Rod Taylor, Australian-American actor and screenwriter (b. 1930)
Rodney Sturt Taylor (11 January 1930 – 7 January 2015) was an Australian actor. He appeared in more than 50 feature films, including The Time Machine (1960), One Hundred and One Dalmatians (1961), The Birds (1963), and Inglourious Basterds (2009).
Taylor was born in Lidcombe, a suburb of Sydney, to a father who was a steel construction contractor and commercial artist and a mother who was a children's author. He began taking art classes in high school, and continued in college. He decided to become an actor after seeing Laurence Olivier in an Old Vic touring production of Richard III.
His first film role was in a re-enactment of Charles Sturt's voyage down the Murrumbidgee and Murray Rivers, playing Sturt's offsider, George Macleay. At the time, he was also appearing in a number of theatre productions for Australia's Mercury Theatre. He made his feature film debut in the Australian Lee Robinson film King of the Coral Sea (1954). He soon started acting in television films, such as Studio 57 (1954), where he played multiple different characters.
He had started to gain popularity after starring in The Time Machine (1960), as H. George Wells. He later starred in the Disney film One Hundred and One Dalmatians (1961), as Pongo. In one of his most famous roles, he played Mitch Brenner in The Birds, directed by Alfred Hitchcock (1963). By the late 1990s, Taylor had moved into semi-retirement. His final film role was in Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds in 2009, portraying a fictionalized version of Winston Churchill in a cameo.