Taylor, Robert (1911-1969)

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Taylor, Robert (1911-1969)

Typecast for most of his career as a handsome ladies man, Robert Taylor became a top box office attraction after his first major film in 1936 and continued to star in big budget movies for the next twenty years. The list of leading ladies who played opposite Taylor include some of the biggest stars of Hollywood's Golden Age: Irene Dunne, Loretta Young, Barbara Stanwyck, Joan Crawford, Greta Garbo, Jean Harlow, Hedy Lamarr, Ava Gardner, Greer Garson,Vivien Leigh, Norma Shearer, Katharine Hepburn, Elizabeth Taylor, and Deborah Kerr. Of his long association with MGM, Taylor said: "I stayed with one studio for twenty years, took what they gave me to do, did my work." Summarizing his treatment at the hands of movie critics, he said, "I never got raves, but neither did I get pans."

Born Spangler Arlington Brough (a name dear to trivia buffs), the son of a physician in Filley, Nebraska, Taylor initially decided on a medical career, but acting in amateur productions in college soon led him in another direction. He enrolled in a Los Angeles drama school, where a talent scout saw him in a production of Journey's End. After a screen test, he was signed by MGM to a seven-year contract, starting at $35 a week. In his first film he played a supporting role to Will Rogers in Handy Andy (1934). A succession of low-budget pictures followed, but in 1936 he moved to number four in the box office ratings with the teary film, Magnificent Obsession, opposite Irene Dunne. Taylor starred in the role of a playboy who becomes a respected surgeon in order to restore the sight of a woman he had blinded in an automobile accident. After the film was released, all of the most glamorous Hollywood leading ladies wanted to play opposite the handsome young actor.

Two other important films followed in 1936—Taylor starred with Barbara Stanwyck in His Brother's Wife and with Joan Crawford in an historical drama, The Gorgeous Hussy. His sudden appeal at the box office led MGM to star him opposite Greta Garbo in Camille. Comparing him with the uniquely talented Garbo, critics were almost unanimous in calling the pairing one of the great mismatches of cinema history. Studio executives pointed out, however, that in the important area of ticket sales, Taylor ranked number three in 1937, while Garbo was only number six. In 1937 Taylor played the more macho role of a secret service agent, who is ordered by President McKinley to join a gang of robbers to expose a powerful mob, in This is My Affair, opposite Barbara Stanwyck as a saloon-girl. Taylor and Stanwyck were married in 1939, a much-publicized Hollywood romance that lasted until 1952.

In the late 1930s, studios gave Taylor parts designed to draw more men to his pictures. He was the cocky, athletic young American in Yank at Oxford (1938), a boxer in The Crowd Roars (1938), and he even starred in a Western, Stand Up and Fight (1939). Taylor's own favorite film was the romantic Waterloo Bridge (1940), in which he played a soldier who meets a ballet dancer (Vivien Leigh) during a London air raid.

His most expensive film was Quo Vadis (1951), in which he essayed the role of a Roman centurion, which Gregory Peck had turned down. In the lavishly made movie, shot in Italy, Taylor falls in love with a Christian beauty (Deborah Kerr), in a plot that threatens to throw both of them to the lions. The movie grossed $11 million, at that time the fourth biggest moneymaker in history. Other big budget spectacles followed: Ivanhoe (1952), Knights of the Round Table (1953), and Valley of the Kings, filmed in Egypt in 1954. In the next few years Taylor's popularity dwindled, and his contract with MGM ended, but he continued to work in minor films and in a television series called The Detectives. In his last movie in 1969, he and Charles Boyer played secret agents in The Day the Hot Line Got Hot. He died that same year after a long struggle with cancer. Fellow actor Ronald Reagan, then governor of California, said at his funeral: "He was more than a pretty boy, an image that embarrassed him because he was a man who respected his profession and was a master of it."

—Benjamin Griffith