Regina Taylor (born August 22, 1960) is an American actress and playwright. She has won several awards throughout her career, including a Golden Globe Award and NAACP Image Award. In July 2017, Taylor was announced as the new Denzel Washington Endowed Chair in Theater at Fordham University.
Early life and education
Taylor was born in Dallas, Texas. Her mother, Nell Taylor, is a social worker and poet. At the age of 12, she moved to Muskogee, Oklahoma. The family later returned to Dallas, where she graduated from L. G. Pinkston High School in 1977.
Acting
Her earliest professional acting roles were two made-for-television films while she was studying at Southern Methodist University: 1980's Nurse (1980) and Crisis at Central High (1981). In the latter movie, she was praised by critic John O'Connor of The New York Times for her portrayal of Minnijean Brown, a member of the Little Rock Nine, a group of African-American students who braved violence and armed guards to integrate Little Rock Central High School in 1957.
Her first role to garner widespread attention was that of Mrs. Carter, the drug-addicted mother of a promising young female student, in the 1989 film Lean on Me. She became well known to the television viewing public for her role as Lilly Harper on the early 1990s TV series I'll Fly Away. This role won her a Golden Globe award for Best Actress in a Television Drama and also an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Actress in a Drama Series. In 2018, Taylor had a role as Dr. Hannah Moshay in season 5 of the highly successful NBC crime thriller series The Blacklist.
Since then she has had some critical success for various supporting roles in films, such as the Spike Lee film Clockers, Courage Under Fire, A Family Thing, The Negotiator, and for the films Losing Isaiah and Strange Justice — a Showtime original film in which she portrayed Anita Hill — and as the lead in the PBS telefilm Cora Unashamed, based on a Langston Hughes short story. She was a cast member for all four seasons of the CBS drama The Unit.
Taylor is also an accomplished stage actress, and was the first black woman to play Juliet in Romeo and Juliet on Broadway. Her other Broadway credits include Macbeth and As You Like It. She appeared in Off-Broadway and regional productions of such plays as Jar the Floor (Off-Broadway, 1999), Machinal (Off-Broadway, 1990), L'Illusion (Off-Broadway, 1988), and A Map of the World (Off-Broadway, Public Theatre). She appeared as "Ariel" in The Tempest at the La Jolla Playhouse, California in 1987, for which she received a Dramalogue Award.
In 2016, Taylor starred in the original pilot of Time After Time as Vanessa Anders, but was replaced by Nicole Ari Parker before the series aired, containing a new pilot with Parker.
Playwriting
As of 2022, Taylor is currently the writer-in-residence at the Signature Theatre, where her play stop. reset. premiered at the off-Broadway Pershing Square Signature Center on September 8, 2013. Taylor also directed the production.
A Distinguished Artistic Associate of Chicago's Goodman Theatre, in 1991, Taylor co-wrote two one-act plays adapted from Franz Xaver Kroetz's Sty Farm and Ghost Train with her husband, Mario Emes. It was produced by Joseph Papp at the Public Theater, New York City, was directed by Melia Bensussen and starred Mary Alice, Paul Benjamin, Paul Butler and Kenya Scott.
She wrote Escape from Paradise, a one-woman show which was produced at the Goodman Theatre Studio, Chicago, in October 1995. Her short plays Watermelon Rinds and Inside the Belly of the Beast were incorporated into a program at the Goodman Theatre Studio in 1994. She wrote and appeared in the play Millennium Mambo, a one-woman work, presented at the Goodman Theatre in February 2000. She wrote the play A Night in Tunisia, which premiered during the 2000 Alabama Shakespeare Festival.
In 2000, Taylor won a best new play award from the American Critics' Association for Oo-Bla-Dee, a play about 1940s female jazz musicians. The Goodman Theatre produced the play in 1999.