Alma Taylor

Biography

Alma Taylor’s career began while the film industry itself was still learning to walk: a moon-faced London girl with chestnut hair and wide, sea-blue eyes stepped before the cameras in 1909 and never quite stepped away. Audiences first met her as a mischievous child, then kept meeting that same bright, unruly spirit long after she had outgrown pinafores. Between 1910 and 1915 she turned Tilly, the original screen tomboy, into a national habit—three dozen brisk comic adventures that left cinema queues cheering for the girl who could outrun, outwit and out-climb every boy in the county. When the post-war world traded innocence for jazz, Alma’s halo slipped; 1928 was the year her name dropped from the top line of posters. Yet she refused to leave the set. Silent gave way to sound, sound to television, and she followed, slipping into smaller parts, character roles, a line or two in a living-room box, always with the same quick grin that had once sold a million tickets. From the flickering storefronts of Shepherd’s Bush to the cathode glow of early BBC drama, Alma Taylor simply kept showing up—proof that some faces, once loved, are never quite forgotten.