Leigh Taylor-Young

Leigh Taylor-Young is an American actress born on January 25, 1945, in Washington, D.C. After graduating from a Detroit high school, she enrolled at Northwestern University as an economics major, spending a summer prior to her enrollment shifting scenery, modeling, acting, and sweeping up at a Detroit little theater. She departed Northwestern before completing her degree to pursue acting professionally, relocating to New York City.

Taylor-Young made her professional stage debut on Broadway in 1966 in the production 3 Bags Full. That same year she traveled to California in April to recover from pneumonia, and within days of her arrival she was cast as Rachel Welles on the primetime soap opera Peyton Place. Producer Everett Chambers selected her for the role, which was written as a replacement for the character Allison MacKenzie previously portrayed by Mia Farrow, citing her warmth and qualities he found similar to Farrow's. To secure the part, Taylor-Young performed a scene from The Glass Menagerie for head producer Paul Monash, who immediately signed her to a seven-year television and multiple-movie contract. It was during her time on Peyton Place that she met Ryan O'Neal, whom she married in 1967 during a spontaneous ceremony in Hawaii arranged by an ABC manager. She left the series in 1967 due to her pregnancy, and the couple divorced in 1974.

Her film career began with the 1968 comedy I Love You, Alice B. Toklas, in which she appeared opposite Peter Sellers. The film was commercially successful, and Taylor-Young received a Golden Globe Award nomination for Most Promising Female Newcomer. She followed that with an appearance alongside O'Neal in The Big Bounce (1969). Through the early 1970s she worked on high-budget productions, including The Adventurers (1970), based on Harold Robbins's novel, and The Horsemen (1971) with Omar Sharif. She also appeared in The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight (1971). Her role as Shirl, the "furniture" girl, in the science fiction film Soylent Green (1973) became among her most recognized screen performances. Following Soylent Green, she stepped away from acting to raise her son, Patrick, her only child.

Taylor-Young returned to film and television in the 1980s. In 1981 she appeared in Michael Crichton's production Looker, and in 1985 she was cast as Virginia Howell in Jagged Edge and appeared in the romantic comedy Secret Admirer. That same year she starred opposite Donald Davis in Samuel Beckett's one-act play Catastrophe, presented as part of a trilogy billed as The Beckett Plays, at the Edinburgh International Festival, subsequently touring the production in Los Angeles, New York City, and London. On television during this period she guest-starred on McCloud, Fantasy Island, The Love Boat, Hart to Hart, Hotel, and Spenser: For Hire, and appeared in the television film Perry Mason: The Case of the Sinister Spirit (1987). She returned to soap opera in 1983 with the short-lived primetime series The Hamptons, and from 1987 to 1989 played recurring character Kimberly Cryder on Dallas.

Her most acclaimed television work came with the CBS drama Picket Fences, on which she played mayor Rachel Harris from 1993 to 1995. She won the Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series in 1994 for the role and received a Golden Globe nomination the following year. From 2004 to 2007 she played Katherine Barrett Crane on the soap opera Passions. Her additional television credits include The Young Riders, Murder She Wrote, Beverly Hills 90210, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, The Pretender, The Sentinel, and Life, among others. Her post-1990 film appearances include Bliss (1997), Addams Family Reunion (1998), Slackers (2002), and Klepto (2003).

In her personal life, Taylor-Young married Guy McElwaine in 1978; they divorced in 1984. In January 2013 she married John Morton at PRANA, the headquarters of the Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness in Los Angeles. She is an ordained minister in that organization, which was founded by the late John-Roger Hinkins and is now led by Morton.