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Roger Meddows Taylor (born 26 July 1949) is an English musician who performs as a multi-instrumentalist, singer and songwriter. He is best known as the drummer of the rock band Queen, but has also served as songwriter and occasional lead vocalist.
As a songwriter, Taylor contributed songs to Queen's albums from the very beginning, composing at least one track on every album, and often singing lead vocals on his own compositions. He wrote or co-wrote three UK number 1s ("These Are the Days of Our Lives", "Innuendo" and "Under Pressure") and contributed a further major hits ("Radio Ga Ga", "A Kind of Magic","One Vision", "Heaven for Everyone", "Breakthru", and "The Invisible Man"). In addition to his drum work, Taylor routinely played keyboards, guitars and bass on his own songs. During the 1980s, in addition to his work with Queen, he formed a parallel band known as The Cross, in which he was the lead singer and rhythm guitarist. Taylor is also well-known for his falsetto vocal range.
By the time Queen's album 'News of the World' was released in 1977, Taylor had met his future girlfriend, Dominique Beyrand, who was working for Richard Branson at the time, who was at the helm of Queen's free concert at Hyde Park. They lived together from 1980 to 1987, raising their two children: actor Felix Taylor and doctor Rory Eleanor Taylor. They decided to get married for reasons relating to his estate, to protect his children's interests in the future. At the time, Taylor was seeing another girl, model/actress Deborah Leng, the Cadbury's Flake girl also seen in Queen's "Breakthru" video; he moved in with her a month after his marriage of convenience to Beyrand. Before Freddie Mercury's death, Taylor and Leng had their first child, drummer Rufus Taylor, who was born in March 1991. He ended up having two more children with Leng: models Tigerlily Taylor (1994) and Lola Leng-Taylor (2000). In late 2002, they decided to break up.
Taylor remarried on 26 August 2010, to Sarina Taylor. He resides in Guildford, Surrey, but also has a home in Helford, Cornwall. Her younger half-sister is fashion model Genevieve Potgieter.- Writer
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Carpenter began as an actor, having trained at the Old Vic Theatre School. Following repertory work he was first seen on screen playing character roles in television shows like Dixon of Dock Green (1955) as well as being regularly featured in Knight Errant Limited (1959) and The Citadel (1960). However, he became eventually dissatisfied with his acting career. By the end of the decade, he fulfilled a long-standing ambition and turned to writing adventure serials for imaginative young audiences. In addition, he made significant contributions to established series, such as The Adventures of Black Beauty (1972). At the centre of much of his own work are mysticism and English folklore.
Among his prolific output for ITV and BBC, he is perhaps best known for Catweazle (1970) (the story of an 11th Century wizard transported in time to the 20th Century where he is aided by a small boy), The Ghosts of Motley Hall (1976), Dick Turpin (1979) and Robin Hood (1984). 'Robin' was one of the most popular programs on British television, capturing a nationwide audience of 12-13 million viewers per episode. It still has a huge fan base to this day. From the mid 1980s, Carpenter alternated writing scripts for comedy (Out of Sight (1996)) with period adventure (The Baker Street Boys (1983), based on premises set forth in Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes and The Scarlet Pimpernel (1999)). Carpenter won Writer's Guild of Great Britain Awards for both 'Catweazle' and 'Out of Sight'. His published works include novelisations of many of his most popular shows.
