Today's Awesome Woman is Elizabeth Taylor. The linked-to obituary describes much about her life and even about her activism, but the two things for which I most remember her are that she took on the cause of AIDS when it was so popular to marginalize and ridicule its victims AND that the public turned on her really viciously when she gained some weight in the late 70s.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/screen-legend-elizabeth-taylor-dies-at-age-79/2010/09/21/ABPFCYIB_story.html
AWU post & comments at http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=1892757407514&set=o.343338393054&type=1
