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Rod Taylor, the strapping Australian who became one of the biggest draws from his country in the nineteen-fifties and sixties, has died, it was announced today. He moved to Hollywood to start a career in television, but movies soon beckoned for a performer of his masculine charm and capability and he appeared in World Without End, Giant, Raintree County and Separate Tables.
By the sixties, he was a major star, appearing in perhaps his signature role in The Time Machine, voicing the hero in Disney's 101 Dalmatians, working with Hitchcock in The Birds, part of the celebrity ensemble in The V.I.P.s, and so forth with successes as Fate is the Hunter, 36 Hours with James Garner, The Liquidator, Do Not Disturb and The Glass Bottom Boat with Doris Day, and the still-tough Dark of the Sun following. Come the seventies he headlined Darker Than Amber, Antonioni's Zabriskie Point, The Train Robbers and The Deadly Trackers, but his stardom waned around this time, and he spent most of the remaining years in television until Quentin Tarantino offered him a fine cameo as Winston Churchill in Inglourious Basterds. Not a bad way to go out as one of the screen's most admirable heroes. |
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