Robert Taylor, another MGM product in the 1930s and 1940s, also lacked control over his screen career. “I stayed with the studio for 24 years,” he once recalled, “I did my work, took what they gave me to do.”
Though younger and more handsome, Taylor, born in 1911, was much less ambitious or talented than either Clark Gable or Spencer Tracy, MGM’s dominant stars of the studio’s era.
Taylor once summed up his career as, “I was just a guy gifted with looks I had done nothing to earn, who fell into a career that I was never overly ambitious about.”
