Forrest Taylor(1883-1965)
- Actor
Minor American character actor Forrest Taylor was a veteran of the
stage by the time he started appearing as a silent lead in both short
and feature-length films. He went on to appear in hundreds of secondary
"B" movies, although his name does not appear in a large percentage of
them. Taylor was born Edwin Forrest Taylor in Bloomington, Illinois, in
1883. Little is known about his early days on stage but he assayed
prime roles in such films as
In the Sunset Country (1915),
April (1916),
True Nobility (1916) and
The Abandonment (1916) before
World War I service intervened. With his leading-man career fatally
interrupted, he would not return to films until a decade later in 1926.
Playing a few strong supports, he regressed quickly to atmospheric bits
primarily in westerns and cliffhangers. With a no-nonsense attitude and
imposingly thick mustache, his attorneys, judges, scientists,
executives and professors were for the most part scarcely acknowledged,
so when he did receive a bit more screen time than usual he pounced on
the opportunity, such as he got in
John Wayne's programmer
Riders of Destiny (1933) where
he played a sagebrush villain; the serial
Shadow of Chinatown (1936)
as a Chief of Police; and
The Oregon Trail (1939) as a
nemesis to hero Johnny Mack Brown.
Taylor also managed some deliciously hammy roles in a few popular
serials including
The Green Archer (1940),
The Spider Returns (1941) and
The Iron Claw (1941). On-camera for
nearly five decades, he extended himself into TV programming in the
1950s, taking part in various TV westerns including episodes of
Adventures of Wild Bill Hickok (1951),
Annie Oakley (1954),
The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp (1955),
Maverick (1957) and
My Friend Flicka (1955), not
to mention both Gene Autry's and
Roy Rogers' weekly shows. He was an
occasional player on the series
Cisco Kid (1950) from 1950
on, and from 1952-1954 had one of his more visible roles as Grandpa
Fisher on the religious TV series
The Fisher Family (1952).
Broaching the age of 80, Taylor finally retired in 1962 after filming
an episode of Bonanza (1959) and died
three years later of natural causes in Garden Grove, California.
