Don Taylor

Taylor's acting career hit its stride early. A supporting turn in the 1950 MGM classic Father of the Bride — playing the groom opposite Spencer Tracy — gave him genuine mainstream visibility, and the sequel Father's Little Dividend kept him in that spotlight. War films followed naturally, and this is where Taylor really found his footing as a screen presence: Battleground, The Flying Leathernecks, and the Billy Wilder-directed Stalag 17 all featured Taylor in roles that leaned on the kind of understated credibility that's hard to fake. That stretch of work, roughly 1950 through the mid-1950s, is the core of his acting legacy. Later acting credits included Giant (1956) and Raintree County (1957) — both sprawling prestige productions — before Taylor began shifting his focus toward the director's chair. The transition wasn't abrupt, but by the 1970s it was complete. His science fiction work as a director is probably what contemporary genre audiences know best: Escape from the Planet of the Apes (1971) is a genuinely weird and melancholy entry in that franchise, the one where the apes arrive in our time and the film turns unexpectedly dark by the third act. Taylor handled that tonal whiplash better than it had any right to be handled. The Island of Dr. Moreau (1977), starring Burt Lancaster and Michael York, followed, and then The Final Countdown (1980) — a time-travel thriller that sent a modern aircraft carrier back to the eve of Pearl Harbor. Ambitious premise. Taylor also directed the 1985 television biopic My Wicked, Wicked Ways: The Legend of Errol Flynn, one of more than 400 TV dramas he helmed over the course of his career (Wikipedia). That television body of work is enormous, and it's the thing nobody mentions when his name comes up — which feels like an oversight.