Background

Julie Taymor was born on December 15, 1952, in Newton, Massachusetts, United States. She is the youngest of the four daughters of Betty Bernstein Taymor, an activist in Democratic politics, and Melvin Taymor, a gynecologist.

Education

Raised in a secular Jewish household, she studied theater from age ten at the Boston Children's Theater, and during her final year of secondary school, at the Theater Workshop of Boston, where director Julie Portman focused on experimental ensemble creation. During high school, Taymor also spent a summer traveling in Sri Lanka and India, getting her first taste of what would later become a serious involvement in the traditional Asian theater.

Following high school, she spent a year in Paris studying at L'Écôle de Mime Jacques LeCoq. She attended Oberlin College, in Ohio, between September 1969 and June 1974, graduating with a degree in folklore and mythology. For part of that time, she earned credits away from the college, apprenticing with experimental theater companies in New York and taking anthropology classes at Columbia University. Her main focus at Oberlin was a theater group run by Herbert Blau, which developed performance projects through ensemble workshops. Taymor credits Blau with helping to shape much of her ongoing approach to performance, which involves "idiographs," tightly compacted, pared-down forms of expression.

Career

After completing her undergraduate degree at Oberlin College in 1974, Taymor earned a Watson traveling fellowship to study in Indonesia and Japan, and she remained in Java and Bali for four years. The performances she saw in Bali, where the theater is part of everyday life, transformed her conception of theater and inspired her to form her own company, Teatr Loh, or theater of the source. Taymor premiered several works with the company, including Way of Snow and Tirai.

Returning to the United States in 1980, Taymor worked with playwright Elizabeth Swados on The Haggadah for the New York Shakespeare Festival. This experience introduced her work to a growing audience and paved the way for a succession of notable works, including the puppets for the American Repertory Theatre's production of The King Stag in 1984. Her production of Juan Darien: A Carnival Mass, however, established her reputation in the New York theater scene.

Increasingly admired as a designer and director, Taymor achieved widespread fame for the stage adaptation of the Walt Disney animated movie The Lion King. Taymor felt the story - in which the cub Simba unwittingly causes his father's death, is banished by his evil uncle Scar, and finally overcomes his false guilt and returns to kill Scar and reclaim his kingdom had much potential. But she had no wish to treat the material in the sentimentalized manner typical of children's theater. Instead, she chose to incorporate elements from folk rituals and spectacle. Critics and audiences raved about the show, often describing it as magical. Taymor won two Tony awards, for direction and for costumes, for The Lion King.

With the fame and financial independence that she earned for The Lion King, Taymor went on to focus on a more controversial project, a film adaptation of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, which she had earlier directed for the stage. It is one of Shakespeare's least-known and least admired plays; dealing with themes of extreme violence, it is not often produced. Taymor's adaptation, which blurs time periods and uses startling visual elements, was widely admired.

Taymor's next project was the film Frida, which was about the life and work of Mexican painter Frida Kahlo, who lived from 1907-1954. The artist lived in pain for much of her life, having suffered from polio in childhood and having sustained severe abdominal and spinal injuries in a tramcar accident. Married to the famous mural painter Diego Rivera.

Her projects also include directing a new production of The Magic Flute, for the 2004-2005 season at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, and an original opera, Grendel, a long-term project she is creating with Goldenthal, for the 2006 season of the Los Angeles Opera and then at the Lincoln Center Festival in New York.

Though her work is rooted in the visual, Taymor has also written plays and lyrics. In addition, she has contributed to three books, The Lion King: Pride Rock on Broadway and Frida: Bringing Frida Kahlo's Life and Art to Film.

After completing her undergraduate degree at Oberlin College in 1974, Taymor earned a Watson traveling fellowship to study in Indonesia and Japan, and she remained in Java and Bali for four years. The performances she saw in Bali, where the theater is part of everyday life, transformed her conception of theater and inspired her to form her own company, Teatr Loh, or theater of the source. Taymor premiered several works with the company, including Way of Snow and Tirai.

Returning to the United States in 1980, Taymor worked with playwright Elizabeth Swados on The Haggadah for the New York Shakespeare Festival. This experience introduced her work to a growing audience and paved the way for a succession of notable works, including the puppets for the American Repertory Theatre's production of The King Stag in 1984. Her production of Juan Darien: A Carnival Mass, however, established her reputation in the New York theater scene.

Increasingly admired as a designer and director, Taymor achieved widespread fame for the stage adaptation of the Walt Disney animated movie The Lion King. Taymor felt the story - in which the cub Simba unwittingly causes his father's death, is banished by his evil uncle Scar, and finally overcomes his false guilt and returns to kill Scar and reclaim his kingdom had much potential. But she had no wish to treat the material in the sentimentalized manner typical of children's theater. Instead, she chose to incorporate elements from folk rituals and spectacle. Critics and audiences raved about the show, often describing it as magical. Taymor won two Tony awards, for direction and for costumes, for The Lion King.

With the fame and financial independence that she earned for The Lion King, Taymor went on to focus on a more controversial project, a film adaptation of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, which she had earlier directed for the stage. It is one of Shakespeare's least-known and least admired plays; dealing with themes of extreme violence, it is not often produced. Taymor's adaptation, which blurs time periods and uses startling visual elements, was widely admired.

