A scholarship to Cambridge at the age of only 16, followed by a starred double first in English and a doctorate in art history from the Courtauld Institute: John Russell Taylor’s intellectual gifts were already abundantly clear when in his mid-twenties he was hand-picked by Lord Astor, then owner of The Times, to be the newspaper’s film critic, occasional theatre critic, and eventually art critic, a position he held for almost 30 years until his retirement in 2005. Along the way, he published several dozen books, including the only authorised biography of Alfred Hitchcock, together with innumerable contributions to exhibition catalogues and anthologies, while at the same time establishing the cinema history programme at the University of Southern California, where he taught as a professor for the best part of a decade.

Generous, warm-hearted, and open-minded, John attracted a wide circle of friends, among them Harold Pinter, Alec Guinness, Vincent Price, and of course Hitchcock, whom he routinely visited both on and off set during his time at USC, supported throughout by his partner of almost 50 years, the artist Ying Yeung Li.

An avid collector, active to the last, John assembled a vast private library, legendary in the book-collecting world, which came to fill virtually every corner of his home in Brook Green, covering the walls from floor to ceiling sometimes two and even three piles deep, and towering over every available surface. This library was not only one of John’s most treasured possessions but also one of the most personal, reflecting the wide-ranging interests that shaped his brilliant mind and career, and including many of his own acclaimed publications.

John Russell Taylor: A Select Bibliography

Anger and After (1962, reprinted 2019); Cinema Eye, Cinema Ear (1964, reprinted 2019); Penguin Dictionary of the Theatre (1966); The Art Nouveau Book in Britain (1966); The Rise and Fall of the Well-Made Play (1967, reprinted 2019); Harold Pinter (1969): The Hollywood Musical (1971); Directors and Directions (1975); Peter Schaffer (1975);  Hitch (1978, revised edition 2022); Impressionism (1981); Strangers in Paradise: The Hollywood Emigrés, 1933-1950  (1983); Ingrid Bergman (1983); Alec Guinness (1984); Vivien Leigh (1984); Orson Welles (1986); Liz Taylor (1991); Claude Monet (1995)

Obituaries

John Russell Taylor obituary: biographer of Alfred Hitchcock
The Times, 11 September 2025

John Russell Taylor obituary
The Guardian,  6 October 2025

John Russell Taylor, 90, Dies; Cultural Critic and Hitchcock Biographer
The New York Times, 6 November 2025