Regina Taylor Biography
After commencing minor on-camera appearances in the early '80s, multi-talented African-American actress Regina Taylor juggled careers as a character actress and playwright with great aplomb. As both a thespian and a scribe, Taylor often dealt with material that grappled with race relations and civil rights. This was hardly accidental, for she rose up out of a bitter and tumultuous youth in the Deep South that forced her to face racism head-on and thus marked her for life. After an appearance as Mrs. Carter in John_G._Avildsen's uneven Joe Clark biopic Lean on Me (1989), Taylor first made members of the press sit up and take notice with her pivotal role on I'll_Fly_Away. This thoughtful and heartfelt series drama -- set in the apocryphal Southern town of Bryland in the late '50s -- starred the venerable Sam_Waterston as D.A. Forrest Bedford, a conservative prosecuting attorney grappling with shifting attitudes about race relations as he took on a new black housekeeper, Lilly Harper (Taylor). The program's consistent inability to land an audience, in spite of across-the-board critical acclaim, marked one of the most unfortunate events to befall a prime-time series program during the early '90s.
Taylor returned to similar themes -- albeit in a much earlier setting -- with the 1995 Children of the Dust, a telemovie starring Sidney_Poitier, about the tensions between black and white homesteaders. The actress also graced the casts of such noteworthy theatrical features as Spike_Lee's Clockers (1995), Ed_Zwick's Courage_Under_Fire (1996), and F._Gary_Gray's The_Negotiator (1998) before hearkening back to television as military man Jonas Blane's (Dennis_Haysbert) beleaguered wife, Molly, on the CBS drama The_Unit.
As a playwright, Taylor received her first significant break with the 1983 +Watermelon Rinds, and spent the following decades authoring such critically acclaimed productions as +Oo-Bla-Dee (2000) and +Urban Zulu Mambo (2001). She debuted on Broadway in 2004 with her work +Drowning Crow, a loose adaptation of Chekhov's +The Seagull posited in the Gullah Islands of South Carolina. At one point, she was reported to have been involved with the Broadway musical production of +The Color Purple, but it was ultimately credited to other writers. Nathan Southern, Rovi
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