Sam Taylor

Not to be confused with Broadway playwright (and later screenwriter) Samuel A. Taylor (1912-2000).

New York-born writer and director with a penchant for comedy. He graduated from Fordham University, and, from 1916, worked at Kalem on the 'Ham and Bud' series (Lloyd Hamilton & Bud Duncan). When Kalem was taken over by Vitagraph, Taylor became feature continuity writer.

Sometime after 1920, he joined Hal Roach as a full screenwriter, eventually becoming an integral part of Harold Lloyd's writing staff. He often worked in tandem with Fred C.

Newmeyer as co-director of such comedy classics as Safety Last! (1923) and The Freshman (1925).

Among his important solo directing efforts were Harold Lloyd's For Heaven's Sake (1926), Exit Smiling (1926), with Beatrice Lillie; Tempest (1928), with John Barrymore and Ambassador Bill (1931),with Will Rogers.

Taylor's 1929 film 'The Taming of the Shrew' (starring Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford) originally credited the production as written 'by William Shakespeare, with additional dialogue by Sam Taylor'. It appears, that the film was rather quickly taken out of circulation and the credits revised.

In 1937, Taylor founded Chase Productions in conjunction with his writer-brother Matt and authored the Broadway play 'Stopover', which ran for 23 performances at the Lyceum Theatre.

Taylor directed Laurel & Hardy in one of their last features, Nothing But Trouble (1944), then turned to writing. His best novel was a thriller, 'The Man With My Face', about an accountant who comes home one day to find that his life has been taken over by a doppelganger and he is subsequently persecuted as an impostor.