swearing at my mother in front of me. And I said, ‘You and your studio can go to hell.’ And I ran out of his office. My mother stayed behind. I was told by Benny Thau and Eddie Mannix (two of the men who ran the studio with Mayer) that I had to go back and apologize.

“I said, ‘No. He should apologize to my mother. I’m never going to his office again.’ And I never did.” Then Taylor smiled slyly and added, “They obviously must have needed me. Otherwise I’d have been out on my can.”

While it sounds as if she was well aware of her importance to MGM (and she was), it was also true that, as she says, “it mattered to me not a whit then whether I was an actress or not. I don’t think I took acting seriously until I did ‘A Place in the Sun.’ ”

That was in 1951, when she was still only 19 but already most breathtakingly and maturely beautful. Working with Montgomery Clift was a life-changing experience and the beginning of a friendship that lasted until Clift’s tragic death in 1966.

“Roddy (McDowall) just sent me a photograph he’d taken of Monty at 20. It’s such a beautiful face, shining with an innocent intelligence. He was such a generous actor. He shocked electricity into the person he was looking at. He acted with such intensity that he would tremble and break out in a sweat. His heart and his body and his brain didn’t know that what he was doing was make-believe. He went through all the trauma that a real situation would create.”

She and Clift were intended to co-star in “Reflections in a Golden Eye” for John Huston. “We were in Rome and Monty was preparing for it and getting himself together. And I guess it was just too much for his heart, and it blew up.” The film, made with Marlon Brando, was released in 1967.

In 1966, she made “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” with Richard Burton, and many critics regard her Martha as her finest performance, for which she received her second Oscar. (Her first was for “Butterfield 8” in 1960.) She looked so unlike herself that the original cinematographer left because he could not bring himself to make Taylor look ugly.

“I gained 20 pounds and wore padding and rubber folds under my eyes and my chin. I was 32, which is a hard age to play 55 because you’re not really playing an old, old woman, but you have to know Martha’s really been abused. (Director) Mike Nichols wanted me to go to a voice coach, but I said, ‘Mike, it scares me because I’ve never had an acting lesson or a voice lesson and why start now? It might just totally screw up my natural swing. Let me work on it and think the voice down.’ And that’s what I did.”

She has belatedly decided she likes the film. “I saw it on television a couple of years ago and I clicked it off, because up to that time I hadn’t been able to look at Richard. I couldn’t cope with it. Then I thought, ‘Aw, that’s silly.’ So I saw about a third of it, the ending, really. And I thought, ‘You know, that stuff isn’t to be ashamed of.’ I wish he’d won the Oscar for the picture. He was nominated eight times. Eight times.”

Burton, Taylor says, “should have been a teacher or a preacher, or an evangelist. He was a wonderful writer, a brilliant writer. Acting was not enough for him. I think when people are extraordinarily bright, acting seems a very superficial, meretricious expression of the arts, and it leaves the actor feeling empty. I think Marlon is another human being who wants to do more with his life than interpret somebody else’s work.”

Burton’s aspirations to do more than act showed up in their (first) marriage when they produced at Oxford a film of Christopher Marlowe’s “The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus.” Burton co-directed with his old Oxford tutor, Neville Coghill, and Taylor played Helen of Troy.

“It was experiment, no budget really,” she says. “Irene Sharaff volunteered the most gorgeous costumes for me and members of OUDS (the Oxford University Dramatic Society) did the smaller parts. Great fun, and Richard was wonderful. Unfortunately, it just ended up playing at universities, but if anybody wants to see ‘Faustus’ as it should be done, there it is.”

Although she was once quoted as calling “Cleopatra” “surely the most bizarre piece of entertainment ever perpetrated,” the film introduced her to Burton and to director Joseph Mankiewicz, who remained a friend until his death last month. “I was stricken when he died the other day,” Taylor says.

She was also a lifelong friend of Richard Brooks, who directed her in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.” “He was a fighter and a defender,” Taylor says. “Man, I went through some dark days after ‘Cat.’ There were times when I couldn’t get a soul on the phone. I’d been a bad girl (e.g., breaking up Eddie Fisher’s marriage to Debbie Reynolds after the death of Mike Todd). It was after the days when Ingrid Bergman had to leave town, but it was the same mentality. And Richard Brooks was one of my staunchest defenders. He’d start a bloody fistfight if anybody said anything. I really found out who my friends were and who they weren’t.

“Then I culminated it all by leaving Eddie and falling madly in love with Richard. Bad girl! “

As a last gesture of support, Brooks left her a momento in his will.

In the early ‘60s, after the shooting of “Cleopatra” was finally finished in Rome, Burton and Taylor--their blazing romance now news the world over--roared into London for a few days and met one afternoon with two of us from Time magazine, which was preparing a cover story on Burton.

We were off to Wales the next morning to talk with Burton’s family, and Burton and Taylor unexpectedly asked if they could come along. Could they ever. “You take the 7:56 out of Paddington,” Burton said, “after you go through the tunnel under the Severn Estuary and come out the other side you’re in Wales, and after that you can only speak Richard III.”

Taylor said, “I haven’t been on a train in 10 years!” Then she stood, put her hands on her knees, did a kind of slow-motion Charleston and began to sing, to the tune of “Humoresque,” “Passengers will please refrain / From flushing toilets while the train . . . “ The small joke was familiar enough to train riders of a pre-jet generation, and it seemed in the elegant hotel drawing room in London an astonishment drawn from some corner of her childhood.

Reminded of that moment recently, Taylor, laughing delightedly, finished the verse: “ . . . is standing in the station I love you.”

To prove that not all anecdotes have tidy endings, only the writers made the 7:56. It turned out to be the morning Sybil Burton decided to fly to New York, ending their marriage, and Burton phoned before dawn to say that he was seeing her off at Heathrow.

Not all memories are unmixed, either. The ending of the marriage was also the beginning of the tumultuous years on an emotional roller coaster for Taylor. By now, the ride appears to be a good deal smoother.

She goes to movies a lot, sometimes at theaters, where, she says, people say, “Hi, Liz,” but leave her alone. “Which is nice, except that I hate being called Liz,” she adds. “The press decided to call me Liz because it fits in headlines better. But my friends call me Elizabeth.”

It is at that a minor annoyance. A more immediate worry is that the worse of her hips might betray her at the Academy Awards. “My hip went out the other day and I thought, ‘God, this would be really great at the academy to have to walk across the stage and fall flat on my face with a great shriek.’ ”

But, that worry aside, she says she finds her days crowded, challenging and splendid. “My life’s work is AIDS now,” Elizabeth Taylor says. “Time is our biggest enemy, and ignorance, and denial. There is still nationwide denial: ‘This isn’t going to happen to me, this couldn’t possibly happen to me.’

“As for a cure, you hear about a formula or some scientist being on the brink of something, but to be quite honest with you there is nothing definitive on the horizon, even. They are testing things that look promising, but the testing itself takes time, and we’ve lost so much time by denial.”