Who

Taymor is the director who traded the fringe for the masses when she brought Disney's Lion King to life on Broadway.

Backstory

The Massachusetts-born daughter of a gynecologist, Taymor's interest in the theater began early: As a kid she performed in a few Boston theater troupes and she studied mime in Paris after high school. After graduating from Oberlin, she went to Asia on a Watson fellowship and spent four years in Indonesia, teaching theater and dance and studying local folklore. When she returned to the U.S. in 1984, she landed a gig doing the choreography, puppetry and costumes for King Stag, a far-out American Repertory Theatre touring show. A handful of well-regarded avant-garde shows in the U.S, Europe and Asia followed—earning her a MacArthur "genius" grant in 1991—and she began to focus on classic works in the early 1990s, directing The Magic Flute, Salome, and an off-Broadway staging of Titus Andronicus.

In 1997, Taymor hit the family-friendly mainstream when she transformed Disney's Lion King into a spectacle packed with large-scale puppetry; the show quickly became the must-have ticket for every vacationing Midwestern family with elementary schoolers. Since then she's directed a handful of movies, including the biopic Frida, starring Salma Hayek; the 1999 film version of Titus, featuring Anthony Hopkins and Jessica Lange; and 2007's trippy Beatles-scored Across the Universe, which generated more fireworks behind-the-scenes than with largely ambivalent critics. (After producer Joe Roth tried to cut Taymor's version of the film by half an hour, she threatened to remove her name from the credits, although ultimately she relented.) Meanwhile, Taymor hasn't written off the stage entirely: She directed the 2004 production of The Magic Flute for the Met.

Personal

Taymor has been in a relationship with composer Elliot Goldenthal for over 20 years, and they frequently collaborate on projects. (They recently teamed up to bring the opera Grendel to the Lincoln Center Festival.) They were introduced by a mutual friend who told Goldenthal, "I know a person whose work is just as grotesque as yours." The couple lives in a duplex near Union Square.

True story

Taymor had a legendary run-in with Harvey Weinstein at a test screening for Frida in 2002. After she appeared less than ecstatic with the response from the audience, Weinstein erupted in front of dozens of onlookers. "You are the most arrogant person I have ever met! Go market the fucking film yourself!" He then turned to Taymor's husband: "I don't like the look on your face. Why don't you defend your wife, so I can beat the shit out of you."