John Russell Taylor
Encyclopedia
John Russell Taylor is an English
critic
and author
. He is the author of critical studies of British
theatre
; of critical biographies of such important figures in Anglo-America
n film
as Alfred Hitchcock
, Alec Guinness
, Orson Welles
, Vivien Leigh
, and Ingrid Bergman
; of Strangers in Paradise: The Hollywood Emigres 1933-1950 (1983); and several books on art
.
, the son of Arthur Russell and Kathleen Mary (Picker) Taylor and now lives in London and West Wales. He attended Dover Grammar School, took a double first in English at Jesus College, Cambridge
and studied Art Nouveau book illustration at the Courtauld Institute of Art
.
for Sight and Sound and the Monthly Film Bulletin
, on the theatre
in Plays and Players, on television
for The Listener and The Times Educational Supplement, and on various subjects relating to the arts
for the Times Literary Supplement. From the late 1950s he began writing anonymously on television and theatre for The Times
, and by 1962 he had become the paper's film critic, initially anonymous but later named after the paper abandoned its anonymity rule in January 1967 when William Rees-Mogg
became editor. During this era he wrote a number of books including Anger and After: A Guide to the New British Drama (1962), titled "The Angry Theatre" in the USA; revised and expanded and published in paperback (1969); Anatomy of a Television Play (1962), concerning the Armchair Theatre
productions Afternoon of a Nymph and The Rose Affair; Cinema Eye, Cinema Ear: Some Key Film-Makers of the Sixties (1964); and The Art Nouveau Book in Britain (1966). Subsequently he wrote The Penguin Dictionary of the Theatre (1966), The Rise and Fall of the Well-Made Play (1967), The Art Dealers (1969) and The Hollywood Musical (1971), as well as British Council monographs on Harold Pinter, Peter Shaffer and David Storey. He also edited the film criticism of Graham Greene in The Pleasure Dome (1972, called Graham Greene on Film in the USA).
In 1969, he was a member of the jury at the 19th Berlin International Film Festival
, and since then has frequently been on juries at other festivals, including Delhi, Venice, Krakow, Cork, Istanbul, Troja, Parnu, Rio de Janeiro, Montreal and, several times, the Chicago International Film Festival.
In the early 1970s Taylor wrote the book The Second Wave: British Drama of the Sixties, a follow-up to Anger and After, and several television plays, including a version of Dracula with Denholm Elliott
in the title role, which was praised by Kingsley Amis
as the best version ever. In 1972, he moved to California
, to teach film at the University of Southern California
, in Los Angeles
, serving as a Professor of Cinema from 1972 to 1978, while continuing to contribute to The Times', as its American Cultural Correspondent, Sight and Sound, The New York Times
, and The Los Angeles Times. During this period, he wrote Directors and Directions: Cinema for the Seventies (1975).
Having developed a friendship with Alfred Hitchcock
during the 1970s, he became Hitchcock's authorised biographer. In 1978, after publishing Hitch, Taylor returned to the UK
, becoming the art critic for The Times
, a post that he held until 2005. His other books since 1978 include Strangers in Paradise: The Hollywood Emigres 1933-1950 (1983), and bio-critical studies of Ingrid Bergman (1983), Alec Guinness (1984), Vivien Leigh (1984), Orson Welles (1986), Elizabeth Taylor (1991), film historian John Kobal
(2008) and the artists Edward Wolfe (1986), Bernard Meninsky (1990), Muriel Pemberton (1993), Ricardo Cinalli (1993), Claude Monet (1995), Bill Jacklin (1997), Cyril Mann (1997) Peter Coker (2002), Zsuzsi Roboz (2005), Carl Laubin (2007), Philip Sutton (2008) and Paul Day (2010). More general books on art include Impressionist Dreams (1990) and Exactitude: Hyperrealist Art Today (2009).
Since 2005 he has contributed frequently to The Times on art and film subjects and to Apollo on art, and reviewed drama regularly for Plays International. He was also editor of the magazine Films and Filming from 1983 until its closure in 1990.
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
critic
Critic
A critic is anyone who expresses a value judgement. Informally, criticism is a common aspect of all human expression and need not necessarily imply skilled or accurate expressions of judgement. Critical judgements, good or bad, may be positive , negative , or balanced...
and author
Author
An author is broadly defined as "the person who originates or gives existence to anything" and that authorship determines responsibility for what is created. Narrowly defined, an author is the originator of any written work.-Legal significance:...
. He is the author of critical studies of British
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
theatre
Theatre
Theatre is a collaborative form of fine art that uses live performers to present the experience of a real or imagined event before a live audience in a specific place. The performers may communicate this experience to the audience through combinations of gesture, speech, song, music or dance...
