John Russell Taylor

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 This article or section is missing citations or needs footnotes.
Using inline citations helps guard against copyright violations and factual inaccuracies. (May 2008)
This article or section includes a list of references or external links, but its sources remain unclear because it lacks in-text citations.
You can improve this article by introducing more precise citations.
For the Canadian politician, see John Russell Taylor (Canadian politician).

John Russell Taylor (born June 19, 1935) 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-American film as Alfred Hitchcock, Alec Guinness, Orson Welles, Vivien Leigh, and Ingrid Bergman; of Strangers in Paradise: The Hollywood Emigres 1933-1950 (1983); and some books on art.

Contents

[edit] Personal

Born in in Dover, Kent, England, the son of Arthur Russell and Kathleen Mary (Picker) Taylor (filmreference.com biography), John Russell Taylor is a graduate of Dover Grammar School and the University of Cambridge.[citations needed] He lives in London (filmreference.com biography).

[edit] Career

 This article or section is missing citations or needs footnotes.
Using inline citations helps guard against copyright violations and factual inaccuracies. (May 2008)

In the 1960s he wrote on cinema for Sight and Sound and the Monthly Film Bulletin, on the theatre in Plays and Players, on television for The Listener, 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 Survey of the New British Drama (1962), revised and expanded and published in paperback as The Angry Theatre: New British Drama (1969); Anatomy of a Television Play (1962), concerning 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 1969 he was a member of the jury at the Berlin International Film Festival (IMDb "filmography").

In the early 1970s Taylor 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 lecturer on film at the University of Southern California, in Los Angeles, serving as a Professor of Cinema from 1972 to 1978 ("John Russell Taylor" at the Encyclopædia Britannica Online), while continuing to contribute to The Times and to 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 official biographer.[citations needed] In 1978, after publishing Hitch, Taylor returned to the UK, becoming the art critic for The Times, a post that he held until 2005.

Since 2005 he has contributed occasionally to The Times and was also editor of the magazine Films and Filming from 1983 until its closure in 1990.

[edit] References

  • Taylor, John Russell. The Angry Theatre: New British Drama. 1962. Rev. ed. New York: Hill & Wang, 1969. ISBN 9780809026630. (Revised and expanded edition of Anger and After: A Guide to the New British Drama.)

[edit] External links