TV GUIDE March 14 1981
His 'Days' may be Numbered. Soap heartthrob Josh Taylor is counting on a primetime breakthrough By Ben Pesta
Chris Kositchek, the easygoing heartthrob of Days of Our Lives, has just walked into Alex Marshall's office to pick up a set of plans for a solar generator he has designed. Marshall, the suave villain, isn't particularly glad to see him, and Kositchek looks as though he would rather undergo emergency root canal work
"Why were the plans brought up?" Kositchek asks, irritated “I'm no fonder of you than you are of me, Chris," Marshall begins. There's obviously something up his sleeve. "But we could do a lot together, and we're missing cards!" Quinn Redeker, the actor who plays Alex Marshall, is frowning. "What happened?”
In the control room the director leans toward his microphone. "We cut some material," he explains
Josh Taylor, who plays Chris Kositchek, looks momentarily at the ceiling. "Nobody told the actors," he says.
Lynne Osborne, Days of Our Lives' associate producer, leans over a reporter's shoulder "Josh doesn’t use cue cards," she says, "so he has to edit these cuts in his mind. He comes in here each morning knowing each and every line."
Quinn Redeker agrees with Osborne's assessment of his colleague. He's a quiet guy. His dressing room's upstairs, away from the rest of the cast. He sort of keeps to himself. Despite his easy demeanor, he has a sort of driven professionalism. When he and I do a scene, it's always, 'How can we make this scene better; how can our characters show even more antagonism for each other?' "
Josh Taylor sits in his Studio 9 dressing room, a nondescript affair with an intercom speaker on the far wall. "It's true," he says. “I figure they pay me enough money for me to memorize my lines. Idon't take myself very seriously, but | take what I do very seriously.”
He doesn't look or talk like a professional actor, somehow. Whereas Quinn Redeker seems to have been cut from the classic matinee-idol mold, Taylor is from regular guy cloth. He grew up in Illinois, where he was an all-state high-school quarterback. His father, who's now in the Illinois High Schoo! Football Hall of Fame, was his coach. "I always figured that if I hadn't become an actor, I'd have been a coach, like my dad and my brother," he says.
Instead, he went to Dartmouth, where he played football and kept up a sufficiently high grade-point average to get himself admitted to law school at the University of Denver. After graduation, he worked as a law clerk for a Denver judge.
Through all the schooling, however, "acting had always been kind of in the back of my mind," he says. “When I was a teen-ager, I was a Paul Newman freak. I always paid attention to movies. If I saw something I liked, I'd go back two or three times to see how it was done. This just isn't something you tell people about when you're 14 years old and living in Chillicothe, Illinois. Even at Dartmouth, my fraternity brothers used to kid me: 'Hey, you goin' to Hollywood right after graduation? "
Actually, it took longer. "I'd arrived at a point where l'd been through college, marriage, divorce—she's a real fine lady, and we're still friends, but we were just too young—finished law school, had a nice offer from a good firm in Denver . . . but I knew it just wasn't for me," he says. I knew I had to give acting a shot."
Taylor arrived in Hollywood, tended bar, attended acting workshops, appeared on such action shows as Serpiсо, Police Story, The Hardy Boys and Barnaby Jones, and waited. About four years ago, he was called in to read for a part on The Young and the Restless. "Thank God I didn't get it," he laughs. “1 was completely wrong for it. But the casting director, who also did the casting for Days of Our Lives, remembered me. About eight months later they called me back to read for Chris Kositchek. After that I went through the normal countdown; they called me back four more times before they told me I had it."
Taylor's character was an urban cowboy, complete with boots, vests and Western shirts, even before John Travolta made the style popular. "He wasn't a blue-collar worker until I made him one. They wanted him in sports coats and ties, like everybody else, and I said, ‘No way!"
One way in which Kositchek does not resemble Taylor is his disposition. Unlike his character, the actor does not suffer fools gladly. Asked if he's temperamental, Taylor pauses, then says, “Well, sure. But there's good temperamental and bad temperamental. It's fine if you want to push harder all the time, if you want to keep working on a scene to make it better, if you want to keep shooting till you get it right. That's good temperamental. That's what an actor should do.