Taymor's next project was the film Frida, which was about the life and work of Mexican painter Frida Kahlo, who lived from 1907-1954. The artist lived in pain for much of her life, having suffered from polio in childhood and having sustained severe abdominal and spinal injuries in a tramcar accident. Married to the famous mural painter Diego Rivera.

Her projects also include directing a new production of The Magic Flute, for the 2004-2005 season at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, and an original opera, Grendel, a long-term project she is creating with Goldenthal, for the 2006 season of the Los Angeles Opera and then at the Lincoln Center Festival in New York.

Though her work is rooted in the visual, Taymor has also written plays and lyrics. In addition, she has contributed to three books, The Lion King: Pride Rock on Broadway and Frida: Bringing Frida Kahlo's Life and Art to Film.

Other films directed by Taymor included Across the Universe (2007), a Vietnam War-era love story set to a soundtrack of the Beatles; The Tempest (2010), based on the play by Shakespeare and for which she changed the male role of Prospero to a female Prospera, portrayed by Helen Mirren; and The Glorias (2020), a biopic about feminist icon Gloria Steinem. Taymor also worked with Goldenthal on two more operas during this period: another staging of The Magic Flute for the Metropolitan Opera in New York City and original work, Grendel (2006), based on the Old English epic poem Beowulf.

She next began work on Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, a Broadway musical that she signed on to direct, with Bono and the Edge of the band U2 as its composers. The production, nine years in the making, was riddled with problems, and Taymor was fired from her position in March 2011 after reportedly clashing with both her collaborators and the show’s producers. The show opened in a new direction in June of that year. Though it was reasonably successful, it closed in January 2014 with the dubious distinction of being, at that time, the most expensive Broadway musical ever produced, at a cost of $75 million.

After a long hiatus, Taymor returned to directing Shakespeare onstage with her 2013 production of A Midsummer Night's Dream at Theatre for a New Audience. She then helmed a 2015 production of Grounded, a one-person show featuring Anne Hathaway as a fighter pilot, at the Public Theater. Her production of M. Butterfly, starring Clive Owen, received middling ticket sales and reviews and ended its run soon after premiering in 2017.

Her new film about Gloria Steinem's life, The Glorias (2020), is filled with such flourishes and features four separate actors - Ryan Kiera Armstrong, Julianne Moore, Alicia Vikander, and Lulu Wilson - playing Steinem at various points in her life.

Achievements

• Julie Taymor is one of the most cerebral and experimental of theatrical directors and designers, whose fusion of folklore, puppetry, and intellectually demanding themes made her a favorite of those with a taste for the cutting edge. She is perhaps best known for her 1997 Broadway hit The Lion King.
  
  Over the years, Taymor's work has garnered practically every award in American theater. She received Villager Theater Awards for the sets and puppets in The Haggadah and for direction in Way of Snow; Maharam Theater Design Citations for Way of Snow and Tire; Obie ("Off-Broadway") Awards for Transposed Heads and Juan Darién; an Emmy award for costumes in Oedipus Rex; the International Classical Music Award, 1994, for Oedipus Rex; a Tony Award, Outer Critics Circle Award, Drama Desk Awards for direction, costume design and (with Michael Curry) puppet design, Tony Awards for direction and costumes, and a (British) Olivier award for costumes, all for The Lion King. Her film Frida earned Academy awards for best score and best makeup.
  
  In 1990 Taymor received both a Guggenheim Fellowship and the first Dorothy Chandler Performing Arts Award in Theater. In 1992 she was granted a MacArthur Fellowship. In 1999 the Wexner Center for the Arts in Ohio mounted a retrospective of Taymor's work. The exhibition subsequently appeared at The National Museum of Women in the Arts (Washington) and the Field Museum (Chicago).

Works

More photos

• book

  • Julie Taymor, Playing With Fire: Theater Opera Film

    (One of the most imaginative and provocative directors and...)

    2007
  • Frida: Bringing Frida Kahlo's Life and Art to Film

    (This is the true story of Frida Kahlo and her husband Die...)

    2009
  • The Lion King: Pride Rock on Broadway

    (The stage adaptation of The Lion King is being hailed aro...)

    1998
  • Titus: The Illustrated Screenplay, Adapted from the Play by William Shakespeare 2000

• movie

  • Across The Universe

    (An upper-class American girl is smitten with an impoveris...)

    2007
  • The Glorias

    (The story of Gloria Steinem - from her childhood in 1940s...)

    2020
  • Titus

    (Adaptation of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, an epic rev...)

    1999
  • The Tempest

    (When Duchess Prospera's ship is wrecked, she is left stra...)

    2010
  • Frida

    (Biopic of the bold and controversial life of artist Frida...)

    2002

Religion

Taymor is a Judaist.

Connections

Julie Taymor is married to Elliot Goldenthal. The couple started dating in 1980 and have been together for 41 years.

Father:

Melvin Taymor

Mother:

Betty Bernstein Taymor

colleague:

Salma Hayek

husband:

Elliot Goldenthal

Friend:

Alfred Molina

colleague:

Valeria Golino

colleague:

Antonio Banderas

colleague:

Gloria Steinem

Friend:

Helen Mirren

colleague:

Julianne Moore

References

• Julie Taymor - Instagram