Kirk Taylor

Kirk Beecher Taylor is an American actor, acting teacher, and musician whose work spans film, television, stage, and music. He was raised in Bridgeport, Connecticut, the oldest of five children born to Dr. Robert Beecher Taylor and Rose Marie Taylor. Taylor began performing at Central High School, where he also became the first Black student named King of the Barnum Festival, a statewide scholastic and leadership competition. During his youth he played trumpet in a local R&B group, The Mighty Chain Reaction, alongside guitarist Jonathan Dubose Jr.

Taylor pursued formal training at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, earning a BFA with a major in drama and a minor in music. His acting studies brought him under the instruction of Lee Strasberg, Stella Adler, David Garfield, Barbara Covington Poitier, David Gideon, Irma Sandrey, Elaine Aiken, and Clay Stevens. His musical education was equally extensive: he studied composition with Lehman Engel and Vladimir Padwa, voice with Helen Lightner and Kenneth Kamal Scott, piano with John Randolph Eaton and Don Friedman, and trumpet with Jimmy Owens. At NYU he was a founding member of the Awamu Theater Company, the university's first and only African American repertory company.

Taylor's Broadway credit is his 1993 appearance as Nomax in the first Broadway tour of Five Guys Named Moe, a musical built around the songs of bandleader Louis Jordan. His broader stage career encompasses a range of Off-Broadway, regional, and touring productions. Earlier Off-Broadway work included George the Barman in Take Me Along and Bagheera the Panther in Mowgli, both in 1985, followed by Joey Robbins in The War Party in 1986. He also portrayed Edmond in the Brooklyn Shakespeare Company's Off-Off-Broadway production of King Lear in 1990. Taylor toured as Jelly Roll Morton in Jelly Roll! The Music & The Man in 1997. On the West Coast, he played Dr. George Gibbs in Our Town at South Coast Repertory in 1998, General Vershinin in Three Sisters with Actor's Alley in 2000, and served as the lead opposite Chaka Khan in the Stevie Wonder-inspired Las Vegas tribute show Signed, Sealed, Delivered in 2002. He appeared in the touring production of What Men Don't Tell in 2004, which included performances at the Beacon Theatre. In 2019, Taylor joined the Denver Center for the Performing Arts to play the dual roles of Captain and trumpet-playing Fabian in their winter production of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night.

Taylor launched his film career in 1984 as Flash the waiter in Francis Ford Coppola's The Cotton Club. Subsequent roles included Crunch in The Last Dragon, The Giggler in Death Wish 3, Sgt. Payback in Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket, and Sir Nose in Spike Lee's 1988 film School Daze. Additional film appearances include Jacknife with Robert De Niro, The Return of Superfly with Sam Jackson, Bonfire of the Vanities, MacArthur Park, and The Sum of All Fears, in which he played AFRAT Specialist Wesson in 2002. He appeared alongside Robin Williams in The Angriest Man in Brooklyn in 2014. In 2017 he was cast as Referee Burton in the indie feature 12 Round Gun, and in 2018 he starred as Cephas in Harry Lennix's musical feature film Revival!

His television career began in 1981 on the soap opera Guiding Light, where he played a recurring role as a football player teammate opposite Kevin Bacon. Subsequent television credits include True Blue, Law & Order, Ghost Writer, Chicago Hope, and To Have and To Hold. In 2000, Taylor portrayed Roland Brown in the TNT television movie Freedom Song, working alongside Danny Glover and Loretta Devine in a film documenting the civil rights struggles of SNCC workers. The following year he took the starring role of Sterling Hamilton in BET's One Special Moment. Later television appearances include British arms dealer Paul Green on NCIS: Los Angeles, French attorney Gilles Lemaire in the final season of All My Children, and Dr. Morris on Days of Our Lives.

As a musician, Taylor has performed as a featured soloist with the New Song Gospel Choir at The Church on the Way under the direction of Rose Stone from 2004 to 2009, on the international broadcast of Hour of Power at the Crystal Cathedral from 2010 to 2012, at the Havana Jazz Festival in 2016, and at Herbie Hancock's International Jazz Day concert at Saint Peter's Church in New York City in 2018, which was later broadcast by Queens Public Television in 2020. In 2014, Taylor made his Carnegie Hall debut performing in the Broadway Reunion with Black Stars of the Great White Way, directed by four-time Grammy Award-winning vocal arranger Chapman Roberts. He also participated in a related production, The Black Stars of The Great White Way: A Chapman Roberts Concept, at the National Black Theatre Festival in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Taylor owns the music publishing company Rising Oak Music.

Taylor taught acting at the Lee Strasberg Institute in New York City from 1988 to 1993, working across the Young People's, Professional, and NYU programs. Among his students were Jessie L. Martin, Chandra Wilson, Gary Dourdan, Karina Lombard, Charles Malik Whitfield, Jose Zuniga, Beth Littleford, Ken Marino, Mari Morrow, and Benno Fürmann. He continues to teach acting intensives through his Art Group Acting Company in Montreal, Los Angeles, and at the University of Nations in Hawaii and Norway.