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John Russell Taylor is an English critic and author. He was born in Dover and attended Dover Grammar School before obtaining a double first in English from Jesus College, Cambridge.

He is the author of a vast number of critical works on cinema, and of biographies of important Anglo-American film figures including Orson Welles, Vivien Leigh and Alfred Hitchcock, whom he befriended in LA while teaching at the University of Southern California in the 1970s. Taylor's biography of Hitchcock is the only one to be written with its subject's full cooperation - and led him to write an intensive study of Hollywood's émigré in his book Strangers in Paradise: The Hollywood Emigres 1933-1950.

Taylor has written regularly for publications such as The Times, Sight and Sound, The New York Times, and The Los Angeles Times throughout his career and was art critic for The Times until 2005.

He now lives in London and West Wales.