“Bad temperamental? I'll tell you a story. I once worked on a show where one of the actresses was what I'd call a prima donna: late for shootings, contract disputes, came unprepared to tapings... I can't stand negativity, cynicism and unprofessionalism," he says quietly. “If someone has no pride in his work, then thanks but no thanks, just get out of my life. Once the tape rolls, I could work with Attila the Hun and you'd think he was my best friend. Make the damn scene work by hook or by crook. But off-stage, a person like that just doesn't exist for me."
Josh Taylor's tree-shaded house sits on a Midwestern-looking street in Burbank, Cal., not far from the NBC studios. Inside, it is austerely furnished, like his dressing room. Taylor does most of his living in the den. "Chris Kositchek would have loved leading wagon trains West," Taylor says. "He's proud, strong, a man of great principle. He's also sensitive. He's not afraid to cry, as has been demonstrated many times on the show. He's the kind of man I'd like to have for a good friend. You could trust him with your life. You could trust him with your wife, which is very rare these days."
But could you trust your wife with Chris Kositchek? Fan mail for Taylor began inundating NBC's offices shortly after he joined the Days of Our Lives cast. (He estimates that he receives between a thousand and 1500 letters weekly.) Today, Taylor is an undisputed sex symbol of the daytime-TV set. There have even been a few incidents of the embarrassing panties-on-the-stage variety although he says, "The overwhelming majority of people are polite and considerate."
But Taylor has found that one thing can sour success: jealousy. "When someone becomes known, when another actor gets his picture on the cover of Us or People, I'm always happy for him," he says. "Especially if I feel he's worked his tail off and really deserves it." His eyes tighten for a few seconds; he weighs his next words. "It was disappointing to see that, when I became well known, people didn't always feel the same way about me. There has been a certain amount of jealousy and backbiting, even among people ! considered my friends. In fact, I'd have to say that this has been the biggest disappointment of my career so far." Taylor certainly has not had this disappointment with Dianne Harper, a fine boned brunette from Oklahoma who plays Leslie James, Kositchek's on-screen love interest. “I get a lot of letters asking me, "What's he like?’ " she smiles. "He's great, not just because he's sexy, but because he's wonderful to work with. He runs through lines anytime I want to, he works on scenes with me, he's real supportive in every way. The fact that he's attractive is a big plus."
Chris and Leslie's planned Christmas Day nuptials have been spoiled. Fate did it to them—fate, and Days’ producers and writers. For one thing, the popularity of both characters would have been diminished if they had married. For another, Josh Taylor is about to make the move from daytime to prime time.
"I did a pilot for producer David Gerber in January of 1980," Taylor says. "CBS has picked it up as a midyear replacement series. The show's called Riker; that's my character. It's a nice feeling to have your own series. When they offer you your own show, you have to run with the ball."
Gerber, who produced Police Story, has made Riker an ex-cop who now works as a special enforcement agent for the district attorney. "I want to make Riker a tough man, like Gene Hackman in 'The French Connection" Taylor explains. "When Hackman rousts a whole bar full of junkies, you believe a guy like him could really do that. At the same time, Riker can't be brutal. I want to make him human. |Iwant to let him screw up now and then."
Taylor intends to stay with Days of Our Lives while shooting Riker, even though that will mean a gruelling schedule for him, especially considering the mortality rate for new prime-time series. "Look, Days has been very good for me," Taylor explains. "It's given me lots of exposure, and the producers have let me have a lot of input into the character of Chris. l'm very supportive of daytime TV, and I'll always be a spokesman for it. I don't believe in actors putting it down."
And if Riker dies? "There isn't an actor alive who doesn't know how to deal with disappointment,” Taylor laughs. He'll continue working toward his "eventual goal" of owning his own production company. "Every time I work, I'm not only watching other actors. I watch grips, soundmen, makeup men. I watch everyone who loves his work—and I remember names."
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Paul Raven ·
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