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.”
Stewart Granger, who acted with Robert Taylor on the 1953 romantic adventure, commented on Taylor’s screen image:
“He was the easiest person to work with but he had been entirely emasculated by the MGM brass who insisted that he was only a pretty face. He was convinced he wasn’t really a good actor and his calm acceptance of this stigma infuriated me. He was such a nice guy, Bob, but he had even more hang-ups than I had.”
