Born: 15 December 1952, United States
Died: NA
Country most active: United States
Also known as: NA
The following is excerpted from Infinite Women founder Allison Tyra’s book The View from the Hill: Women Who Made Their Mark After 40.
Julie Taymor was 45 when she became the first woman to win the Tony for best director of a musical in 1998. The award was in recognition of her innovative approach adapting the Disney classic The Lion King into a Broadway stage production. Rather than taking the proverbial Disney on Ice approach, Taymor utilized Asian-inspired theatrical masks and puppetry to create a stylized aesthetic that elicited the impression of real animals on the stage—particularly impressive for a musical.
Taymor has been involved in theater since childhood, putting on plays in the backyard, joining the Boston Children’s Theatre, and attending experimental theater workshops in high school, even traveling to Paris to study mime before attending Oberlin College. There, she explored folklore and mythology, and joined an experimental campus theater group. In 1974, the 21-year-old received a grant to travel and study theater internationally, in eastern Europe, Japan, and Indonesia. Although she had planned to be there for only three months, she stayed in Indonesia for four years. With support from another grant, she founded Teatr Loh in Bali with German, American, French, Sundanese, Javanese, and Balinese puppeteers, musicians, dancers, and actors. She developed her first theater works, Way of Snow and Tirai, with the group, and would restage them in New York in 1980 and 1981.
In the 1980s, Taymor built up a reputation in the New York City theater scene with original works, Shakespearean productions, and adaptations, including 1988’s Juan Darién: A Carnival Mass, for which she won an Obie Award (short for “off-Broadway”) for best direction. She restaged it on Broadway in 1996, by which time she had also expanded into films and operas, such as Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex. The 1993 production was recorded, with the film screening at film festivals and airing on television, winning an Emmy. Her first film, Fool’s Fire, an adaptation of an Edgar Allen Poe story, aired on television in 1992.
1996 saw two productions of what would become her signature puppetry—the Broadway production of Juan Darién: A Carnival Mass, and a staging of The Green Bird influenced by Bunraku, a style of Japanese puppetry where the puppeteers are visible but silent and cloaked in black so they fade into the background. In Taymor’s version, which she would also utilize in The Lion King, the puppeteers were actors as well, without masks and given speaking roles. This innovation was what enabled her to persuade Disney executives to entrust such a beloved property to such an experimental director. She also won a Tony for her work as the production’s costume designer, creating animal masks that allowed the performers’ faces, and thus their expressions, to be seen, as well as more than 100 puppets. In addition to the critical acclaim, the show was a huge hit with audiences and would become one of the longest-running musicals in Broadway history.
In addition to her many successful stage productions, Taymor had the misfortune of being associated with the infamous Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark. Notorious as the most expensive Broadway musical ever produced, at $75 million, it closed after two and a half years after having been nine years in the making. Taymor was fired in March 2011 after reported clashes with both collaborators and producers, and the show debuted that June under new direction. Although a two-and-a-half-year run is not bad for most productions, it’s estimated that with the price tag, the show lost around $60 million. The $75 million cost is three times that of the second-most-expensive musical, 2008’s $25 million Shrek. On the film side, Taymor directed the Oscar-winning Frida Kahlo biopic Frida (2002), the Beatles jukebox musical Across the Universe (2007), a gender-swapped The Tempest (2010) starring Helen Mirren, and the Gloria Steinem biopic The Glorias (2020).
The following is republished from the National Endowment for the Arts. This piece falls under under public domain, as copyright does not apply to “any work of the U.S. Government” where “a work prepared by an officer or employee of the U.S. Government as part of that person’s official duties” (See, 17 U.S.C. §§ 101, 105).
Whether directing for the stage or screen, Julie Taymor has consistently defied cultural expectations and tested technological limits, reinventing storytelling in the process. She is perhaps best known for her 1997 Broadway hit The Lion King, which earned her Tony Awards for Direction and Costume Design. Based on the Disney movie, the musical utilizes masks and puppetry, an art form Taymor studied while living in Indonesia and Japan as a young woman. Her 1996 multimedia off-Broadway production, Juan Darién: A Carnival Mass, earned two Obie Awards, while early stage works such as The Tempest, Liberty’s Taken, andTransposed Heads were recognized with a 1991 MacArthur Fellowship. Taymor has also brought her imaginative touch to other media. She has directed operas such as The Magic Flute and Grendel (which she created with the help of a 1988 National Endowment for the Arts grant), while her filmography includes Titus (1999), Frida (2002) — which won Oscars for Best Makeup and Best Original Score — Across the Universe (2007), based on music by the Beatles, and The Tempest (2010).