; of critical biographies of such important figures in Anglo-America
Anglo-America
Anglo-America is a region in the Americas in which English is a main language, or one which has significant British historical, ethnic, linguistic, and cultural links...
n film
Film
A film, also called a movie or motion picture, is a series of still or moving images. It is produced by recording photographic images with cameras, or by creating images using animation techniques or visual effects...
as Alfred Hitchcock
Alfred Hitchcock
Sir Alfred Joseph Hitchcock, KBE was a British film director and producer. He pioneered many techniques in the suspense and psychological thriller genres. After a successful career in British cinema in both silent films and early talkies, Hitchcock moved to Hollywood...
, Alec Guinness
Alec Guinness
Sir Alec Guinness, CH, CBE was an English actor. He was featured in several of the Ealing Comedies, including Kind Hearts and Coronets in which he played eight different characters. He later won the Academy Award for Best Actor for his role as Colonel Nicholson in The Bridge on the River Kwai...
, Orson Welles
Orson Welles
George Orson Welles , best known as Orson Welles, was an American film director, actor, theatre director, screenwriter, and producer, who worked extensively in film, theatre, television and radio...
, Vivien Leigh
Vivien Leigh
Vivien Leigh, Lady Olivier was an English actress. She won the Best Actress Academy Award for her portrayal of Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire , a role she also played on stage in London's West End, as well as for her portrayal of the southern belle Scarlett O'Hara, alongside Clark...
, and Ingrid Bergman
Ingrid Bergman
Ingrid Bergman was a Swedish actress who starred in a variety of European and American films. She won three Academy Awards, two Emmy Awards, and the Tony Award for Best Actress. She is ranked as the fourth greatest female star of American cinema of all time by the American Film Institute...
; of Strangers in Paradise: The Hollywood Emigres 1933-1950 (1983); and several books on art
Art
Art is the product or process of deliberately arranging items in a way that influences and affects one or more of the senses, emotions, and intellect....
.
Personal
Taylor was born in DoverDover
Dover is a town and major ferry port in the home county of Kent, in South East England. It faces France across the narrowest part of the English Channel, and lies south-east of Canterbury; east of Kent's administrative capital Maidstone; and north-east along the coastline from Dungeness and Hastings...
, the son of Arthur Russell and Kathleen Mary (Picker) Taylor and now lives in London and West Wales. He attended Dover Grammar School, took a double first in English at Jesus College, Cambridge
Jesus College, Cambridge
Jesus College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge, England.The College was founded in 1496 on the site of a Benedictine nunnery by John Alcock, then Bishop of Ely...
and studied Art Nouveau book illustration at the Courtauld Institute of Art
Courtauld Institute of Art
The Courtauld Institute of Art is a self-governing college of the University of London specialising in the study of the history of art. The Courtauld is one of the premier centres for the teaching of art history in the world; it was the only History of Art department in the UK to be awarded a top...
.
Career
In the 1960s he wrote on cinemaFilm
A film, also called a movie or motion picture, is a series of still or moving images. It is produced by recording photographic images with cameras, or by creating images using animation techniques or visual effects...
for Sight and Sound and the Monthly Film Bulletin
Monthly Film Bulletin
The Monthly Film Bulletin was a periodical of the British Film Institute published monthly from February 1934 to April 1991. It reviewed all films on release in the United Kingdom, including those with a narrow arthouse release. The MFB was edited in the mid-1950s by David Robinson, in the late...
, on the theatre
Theatre
Theatre is a collaborative form of fine art that uses live performers to present the experience of a real or imagined event before a live audience in a specific place. The performers may communicate this experience to the audience through combinations of gesture, speech, song, music or dance...
in Plays and Players, on television
Television
Television is a telecommunication medium for transmitting and receiving moving images that can be monochrome or colored, with accompanying sound...
for The Listener and The Times Educational Supplement, and on various subjects relating to the arts
ARts
aRts, which stands for analog Real time synthesizer, is an audio framework that is no longer under development. It is best known for previously being used in KDE to simulate an analog synthesizer....
for the Times Literary Supplement. From the late 1950s he began writing anonymously on television and theatre for The Times
The Times
The Times is a British daily national newspaper, first published in London in 1785 under the title The Daily Universal Register . The Times and its sister paper The Sunday Times are published by Times Newspapers Limited, a subsidiary since 1981 of News International...
