Robert Thad Taylor, 81; Shakespeare fan founded society, Globe Playhouse

Robert Thad Taylor, who founded the Shakespeare Society of America and the Globe Playhouse for Shakespearean theater in West Hollywood, died Oct. 5, according to Katy Taylor, his niece. He was 81.

She said he died of complications from heart disease at the Veterans Administration hospital in Los Angeles.

Starting in the early 1970s, Taylor realized his dream of staging the 37 plays of William Shakespeare, raising the money for productions and filling in with his own savings. He repeated the cycle once, then expanded the theater’s offerings to include plays related to Shakespeare’s works.

“While rarely terrific, the ratio of hits to clinkers ... has been as good as any group’s in town,” wrote John C. Mahoney in the Los Angeles Times at the end of the first complete play cycle in 1979.

The Globe Playhouse grew out of a clubby group, the Shakespeare Society of America, that Taylor launched in 1967. The first members included scholars, socialites and actors Edward G. Robinson and Robert Ryan. The society’s headquarters was in a Tudor-style mansion in West Hollywood that resembled New Place, Shakespeare’s house in Stratford, England. Taylor planned a theater and entertainment center with two stages as well as a restaurant, the Mermaid Tavern, and an acting school, all tucked around the house. He kept an artist’s rendering of the project on display in the mansion’s library.

In 1971, however, Taylor and the Shakespeare Society were evicted from the house, a rental that was later torn down and replaced by an apartment building.

He relocated to a corrugated metal warehouse on North Kings Road in West Hollywood and converted the space into a 99-seat half-replica of the Globe Theatre in London. The lobby was filled with posters of past productions signed by the actors and photos of Taylor with famous friends.

The performance space with its balcony and trap doors was “fun, intimate and a little bit kooky,” said Robert L. Williams, who was a co-producer of “The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged)” at the theater in 1999 as well as “An Appalachian Twelfth Night” in 2002.

Financial difficulties forced Taylor to give up producing his own plays in 1990, but he rented the theater space for plays produced by others. One of the most successful plays to run at the Globe Playhouse was “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” in 1998, a one-woman show starring Nia Vardalos, who also starred in the popular movie version in 2002.

Taylor was born Aug. 29, 1925, in Wendell, Idaho and moved to Los Angeles as a teenager. He served in the merchant marine during World War II and in the Army for two years in the 1950s, his niece said.

He was an electrical engineer, she said, but he found his true passion when he started reading all of Shakespeare’s plays and attending as many productions as he could.

“Shakespeare was the greatest thing that happened to the English language,” Taylor said in 1967, as his grand plan was just starting to unfold.

Taylor’s survivors include several nieces and nephews. He was preceded in death by two sisters and a brother.

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mary.rourke@latimes.com