Don Taylor Biography

Donald Victor Taylor (30 June 1936 – 11 November 2003; usually credited as Don Taylor) was an English writer, director and producer, active across theatre, radio and television for over forty years. He is most noted for his television work, particularly his early 1960s collaborations with the playwright David Mercer, much of whose early work Taylor directed for the BBC.

Career

He was, however, able to find work with other departments of the BBC, directing several episodes of the arts documentary series Omnibus. He also began to find success as a playwright himself, for the theatre, with his first professional play Grounds for Marriage being premiered by the Traverse Theatre in 1967. He also worked in television for the ITV network, including two episodes of Nigel Kneale's ATV anthology horror series Beasts in 1976. From the early 1970s, he also began to work for BBC television again, mostly directing classic theatrical adaptations, including The Two Gentlemen of Verona in 1984 for their The Complete Dramatic Works of William Shakespeare series, which adapted all of Shakespeare's plays for the small screen. His final television work was his own new translation of Iphigenia at Aulis by Euripides in 1990, after which he retired from the medium. That same year he published a memoir of his television work, Days of Vision, in which he was scathing of the state of modern television drama and the disappearance of the theatrical tradition from the medium. For the remainder of his career, Taylor was particularly active in radio and the theatre. The same year that he retired from television work, he and his wife established a radio production company called First Writes, producing plays independently for transmission on BBC radio. He both wrote and directed for radio himself, as well as assisting his wife with the running of a children's theatre company she had established near their Chiswick home. Later in life, the family moved to the village of Banham, near Norwich, in Norfolk, where Taylor died in 2003. He had married the writer Ellen Dryden in 1960 — she and their two children survived him. Less than a year after his death, Katie Mitchell directed a production of his translation of Iphigenia at Aulis at the Lyttelton, to huge critical acclaim. The "National Theatre of the Air" had not come to pass, but finally his work was played at the National Theatre. This was followed in 2007 by the same director's production of his translation of Women of Troy.

Source: Wikipedia