Delores Taylor, Writer and Star in ‘Billy Jack’ Films, Dies at 85

Delores Taylor, whose empathy for Native Americans informed the 1971 surprise action-film hit “Billy Jack,” which she wrote and starred in with her husband, Tom Laughlin, died Friday in Woodland Hills, California. She was 85.

Her daughter, Teresa Laughlin, said her mother had dementia.

In the film, which he directed, Tom Laughlin played the title role, a tightly wound, half-Native American Vietnam veteran and martial artist who defends a progressive school on an Arizona reservation against local bigots.

Taylor, who made her film debut as Jean Roberts, the head of the school, was the “strongest thing about the film,” the critic Howard Thompson wrote in The New York Times.

Thompson called her flat, singsong voice “as penetrating as a lance.”

The film, which was made for less than $1 million, grossed about $6 million in its initial release. But after Laughlin reacquired the rights, he mounted a major advertising campaign, and it reaped more than $80 million.

Two sequels followed — “The Trial of Billy Jack” (1974) and “Billy Jack Goes to Washington” (1977) — but a third, “The Return of Billy Jack,” was never completed because of an injury to Laughlin. He died at 82 in 2013.

Taylor reprised her role in the two sequels, collaborated with Laughlin on the screenplays, and was the executive producer.

Growing up in Winner, South Dakota, near the Rosebud Indian Reservation, Taylor recalled discrimination against the Sioux, like their being barred from her public school when she was in the third grade.

“I decided, ‘OK, if they’re not going to let them come in, I’m not going to come in, too,'” she said in an interview for a family video.

Her father spoke to the school and it relented, she said. She then helped the frightened children acclimate to their new surroundings. But for her efforts, she believed, the school’s principal forced her to repeat the third grade.

As a young adult, she said, she saw white men cut open bags of flour given by the state to needy Sioux, pour it on them and declare, “Now you’re white.”

When she began dating Laughlin, he was shocked to see some residents of the reservation living in rusted cars in winter.

“They both had a heightened sense of justice,” Teresa Laughlin said in a telephone interview. “Anything they saw profoundly affected them.”

For their scripts, she said, Tom Laughlin wrote extensively in longhand on yellow legal pads, and “together they formulated something cohesive.”

Delores Judith Taylor was born in Winner on Sept. 27, 1932. Her father, Harry, was the local postmaster general; her mother, the former Ann Nelson, was a homemaker. A natural soprano, Delores won local contests for her singing and graduated from the University of South Dakota, Vermillion, where she met Laughlin.

She planned on a career in graphic arts while Laughlin acted on television and in films during the 1950s and ‘60s. When he started directing, Taylor helped pack lunches and find locations, she said in an interview with The Associated Press in 1971.

“I became a kind of super-gofer,” she said. But as “Tom’s pictures became bigger,” she added, “I started doing more things. It’s a job, and I like it.”

She had a small role in “The Born Losers” (1967), in which the Billy Jack character first appeared. She was the film’s executive producer.

“They became a really symbiotic match,” Teresa Laughlin said. “They were opposites in so many ways. My mother was this calm, ethereal force who glided through and never went off one end or the other. My father was volatile and explosive, in good and bad ways, with all this full-on passion all the time. She was his ballast — incredibly spiritual — and a tempering force on him.”

She added: “Had ‘Billy Jack’ not been a coalescence of both their forces, it would have been far less interesting.”

Taylor was nominated for a Golden Globe for most promising female newcomer in 1972 but rejected offers to work for filmmakers other than her husband. “As much as she loved acting,” Teresa Laughlin said, “she did it only because my father needed her.”

Their collaboration extended to education: Unhappy with traditional educational methods, they opened a Montessori school in Santa Monica, California, in 1959 or 1960, their daughter said, before selling it after several years.

The family liked to recall that Marlon Brando, whose son Christian had gone to the school, attended a screening of “Billy Jack” and praised Taylor for her performance in a scene after her character is raped, declaring it a yardstick to measure other actors by.

In addition to her daughter, Taylor is survived by a second daughter, Christina Harrington; a son, Frank; five grandchildren; and her sisters, Joan Wishart and Darlene Taylor.

Tom Laughlin, who had a passion for politics, was remembered for quixotically seeking the presidential nomination in several state primary races in 1992, 2004 and 2008.

“I never saw her object,” Teresa Laughlin said. “She was amazing. She was forceful with her opinions privately, but once they decided to do something, she was all in. If that’s what he wanted to do, she would be there for him.”