Biography

Member of the jury at the Berlin International Film Festival in 1969

For many years, he was the film critic of the London "Times", although his contributions were anonymous until the mid-1960s. He was also a well-known art critic, mostly for the same newspaper. In the 1980s, he was the editor of the magazine "Films And Filming" for a few years, and he contributed to the British Film Institute's magazine "Sight And Sound" for over twenty years from the late 1950s.

John Russell Taylor was born in Dover, Kent, England on June 19, 1935. He was for several years professor in the Cinema Division of the University of Southern California. Now retired from academic life, he divides his time between London and West Wales, although he still makes occasional contributions to the London "Times" newspaper.

Whoever it was who first thought the cinema was an art, he should have kept his mouth shut. Not that it isn't, but there are so many terrible instances of films made specifically to be art which come perilously close to making us doubt the whole proposition.

[on Alfred Hitchcock, 1978] He has become a rich man, and, more alarmingly, he has become probably the most universally-recognized person in the world.

[on Michelangelo Antonioni, 1970]: Antonioni is a problem because, as a film-maker at least, he is undoubtedly an intellectual but does not seem to be particularly intelligent.

[on the films of Robert Mulligan]: The films, like their heroes, are modest, quiet, but stubborn. And it would not surprise me at all if, in the long run, they prove just as stubbornly lasting, when others with larger immediate reputations have been cut down to size or quite forgotten.

It is always disastrous to start your career with a masterpiece. No-one will ever let you live it down, or allow that you are living up to it.