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(Rodney Taylor 1930–2015). Australian actor.
Appeared in documentaries: The Fantasy Film Worlds of George Pal (Arnold
Leibovit 1985); All About 'The Birds' (video) Laurent Bouzereau 2000);
Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation! (Mark
Hartley 2010).
Why should this be the case? One answer would be that Taylor seemed to
believe in brawn, not brains, as the proper attribute of a successful hero,
even though science fiction films sometimes require their heroes to outwit, and
not outslug, their adversaries. So it must not be forgotten that Taylor first
made an impression on the film world as the muscular, sometimes shirtless hero
of World without End, ready to provide the frail men of humanity's
future with lessons in masculine toughness. Indeed, he may have had some
influence in diverting the subsequent adaptation of H.G.
WELLS's The Time Machine
into similar territory; for in the opening scenes, Taylor was far from
convincing as a brilliant scientist explaining the mechanics of time travel to
his friends, and once arrived in the future, he could not muster the proper
aura of pain and anguish when his casual gesture causes a shelf of ancient
books to turn into dust, a tragedy from the perspective of an educated man. But
Taylor came to life when he recognized that the attractive but effete Eloi
needed to become fighting machines to fend off the monstrous Morlocks and
proceeded to inspire them to acts of gleeful mayhem, oblivious to the sacrilege
being perpetrated in the name of a noted pacifist's novel. Clearly, if you
prefer carnage over cerebration, you would understandably gravitate toward the
Wild West, not the far future.
Still, Taylor was effective when cleverly cast in roles which deliberately
prevented him from being the sort of brawler that he wished to be. In the Twilight
Zone episode 'And When the Sky Was Opened,' he was quite moving
as one of the subdued astronauts who discover that, as an unintended effect of
their space flight, they are being erased from existence. And it was an act of
sheer genius for Alfred HITCHCOCK
to cast Tippi Hedren and Taylor in The Birds: as an inexperienced
actress who wasn't quite sure about what to do with her role, Hedren
persuasively conveyed the uneasiness of a woman in an unfamiliar environment,
and as an action hero who can't quite manage to do anything genuinely heroic in
response to Hitchcock's unconventional menace, Taylor persuasively projected
the sense of frustration that people would actually feel if suddenly attacked
by legions of ferocious birds.
What else is there is mention? Taylor embarrassed himself in the inane Colossus
and the Amazon Queen; competently spoke for an heroic dog in One Hundred
and One Dalmatians; and was modestly engaging as a nineteenth-century
cowboy transplanted into the present in the television movies and series Outlaws
(a rare instance where his interest in westerns overlapped with science
fiction). Of greater interest to science fiction fans would be his appearance
in Time Machine: The Journey Back, both a documentary about and an
expansion of his most famous film. In his declining years, Taylor even emulated
other science fiction veterans by accepting roles in a Joe DANTE film and a
mindless Sci-Fi Channel rip-off of The Birds, suggesting that the
elderly Taylor had finally accepted such fare as the inevitable destiny of any
actor no longer in demand who had once been a part of the genre. But he
probably had more fun playing Winston Churchill in Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious
Basterds (2009), allowed to be verbally irascible at an age when he could
no longer beat the crap out of his opponents. Still, he probably died ruefully
recognizing that he would always be best remembered for his roles in science
fiction films, embraced by fans who will always cherish their performers even
if they struggled to escape from the fold.
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