Pix: Elizabeth Taylor laid to rest

Elizabeth Taylor was laid to rest at Forest Lawn Memorial Park, in California, on March 24.

The funeral was a private affair attended by 50 members of her family and close friends, who mourned for her for an hour.

Taylor has been buried in the same cemetery as her close friend Michael Jackson.

Taylor's last rituals were in line with Judaism, to which she had converted before her marriage to the singer Eddie Fisher, the fourth of her seven husbands, in 1959.

A public memorial service will be held later. That will be a grand exit for a lady, who always made a grand entrance.

It is likely to be the largest of its kind since Michael Jackson's death in 2009.

Songwriter and Taylor's best friend Carole Bayer Sager had visited her just hours before her death. 'Everybody was okay with it that her spirit needed to leave her body, which had suffered so much pain for so many years,' she said.

The best resting place for the violet-eyed actress would have been a quiet cemetery 5,000 miles away, in Pontrhydyfen, in the Afan Valley of South Wales, the birthplace of her husband Richard Burton.

Burton's family, whom Taylor married and divorced twice, said it would allow the actress to be buried in the family plot near Port Talbot, a plan the couple apparently agreed upon while together. 'If she has stipulated in her will that that's what she wants then, of course, we will be 100 per cent behind her,' Sian Owen, Burton's niece, told the BBC.

There was, however, one problem: Burton is not buried in Pontrhydyfen, but in the Swiss village of Celigny, on the banks of Lake Geneva, where he lived with his fourth and final wife, Sally.

In her favourite West Hollywood gay bar, The Abbey, the staff created a candlelit shrine to the actress, a campaigner for HIV/Aids causes, in a VIP room that she visited frequently.

This weekend, the bar will offer a new drink: The Blue Velvet Martini will be named in honour of Taylor's breakthrough role in the 1944 film National Velvet.

The cocktail promises to have the same heady effect as Taylor's luminescent beauty exerted on her seven husbands: the ingredients will include Blue Angel vodka and blueberry schnapps.