Oscar-winning Hollywood star Elizabeth Taylor said she underwent a heart operation to repair a valve and that it went "perfectly."

The 77-year-old English-born movie legend announced the success of the procedure in a post Thursday on micro-blogging site Twitter.

"Dear friends, my heart procedure went off perfectly," she tweeted.

"It's like having a brand new ticker. Thank you for your prayers and good wishes."

On Tuesday the actress told her more than 165,000 followers on Twitter that she was going into the hospital for a procedure "repairing my leaky valve using a clip device, without open heart surgery."

Taylor's health has been the subject of intense speculation in recent years.

She has had hip replacement surgery, and in 1997 she underwent surgery to have a brain tumor removed. In 2006 she appeared on US television to deny rumors she had Alzheimer's.

In July 2008 she was hospitalized in Los Angeles but her spokesman denied reports that she was close to death and had been placed on life support.

Taylor, who first soared to worldwide fame at the age of 12 in 'National Velvet' and went on to leading roles in 'Cleopatra' and 'Cat On a Hot Tin Roof', has only rarely appeared in public in recent years.

But the star who won Academy Awards for best actress in "Butterfield 8" as well as 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?' was among the mourners at the private funeral last month for her longtime friend Michael Jackson, who died in June aged 50.

Taylor now devotes most of her time to her two-decade-old crusade against the scourge of AIDS and HIV.

AFP