, and by 1962 he had become the paper's film critic, initially anonymous but later named after the paper abandoned its anonymity rule in January 1967 when William Rees-Mogg
William Rees-Mogg
William Rees-Mogg, Baron Rees-Mogg is an English journalist and life peer.-Education:Rees-Mogg was educated at Clifton College Preparatory School in Bristol and Charterhouse School in Godalming, followed by Balliol College, Oxford...
became editor. During this era he wrote a number of books including Anger and After: A Guide to the New British Drama (1962), titled "The Angry Theatre" in the USA; revised and expanded and published in paperback (1969); Anatomy of a Television Play (1962), concerning the Armchair Theatre
Armchair Theatre
Armchair Theatre is a British television drama anthology series, which ran on the ITV network from 1956 to 1974. It was originally produced by Associated British Corporation, and later by Thames Television after 1968....
productions Afternoon of a Nymph and The Rose Affair; Cinema Eye, Cinema Ear: Some Key Film-Makers of the Sixties (1964); and The Art Nouveau Book in Britain (1966). Subsequently he wrote The Penguin Dictionary of the Theatre (1966), The Rise and Fall of the Well-Made Play (1967), The Art Dealers (1969) and The Hollywood Musical (1971), as well as British Council monographs on Harold Pinter, Peter Shaffer and David Storey. He also edited the film criticism of Graham Greene in The Pleasure Dome (1972, called Graham Greene on Film in the USA).
In 1969, he was a member of the jury at the 19th Berlin International Film Festival
19th Berlin International Film Festival
The 19th annual Berlin International Film Festival was held from June 25 to July 6, 1969.-Jury:* Johannes Schaaf * Agnesa Kalinova* José P...
, and since then has frequently been on juries at other festivals, including Delhi, Venice, Krakow, Cork, Istanbul, Troja, Parnu, Rio de Janeiro, Montreal and, several times, the Chicago International Film Festival.
In the early 1970s Taylor wrote the book The Second Wave: British Drama of the Sixties, a follow-up to Anger and After, and several television plays, including a version of Dracula with Denholm Elliott
Denholm Elliott
Denholm Mitchell Elliott, CBE was an English film, television and theatre actor with over 120 film and television credits...
in the title role, which was praised by Kingsley Amis
Kingsley Amis
Sir Kingsley William Amis, CBE was an English novelist, poet, critic, and teacher. He wrote more than 20 novels, six volumes of poetry, a memoir, various short stories, radio and television scripts, along with works of social and literary criticism...
as the best version ever. In 1972, he moved to California
California
California is a state located on the West Coast of the United States. It is by far the most populous U.S. state, and the third-largest by land area...
, to teach film at the University of Southern California
University of Southern California
The University of Southern California is a private, not-for-profit, nonsectarian, research university located in Los Angeles, California, United States. USC was founded in 1880, making it California's oldest private research university...
, in Los Angeles
Los Ángeles
Los Ángeles is the capital of the province of Biobío, in the commune of the same name, in Region VIII , in the center-south of Chile. It is located between the Laja and Biobío rivers. The population is 123,445 inhabitants...
, serving as a Professor of Cinema from 1972 to 1978, while continuing to contribute to The Times', as its American Cultural Correspondent, Sight and Sound, The New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
, and The Los Angeles Times. During this period, he wrote Directors and Directions: Cinema for the Seventies (1975).
Having developed a friendship with Alfred Hitchcock
Alfred Hitchcock
Sir Alfred Joseph Hitchcock, KBE was a British film director and producer. He pioneered many techniques in the suspense and psychological thriller genres. After a successful career in British cinema in both silent films and early talkies, Hitchcock moved to Hollywood...
during the 1970s, he became Hitchcock's authorised biographer. In 1978, after publishing Hitch, Taylor returned to the UK
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
, becoming the art critic for The Times
The Times
The Times is a British daily national newspaper, first published in London in 1785 under the title The Daily Universal Register . The Times and its sister paper The Sunday Times are published by Times Newspapers Limited, a subsidiary since 1981 of News International...
, a post that he held until 2005. His other books since 1978 include Strangers in Paradise: The Hollywood Emigres 1933-1950 (1983), and bio-critical studies of Ingrid Bergman (1983), Alec Guinness (1984), Vivien Leigh (1984), Orson Welles (1986), Elizabeth Taylor (1991), film historian John Kobal
John Kobal
John Kobal was an Austrian-born British based film historian responsible for The Kobal Collection, a commercial photograph library related to the film industry....
(2008) and the artists Edward Wolfe (1986), Bernard Meninsky (1990), Muriel Pemberton (1993), Ricardo Cinalli (1993), Claude Monet (1995), Bill Jacklin (1997), Cyril Mann (1997) Peter Coker (2002), Zsuzsi Roboz (2005), Carl Laubin (2007), Philip Sutton (2008) and Paul Day (2010). More general books on art include Impressionist Dreams (1990) and Exactitude: Hyperrealist Art Today (2009).
Since 2005 he has contributed frequently to The Times on art and film subjects and to Apollo on art, and reviewed drama regularly for Plays International. He was also editor of the magazine Films and Filming from 1983 until its closure in 1990.
External links
. Accessed May 7, 2008. ("Filmography".)- "John Russell Taylor Biography (1935– )" at filmreference.com. Accessed May 7, 2008.