Delores Taylor helped make ‘Billy Jack’ movies
Delores Taylor, who co-wrote, coproduced and co-starred in husband Tom Laughlin’s “Billy Jack” movies, has died. Taylor, who married Laughlin in his hometown of Milwaukee, was 85.
Taylor’s daughter, Teresa Laughlin, told The Associated Press on Monday that Taylor died March 23 of natural causes at the Motion Picture and Television Fund Home near Los Angeles. She said her mother had suffered from dementia.
Born in South Dakota in 1932, Taylor grew up near the Rosebud Indian Reservation, where the discrimination she witnessed against American Indians later fueled the narratives of the “Billy Jack” movies.
She met Laughlin at the University of South Dakota, Vermillion, where he had transferred from Marquette University after being a football standout at Milwaukee’s Washington High School.
The couple were married in Milwaukee in 1954. The next year, they headed to Hollywood, where Laughlin, who studied acting at Marquette, got work in television and movies.
Taylor opened a Montessori school in California but joined her husband’s line of work to make “The Born Losers,” a 1967 movie about a Vietnam veteran named Billy Jack who gets in trouble after standing up to a motorcycle gang.
Taylor said she came up with the story after reading about a similar incident; she and Laughlin raised the financing outside the traditional Hollywood pipeline.
In a 1967 interview with The Milwaukee Journal while on vacation with Laughlin and their children in Lake Geneva, Taylor said she and her husband wanted to make a movie that mattered. Laughlin always planned to direct it, she said, but he only stepped in to play the lead role at the last minute.
“Tom and I believe movies should do more than just entertain,” Taylor said. “They should teach the viewer something about himself and society.”
“The Born Losers” also taught Hollywood something about the changing movie business. Costing about $400,000, the movie took in $2.5 million in its initial release; subsequent re-releases pushed its box-office take to $12.5 million.
Taylor had a cameo in “The Born Losers,” but she co-starred with Laughlin on “Billy Jack,” the 1971 movie that made the title character a popculture icon and Laughlin an indiemovie legend.
Made for an estimated $800,000 with little studio backing, “Billy Jack” was one of its year’s top-grossing movies, and, after it was re-released in the 1970s, eventually took in more than $90 million. (The movie’s theme song, “One Tin Soldier,” was a hit single for the rock group Coven.)
Taylor played a teacher at an American Indian school where the students were facing persecution. She received a Golden Globe nomination for “most promising female newcomer.” (She lost to Twiggy, in “The Boy Friend.”)
The couple went on to play the same characters in “The Trial of Billy Jack” (1974) and “Billy Jack Goes to Washington” (1977). A fourth movie, “The Return of Billy Jack,” was begun in 1986 but never completed, according to Internet Movie Database.
Taylor’s filmmaking career ended with the “Billy Jack” movies. Her daughter told The New York Times: “As much as she loved acting, she did it only because my father needed her.” Tom Laughlin died in 2013 at age 82. The Associated Press contributed to this report.