Her best-known films include I Love You, Alice B. Toklas (1968), The Horsemen (1971), The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight (1971), Soylent Green (1973), and Jagged Edge (1985).

Before attending Northwestern University as an economics major, she spent a summer shifting scenery, modeling, acting, and sweeping up at a Detroit little theater.

[2] She left Northwestern before graduating to pursue a full-time acting career, making her professional debut on Broadway in 3 Bags Full.

[4] She impressed the head producer of Peyton Place, Paul Monash, with a performance from The Glass Menagerie and was immediately signed to a seven-year television and multiple-movie contract.

For the next several years, her pictures tended to be high-budget films, such as The Adventurers (1970), based on the novel by best-seller Harold Robbins; and The Horsemen, (1971) with leading man Omar Sharif.

After her appearance in Soylent Green, she made the professional decision to take a hiatus from acting in order to concentrate on raising her only child, son Patrick.

From 1987–89, she played Kimberly Cryder, a recurring character on Dallas, her first role in a major prime time soap since Peyton Place.

Perhaps her best-known television work was on the CBS series Picket Fences, playing mercurial and cougar-ish mayor Rachel Harris from 1993–1995.

She won an Emmy Award for the role in 1994, for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series, and received a Golden Globe nomination the following year.

Taylor-Young also appeared on TV series such as The Young Riders, Murder, She Wrote, Sunset Beach, Malibu Shores, 7th Heaven, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Life.