Actress Joan Taylor, best remembered for two sci-fi / horror B movies of the late 1950s, died March 4 in Santa Monica, in Los Angeles County. Taylor was 82.
According to various sources, Taylor was born Rose Marie Emma in Geneva, Illinois, on August 18, 1929. She was the daughter of Austrian vaudeville player Amelia Berky and an Italian-born immigrant who later became a Hollywood prop man.
Curiously, last Friday night I watched for the first time the 1957 Columbia release 20 Million Miles to Earth. Though wasted in a non-role in this King Kong rip-off with animation by Ray Harryhausen, Taylor looked quite pretty (as an Italian) whether angry at leading man William Hopper (son of gossip columnist Hedda Hopper) or screaming at the ballooning Martian creature. I guess it says something about her screen presence that I was rooting for the Martian Monster to gobble up the film’s entire cast (including the extras), director, and writers — except for her.
And a couple of months ago, I ardently rooted for the nasty alien invaders in Fred F. Sears’ Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, released the year before. Taylor is also wasted in that one, though her role is considerably larger and she has better chemistry with leading man Hugh Marlowe.
Among her other handful of big-screen roles were those in B Westerns such as Lesley Selander’s War Paint (1955), opposite Robert Stack, and Roger Corman’s Apache Woman (1953), with Lloyd Bridges. Her A-feature film work was basically restricted to a supporting appearance in Mervyn LeRoy’s 1954 remake of Rose Marie, starring Ann Blyth, Fernando Lamas, and Howard Keel. Perhaps one could also include another such supporting role, in William Dieterle’s Omar Khayyam (1957), starring Cornel Wilde as the Persian poet. Debra Paget had the female lead in that one.
One Joan Taylor movie that I’ve never watched, but that sounds like a must-see is Edward L. Cahn’s Girls in Prison (1956), which boasted the tagline: “What happens to girls without men?” Richard Denning and Adele Jergens were Taylor’s co-stars.
Taylor’s movie career abruptly ended in 1957. As per the IMDb, she’d return only one more time, in a cameo in the 1989 sci-fier Split. But she did continue working on television until 1963. She had a recurring role in The Rifleman, and had guest parts in dozens of TV series, including My Three Sons, The Dick Powell Show, Rawhide, Philip Marlowe, 77 Sunset Strip, and Gunsmoke.
In addition, the IMDb has Taylor credited for writing and directing a 1990 short film, Redlands, featuring Lisa Louise Christensen and Pamela Reed. Besides Redlands, the IMDB also lists her co-writing the story for the Matthew Perry / Salma Hayek movie Fools Rush In (1997); the TV movie Heart of a Stranger (2002), starring Jane Seymour; an episode from the ’70s series Family; and the novel Asking for It, which was the basis for the 1983 TV movie An Invasion of Privacy, featuring Jeff Daniels, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Valerie Harper, Carol Kane, and others.
I couldn’t confirm that the 20 Million Miles to Earth Joan Taylor is the same person who wrote Asking for It. Anyhow, Kirkus Reviews wrote the following about the book: “Rape and its aftermath — in a predictable, touching-all-feminist-bases scenario that’s sometimes enlivened by the personality and particulars of the narrator-heroine.” The Kirkus review also features several, huh, spicy quotes from the book that would have made even the 20 Million Miles to Earth monster blush.
From 1953 to his death in 1974, Taylor was married to writer-producer Leonard Freeman, among whose credits was the television series Hawaii Five-O and the TV drama Cry Rape. Following Freeman’s death, Taylor reportedly managed his business affairs.
In 1976, she married television writer-producer Walter Grauman (Murder, She Wrote, Barnaby Jones, The Streets of San Francisco), who’ll turn 90 next March 17. The couple were divorced in 1980.
