![]() "The film pauses for these moments, which were perhaps improvised by Delores Taylor," she wrote, amazed. Film critic Pauline Kael said Taylor's performance marked the first time she had ever seen a woman discuss her own rape in a movie, and what it meant to her life. The first lead actress in a Western movie who didn't seem to have on any makeup and didn't seem to care. My deepest condolences go out to Laughlin's partner, Delores Taylor, who embodied the lovely, strong-willed Jean. When my mother told me the school was all make-believe, I cried over it. He later became an outspoken environmentalist and antinuclear activist and sought the Democratic nomination for president on several state primary ballots in 1992, 20.At age 13 or 14, I wanted to go out west and go to the Freedom School run by Billy Jack's almost-girlfriend (and real-life wife) Jean. He wrote his script and raised money for the motorcycle movie “Born Losers” (1967), the first to feature Billy Jack. Laughlin decided to return to the movie business, but on his own terms. ![]() Colleagues and family members described him as driven, stubborn, uncompromising and intensely attracted to quixotic endeavors.Īfter a succession of small film and television roles during his first decade in Hollywood, he and his wife, Delores Taylor - who later co-starred in the Billy Jack films - opened a Montessori school to keep their children out of what they considered the mediocre public schools of Southern California.Ī half-dozen years later Mr. By most accounts, the single-minded, loner-idealist tough guy at the center of the Billy Jack franchise was based on an amalgam of cowboy archetypes, Asian martial-arts film archetypes and Mr. Laughlin wrote, directed and starred in all four of the Billy Jack films, earnest tales of a tightly wound, half-Cherokee Vietnam veteran named Billy Jack who protects Indians, wild horses and progressive ideals against attacks. Thus, the passing of Tom Laughlin is even more sad than expected.įrom the New York Times: Mr. That's when I knew the magic Billy Jack moment had passed forever, and doesn't even really translate well to the next generation. ![]() Or whites and non-whites entering an ice cream shop together. They do not understand that what they now take for granted, was risky and dangerous for us-something as simple as standing at a bus stop, wearing patched jeans and scruffy hair. But it also means the young people do not understand how it was for us. These truths are now just a given.Īnd that's a good thing, isn't it? In one way, of course. I realized: much of what we once fought for had become passe. Or rather, I saw that she easily got it, since it all seemed so obvious to her. I was so crestfallen that she didn't get it. His prints are in collections at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Phillips Gallery, the Fogg Museum in Cambridge, the New Orleans Museum of Art and other museums around the country.I once showed the film BILLY JACK (1971) to my daughter, and she rolled her eyes most of the way through. He first began taking photographs in the 1930's, influenced by Alfred Steiglitz, Edward Weston and others. Laughlin was born in Lake Charles, La., and spent his first years on a plantation in New Iberia before moving to New Orleans with his family. His photographs have appeared in Life, Look, Architectural Review, Harper's Bazaar, Town and Country and other periodicals. Laughlin supported his avant-garde photography with freelance work for architects and for magazines. As he explained in the book's prologue, he was attempting to show ''the beauty that comes out of time, that transcends decay and the tenderness the years can bring.''įor much of his career, Mr. Laughlin transmogrified the decaying houses according to his own surrealistic vision. With unusual photographic effects and careful attention to light, Mr. Laughlin became best known for his book of photographs and essays, ''Ghosts Along the Mississippi.'' The book, published in 1948, centered on Louisiana country houses evolving from the plantation culture that flourished along the Mississippi River before the Civil War. In his career as a photographer and writer with a strong interest in fantasy, Mr. Clarence John Laughlin, one of the first Surrealist photographers in the country and a writer of poetic essays, died here Wednesday in Touro Infirmary after a long illness.
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