John Russell Taylor

John Russell Taylor (born 19 June 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 several books on art.

Taylor was born in Dover, 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.

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 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).

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