Jack Taylor, one of the most spectacular faces of Spanish horror cinema, has died in Madrid at the age of 99. The American had lived in Spain since the sixties, when he came to a filming and decided to stay, to the point of becoming a popular neighbor in Madrid’s Plaza de Chamberí. With his strange and very Anglo-Saxon face, his exquisitely pronounced English, his cold gaze and his aristocratic bearing, he managed to be a reference especially for terror, although in his long career he also acted in the major productions that Hollywood filmed during the Franco regime in Spain. That is why in his career horror titles and B series are combined. (Necronomicon, The night has a thousand screams, The attack of the vampires o blood in the night with higher quality and diverse films, such as Cleopatra Conan, the barbarian; The ninth gate; The Birthday o Goya’s ghosts.
The actor had just published his memoirs My 100 years of cinema (Editorial Pigmalión), which he was going to present publicly at the beginning of June. Taylor would have turned a century old on October 21, and until the beginning of May he was fine, days when he was admitted to a hospital.
His real name was George Brown Randall, and he was born in Oregon City, just outside Portland. His great-grandfather, whom he knew—in his memoirs there is a beautiful photo with him—was a pioneer of the Wild West. Since he went on stage to play Santa Claus, he felt that he wanted to be an actor. At age 25, frustrated in his marriage and his job, he left his wife and son behind and moved to San Francisco for a year, where he saved money to study in Los Angeles and pursue his acting dream. He debuted on television, in The Jack Benny Show, where he met Marilyn Monroe; Marlene Dietrich taught him how to make scrambled eggs… But, beyond secondary characters in television series, he did not achieve a single role in the rigid Hollywood studio system. In his book he points out a phrase by Orson Welles as a motivating impulse: “Hollywood is a place where you go to bed young and wake up 65 years old.” So, since he didn’t have enough money to fly to Italy and join the big American shoots in Cinecittà, he decided to take his car and, without knowing Spanish, settle in Mexico at the end of the 1950s.
In Mexico he learned the language in eight months and began working on films by director Federico Curiel. Even Julio Alejandro, Buñuel’s screenwriter, wrote his first protagonist for him, in The ivory tower (1958). Until a musical took him to Madrid. The success of The redhead On the stages of Mexico he had a producer take the entire company to represent it in Spain, at the Teatro de la Zarzuela. On his first morning in the capital, August 29, 1961, he left the Palace Hotel dressed in a suit and suffered a brutal slap from the heat. That summer he thought that, due to the temperatures, he would not last long in Madrid, and yet, there he began the most fruitful professional stage of his life.
Taylor points out in his memoirs the strange sensations that emanated from Spain in the sixties. It speaks of cultural gaps and, at the same time, of a cheerful nightlife. After filming in Italy Cleopatra (in his memoirs he writes, along with a photo that attests to his presence, “If you blink, you won’t see me, but I’m there, playing Rex Harrison’s Greek slave”), he achieved his first character with dialogue in Spanish cinema in The guerrillas (1963), where he plays Dubois, a lieutenant in Napoleon’s army, alongside Manolo Escobar and Rocío Jurado. Taylor joined westerns like Outlaw, The Gunslinger’s Tomb o General Custer’s last adventure. His accent and physique attract Spanish horror directors, a genre that was then bustling with creators as diverse as Paul Naschy, Jess Franco, Juan Piquer Simón, Javier Aguirre and Eugenio Martín. Necronomicon (1968), by Franco, launched him into stardom. The characters of villain, mad scientist, elusive aristocrat, evil doctor, leaders of satanic sects…
In his book he speaks fondly of the fantasy horror industry, which pays for one film with the filming of another, where sometimes they don’t even have money for expenses, but where he imposes his talent and becomes a cult actor. They are the decades of Count Dracula, Blood in the Night, Doctor Mabuse, The Night Orgy of the Vampires, Journey to the Center of the Earth, The Night of the Witches, The Night Has a Thousand Screams… Furthermore, he combines these jobs with his work as a set designer and theater director.
With the Miró Film Law, that industry disappeared. Taylor remained in the gap thanks to his mother tongue: he is the priest who has his ups and downs with Arnold Schwarzenegger in Conan, the barbarian; acts under the orders of Monte Hellman in The iguana; collaborates with Roman Polanski on The ninth door, with André Techiné in Loin and with Ridley Scott in 1492: the conquest of paradise. Milos Forman only left a bad taste in his mouth in Goya’s ghosts.
Taylor, who worked a lot in Spanish series and films in the nineties, pays tribute in his book to two directors who counted on him in recent years: Eugenio Mira (The Birthday y Grand Piano) and Victor Matellano (Wax y Print The Legend). His prodigious memory has been the basis of his autobiography, which has now become his final close-up.