Rod Taylor (actor)

Rod Taylor
Taylor in The V.I.P.s (1963)
Born	Rodney Sturt Taylor (1930-01-11)11 January 1930 Lidcombe, New South Wales, Australia
Died	7 January 2015(2015-01-07) (aged 84) Los Angeles, California, U.S.
Cause of death	Heart attack
Resting place	Forest Lawn Memorial Park (Hollywood Hills)
Education	Parramatta High School
Occupation	Actor
Years active	1951–2009
Spouse(s)	Peggy Williams (m. 1951; div. 1954) Mary Hilem (m. 1963; div. 1969) Carol Kikumura (m. 1980; his death 2015)
Children	Felicia Taylor (born 1964)

Rodney Sturt "Rod" Taylor (11 January 1930 – 7 January 2015) was an Australian actor of film and television. He appeared in over 50 films, including The Catered Affair, The Time Machine, One Hundred and One Dalmatians, Seven Seas to Calais, The Birds, Sunday in New York, Young Cassidy, Dark of the Sun, The Liquidator, Darker Than Amber, The Train Robbers, and Quentin Tarantino's 2009 film Inglourious Basterds as Winston Churchill, which was his final film appearance.

Taylor was born on 11 January 1930 in Lidcombe, a suburb of Sydney, the only child of William Sturt Taylor, a steel construction contractor and commercial artist, and Mona Taylor (née Thompson), a writer of more than a hundred short stories and children's books. His middle name comes from his great-great grand uncle, Captain Charles Sturt, a British explorer of the Australian Outback in the 19th century.

Taylor attended Parramatta High School and later studied at the East Sydney Technical and Fine Arts College. For a time he worked as a commercial artist, but decided to become an actor after seeing Laurence Olivier in an Old Vic touring production of Richard III.