John Russell Taylor

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For the Canadian politician, see John Russell Taylor (Canadian politician).

John Russell Taylor (born in Dover on June 19, 1935 and educated at Dover Grammar School and Cambridge University) is an English critic and author, who graduated from Cambridge University. He has been a prolific writer on cinema, art, theatre and television from the late 1950s onwards.

In the 1960s he wrote on cinema for Sight and Sound and the Monthly Film Bulletin, the theatre in Plays and Players, television for The Listener and various subjects 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 Survey of the New British Drama (1962), Anatomy of a Television Play (also 1962, written about the Armchair Theatre production Afternoon of a Nymph), Cinema Eye, Cinema Ear: Some Key Film-Makers of the Sixties (1964) and The Art Nouveau Book in Britain (1966).

In the early 1970s he wrote the book Second Wave: British Drama for the Seventies, a follow-up to Anger and After. In 1972 he moved to California to become a university lecturer on film - he intended to stay for only one semester, with his original plan being to return to Britain and continue as The Times' film critic, but he decided in early 1973 to take up the job on a permanent basis. While in the United States he continued to contribute to The Times, as well as its near-namesakes the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, and wrote the 1975 book Directors and Directions: Cinema for the Seventies.

Around this time he became very close to Alfred Hitchcock, and he was to become the director's official biographer. In 1978, when this biography was published, John Russell Taylor returned to Britain where he promptly became The Times' art critic, which he would remain until 2005. Since then he has been an occasional contributor to the paper. He was also editor of Films and Filming magazine from 1983 until its closure in 1990. He has written books on Alec Guinness, Orson Welles, Vivien Leigh and Ingrid Bergman, and the 1983 work Strangers in Paradise: The Hollywood Emigres 1933-1950, as well as a number of books on art subjects.