Dame Elizabeth Taylor has dismissed reports she is gravely ill

Oscar-winning actress Dame Elizabeth Taylor has dismissed reports she is gravely ill or being treated for the dementia condition Alzheimer's disease reports BBC news

Appearing on CNN's "Larry King Live," the 74-year-old actress and two-time Academy Award winner described herself as happy and busy with a new venture designing jewelry -- "one of my passions" -- and said she remains active in the fight against AIDS reports Washington Post.

"Let's clear up some things, a lot of tabloid stories about you," King said during the TV interview. "Oh my God, am I dead, am I alive?" an exasperated Taylor responded.
"Oh come on, do I look like I'm dying?"

"Do I look like or sound like I have Alzheimer's?"

She said tabloids printed such stories "because they have nothing else dirty to write about anybody else".

She added she was using a wheelchair because of a bad back and osteoporosis.

Alzheimer's is a degenerative brain disease which affects memory, thinking and behavior.

Hours earlier, Taylor's spokesman, Dick Guttman, denied to Reuters that the actress had been diagnosed with Alzheimer's, a degenerative and fatal nervous disorder.

The actress became emotional when asked about her friend Michael Jackson, who was acquitted last June of charges that he molested a boy during overnight stays at the singer's home.

"I've never been so angry in my life," she said of the case brought against Jackson.

"I've been there, when his nephews were there, and we all were in the bed watching television.

She added: "We laughed like children and we watched a lot of Walt Disney. There was nothing odd about it."

Taylor got her breakthrough at the age of 12 as the young heroine in National Velvet and became a bona fide star with her Oscar-winning performance as a call girl in 1960's Butterfield 8 reports Guardian UK. She got her second statuette for playing an alcoholic wife opposite her real-life husband at the time, Richard Burton, in the screen adaptation of Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?