Thanks, Alejandra, for another interesting contribution. Bob wasn't even 25 when this article was pu…

[Dianne]

Thanks, Alejandra, for another interesting contribution. Bob wasn't even 25 when this article was published, so we must consider his youth and limited experience when he wrote it. Except for the death of his father a few years before, his life had gone very smoothly. He would have a lot of negative, as well as positive, experiences in the years that followed, which caused him to develop the humility for which he was so well-known.

[Alejandra]

Some people think he didn't harbor acting ambitions and goals. I think he did have, in his early years at least. Although his work was never badly decried by the critics, he was villified by certain press who couldn't handle the fact we was an actor... well, so astonishingly handsome and charming. So handsome and charming to be a capable performer, to have skills, brain, talent, you know...Sometimes critics admitted defeat like Frank. S. Nugent for instance who wrote the review of A Yank at Oxford for The New York Times: "It can't be the story, for we've read the one about the old college spirit before. And it can't be Robert Taylor, for we still regard that widow's peak with a cynicism the feminine contingent rightly defines as envy..."
I think he was very sensitive about these tendencious reviews and with time he turned out to be a extremely self deprecating person. Already in 1938 he had changed. A Film Weekly journalist interviewed Bob in Denhan, England, where he had just started making A Yank at Oxford: "...By way of making conversation I asked whether he had done any research for his part in the picture. 'None whatever,' he replied. 'Haven't you heard? I can't read. I just stand with my profile against a white background and rake in the shekels.' This was said in jest, but it was not difficult to detect beneath his broad smile a feeling of rancour. In the midst of all his tremendous fame and adulation, Adonis was suffering from an inferiority complex. And no wonder." Again, a columnist labeling him Adonis. When he was young he was typecast in romantic roles because of his physical attractiveness and, even though he had chances to play more challenging and interesting roles when he got older, he continued making derogatory remarks against himself. Henry Koster, who directed him in D-Day the Sixth of June and The Power and The Prize, said in an interview in 1980: "Robert Taylor I guess was the handsomest actor there ever was. But he always said, 'I'm not an actor. I don't know what I'm doing.' I'd say, 'Robert, you did Camille with Greta Garbo.' He said, 'Believe me, I didn't know what the hell I was doing. But a beautiful director, George Cukor, told me what to do. He acted it and I just copied him, and out came a good performance. You show me what to do and I'll do it.' He had a complex that he couldn't do the work, that he wasn't born to be an actor. .." Stewart Granger wrote in his autobiography "Sparks Fly Upward": "He was such a nice guy, Bob, but he had even more hang-ups than I had. Bob Taylor 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." There are more quotations like this from people who worked with him, directors and co-workers who always praised him.
If he had paid more attention to this people's words rather than to the critics ones, he would have judged in a different way his long and noteworthy career...