Rod Taylor

Born: January 11, 1930;

Died January 7, 2015.

Rod Taylor, who has died of a heart attack, aged 84, appeared alongside such Hollywood legends as John Wayne, Elizabeth Taylor, James Dean and Doris Day.

But when it came to his most famous film the biggest star was behind the camera and Taylor found himself sharing the screen with hundreds of screeching gulls, sparrows, crows and other common or garden varieties of birdlife.

Taylor played the Californian lawyer whose search for a pair of lovebirds for his little sister's birthday proves to be the prelude to a series of inexplicable and increasingly fierce attacks from the sky in the classic 1963 Hitchcock film The Birds.

Taylor later recalled the lengths to which director Alfred Hitchcock would go to get his shots, feeding his avian stars wheat soaked with whisky when he wanted them just to hang around and doing nothing. "They were half-pissed, rocking around on their feet," Taylor said.

On another occasion Hitch put gulls in a box and agitated them before getting Taylor to stick his arm in among them. Taylor said he stood there with blood dripping from his arm, but Hitchcock refused to call "Cut"..

"We were weeks and weeks and weeks working with these bloody birds," Taylor said in an interview many years later. "I was poo-pooed on by every seagull in Northern California."

Taylor began his acting career in Australia and found it tough going when he arrived in Hollywood in the mid-1950s, living in one little room beside Malibu beach, with a bowl and jug as his bathroom and going down to the sea to catch fish to feed himself.

He got his big break with a lead role in the HG Wells adaptation The Time Machine in 1960 and went on to star in films across a wide range of genres, including Do Not Disturb (1965) and The Glass Bottom Boat (1966), both with Doris Day; the Arthur Hailey adaptation Hotel (1967) and The Train Robbers (1973), with John Wayne, who was a personal friend.

In later years he worked increasingly in television, starred in several different series and had a recurring role in the glossy American soap Falcon Crest (1988-90). His character marries Jane Wyman, who in real life was the former wife of President Reagan.

Quentin Tarantino, who had grown up as a fan of Taylor's movies, lured him out of retirement and took him to a new generation when he cast him in the cameo role of Winston Churchill in his revisionist Second World War drama Inglorious Basterds (2009).

He was born Rodney Sturt Taylor in 1930 in Sydney. His father was a construction contractor and draughtsman and his mother wrote children's stories. He went to art school and considered art, acting and engineering as careers.

Early jobs included hospital cleaner and painting backdrops for window displays in a department store. He settled on acting after seeing Laurence Olivier playing Richard III on stage in Sydney.

His first film was a 1951 short called The Sturt Expedition. It was about a 19th Century explorer called Captain Charles Sturt, who just happened to be Taylor's great-great-great uncle. He played Tarzan on the radio and reached an international audience as the pirate Israel Hands in the 1954 Treasure Island sequel Long John Silver.

In Hollywood Taylor got an early break when he landed the role of a knighted English diplomat engaged to his namesake Liz Taylor in the 1956 film Giant. Liz runs off with Rock Hudson and Rod settles for Liz's character's little sister.

He worked with Liz Taylor again in Raintree County (1957) and The VIPs (1963). By that time he had made his big breakthrough after starring in the classic science-fiction film The Time Machine. He played a Victorian scientist who travels into the future and encounters the monstrous Morlocks. It mixed action, adventure, time travel and a little philosophising.

After getting a personal call from Walt Disney, Taylor voiced the father dog Pongo in 101 Dalmatians (1961), though he admitted in 1987 that he had never seen the film.

Around that time he was invited to try out for the role of James Bond in the first film Dr No. "I refused because I thought it was beneath me," he said. "I didn't think Bond would be successful in the movies. That was one of the greatest mistakes of my career!"

Subsequently he starred in The Liquidator (1965), one of the many secret agent films that tried to duplicate Bond's formula for success.

Taylor would later say that he felt he was not handsome enough for some of the roles in which he was cast and that he lacked the action-man credentials for others. He once said he was "one of the first of the uglies to get lucky".

But Taylor brought a certain vitality and an everyman quality to characters. And he proved versatile, playing everything from romantic comedy to war films and westerns.

He was married three times. The first two marriages lasted only a couple of years. He first dated Carol Kikumura when she was an extra on his television series Hong Kong in the early 1960s. They kept in touch over the years and finally married in 1980. She survives him, as does his daughter from his second marriage.

BRIAN PENDREIGH