He appeared in more than 50 feature films, including Young Cassidy (1965), Nobody Runs Forever (1968), The Train Robbers (1973), and A Matter of Wife... and Death (1975).

Taylor was born in Lidcombe, a suburb of Sydney, to a father who was a steel construction contractor and commercial artist and a mother who was a children's author.

For a time he worked as a commercial artist, but he decided to become an actor after seeing Laurence Olivier in an Old Vic touring production of Richard III.

Earlier in his career, he had to support himself by working at Sydney's Mark Foy's department store, designing and painting window and other displays during the day.

Taylor made his feature-film debut in the Australian Lee Robinson film King of the Coral Sea (1954), playing an American.

He later played Israel Hands in a Hollywood-financed film shot in Sydney, Long John Silver (1954), an unofficial sequel to Treasure Island.

In 1955, he guest-starred as Clancy in the third episode ("The Argonauts") of the first hour-long Western television series, Cheyenne, an ABC program starring Clint Walker.

Taylor played a character not unlike that of his Twilight Zone episode of a year earlier and the film World Without End in 1956.

His credits including The V.I.P.s (1963), his first feature-film role as an Australian, with Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor, and Maggie Smith; Fate Is the Hunter (for 20th Century Fox, 1964) with Glenn Ford and Suzanne Pleshette; 36 Hours (1964) with James Garner; Young Cassidy (1965) with Julie Christie and Maggie Smith; The Liquidator (1965) with Jill St. John; Do Not Disturb (1965); and The Glass Bottom Boat (1966), both co-starring Doris Day.

He began to change his image toward the end of the decade to more tough-guy roles, such as Chuka (1967), which he also produced, and he starred in Hotel (1967) with Catherine Spaak; Dark of the Sun (or The Mercenaries, 1968), again with Yvette Mimieux; Nobody Runs Forever (1968) in which he played New South Wales Police Sergeant Scobie Malone, this being Taylor's first starring feature-film role as an Australian; and Darker than Amber (1970) as Travis McGee.

From 1988 to 1990, Taylor appeared in the CBS drama series Falcon Crest as Frank Agretti, playing opposite Jane Wyman.

Taylor returned to Australia several times over the years to make films, playing a 1920s traveling showman in The Picture Show Man (1977) and a paid killer in On the Run (1983).

In 2007, he appeared in the horror telemovie Kaw, which revisits the idea of marauding birds turning on their human tormentors.

[11] In 2017, a documentary on Taylor's life, Pulling No Punches, was released and entered into the Beverly Hills Film Festival.

[18] Taylor died of a heart attack at his home, surrounded by his family, on 7 January 2015, in Beverly Hills, California, four days before his 85th birthday.