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Taylor Mead (born December 31 1924 in Grosse Pointe, Michigan) is a writer and performer who starred as Tarzan in Andy Warhol's Tarzan, and in Ron Rice's beat classic The Flower Thief, in which he "traipses with an elfin glee through a lost San Francisco of smoke-stuffed North Beach cafes..." Film critic P. Adams Sitney called The Flower Thief "the purest expression of the Beat sensibility in cinema." Village Voice film critic Jeffrey Hoberman called Mead "the first underground movie star."

In the mid 70s, Errol Morris made some short films of Mead talking to his cat in the kitchen of his Lower East Side apartment, called "Taylor Mead's Cat;" one of them even aired during the first season of Saturday Night Live.

Mead lives in New York City, and continues to regularly perform and read poetry at The Bowery Poetry Club. His latest book of poems is called A Simple Country Girl. He was the subject of a documentary called Excavating Taylor Mead, which debuted at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2005. The film shows him engaging in his nightly habit of feeding stray cats in an East Village cemetery after bar-hopping, and features a cameo by Jim Jarmusch, in which Jarmusch explains that once, when Mead went to Europe, he enlisted Jarmusch's brother to feed the cemetery cats in Mead's absence. Mead appeared in the final segment of Jarmusch's 2003 film Coffee and Cigarettes. He has been "a beloved icon of the downtown New York art scene since the 60s."

Filmography

• The Flower Thief directed by Ron Rice (1960)
• Lemon Hearts directed by Vernon Zimmerman (1962)
• Too Young, Too Immoral directed by Raymond Phelan (1962)
• Hallelujah the Hills directed by Adolfas Mekas (1963)
• Queen of Sheba Meets the Atom Man directed by Ron Rice (1963)
• Tarzan and Jane Regained...Sort Of directed by Andy Warhol (1964)
• Couch directed by Andy Warhol (1964)
• Taylor Mead's Ass directed by Andy Warhol (1965)
• The Illiac Passion directed by Gregory Markopoulos (1967)
• Imitation Of Christ directed by Andy Warhol (1967)
• The Nude Restaurant directed by Andy Warhol (1967)
• Lonesome Cowboys directed by Andy Warhol (1968)
• The Secret Life of Hernando Cortez directed by John Chamberlain (1969)
• Brand X directed by Win Chamberlain (1970)
• Last Supper directed by Robert Frank (1992)
• "Taylor Mead Unleashed" (1996) directed by Sebastian Piras
• Ecstasy In Entropy directed by Nick Zedd (1999)
• Coffee and Cigarettes directed by Jim Jarmusch (2003)
• Excavating Taylor Mead directed by William A. Kirkley (2005)
• Electra Elf: The Beginning directed by Nick Zedd (2005)
• Man Under Wire directed by Josh Bishop (2006)