Jack Taylor

Born George Brown Randall in Oregon City, he acted onstage as a child, picked up small television parts in Los Angeles in the 1950s, and then did something unusual: he left. Mexico came first, with a run of films for Federico Curiel, and after that Spain, where as Jack Taylor he became one of the most recognisable faces in European low-budget cinema.

The bulk of that work is exploitation, much of it for Jesus Franco, and there is no point pretending otherwise. Count Dracula (1970), Eugenie, Female Vampire, Call of the Blonde Goddess. Taylor is the reason several of those films are watchable at all. He plays aristocrats and professionals with a completely straight face in productions where nobody else is bothering, and that seriousness is what gives the horror its footing. As Quincey Morris in Count Dracula he is doing real Stoker while the film around him improvises.

The Spanish industry then handed him a second act as the reliable local hire on international productions shooting there: a priest in Conan the Barbarian (1982), Vicuna in 1492: Conquest of Paradise, the chamberlain in Goya's Ghosts, a gentleman on horseback in The Return of the Musketeers. His best late role is Victor Fargas in Roman Polanski's The Ninth Gate (1999), where the fastidiousness he had spent thirty years applying to nonsense finally landed in a film that wanted it.

He was still on screen in a 2024 documentary about the Spanish clasificada S era, talking about the films he had made.