Dwight Taylor (writer)


Dwight Oliver Taylor was an American author, playwright, and film/television screenwriter.

Background

Dwight Taylor was the son of actress Laurette Taylor and her husband, Charles A. Taylor. Dwight Taylor attended Lawrenceville School in Lawrence Township, New Jersey where he began drawing and painting and wrote a book of poetry.
After refusing an opportunity to work as a cub reporter for The New York World, he began his career as a journalist for The New Yorker magazine, serving as one of the first editors for their "Talk of the Town". He began screenwriting for Hollywood films in 1930 and for television in 1953. His first produced play was Don't Tell George. Other plays included such as Lipstick and Gay Divorce.
Taylor's first screenplay was Jailbreak. First National Pictures bought the project in 1929 while it was still in manuscript form and had Alfred A. Cohn and Henry McCarty adapt it to become the 1930 film Numbered Men starring Conrad Nagel and Bernice Claire. Gay Divorce was adapted into a Broadway musical by Cole Porter.
In 1934, RKO Studios, which renamed it The Gay Divorcee to appease the censors, filmed it with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. He was a founding member, and had served one term as president, of the Writers Guild of America, West.

Death

On December 31, 1986, one day before his 84th birthday, Dwight Taylor died of a heart attack at the Motion Picture and Television Hospital in Woodland Hills, California where he had resided since 1981, thus achieving a rare feat of being born on New Year's Day and dying on New Year's Eve.
He had been widowed three months earlier by his second wife, former Hollywood costume designer Natalie Visart, with whom he had a daughter, Laurel. His first wife was Marigold Lockhart Taylor, whom he married on May 25, 1929, and by whom he had three children.

Filmography

Film