Massachusetts Native Julie Taymor Is a ‘Lion King’ Legend

According to Playbill, Disney's The Lion King became the top-earning title in box-office history in 2014 for both stage works and films, surpassing the previous record established by Phantom of the Opera.

Guinness World Records says the stage production of The Lion King has grossed more than $9.1 billion worldwide, and it is still being performed on Broadway and around the world.

Based on the 1994 animated Disney film The Lion King, which earned nearly a billion dollars at the box office, the theatric production debuted July 8, 1997, at the Orpheum Theater in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

The Lion King premiered at the New Amsterdam Theater on Broadway in New York on November 13, 1997. To make room for another Disney adaptation, Mary Poppins, the production was moved to the Minskoff Theater on June 13, 2006, and is still running after over 10,000 performances.

The Lion King is Broadway's third longest-running show and the highest-grossing ever.

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Much of the success of the stage version of The Lion King can be attributed to Massachusetts native Julie Taymor.

Taymor was born in Newton, Massachusetts on December 15, 1952, to a political science professor and Democratic activist Elizabeth Bernstein Taymor and Harvard Medical School researcher and gynecologist Melvin Lester Taymor.

Taymor joined the Boston Children's Theatre when she was 10 and by 13 was a member of Julie Portman's Theatre Workshop in Boston.

Taymor studied in Sri Lanka, India, and Paris. She worked with masks in Paris for the first time. Taymor's Tony Award-winning costume designs, including her masks, were a key to the success of The Lion King.

Taymor was the first woman to win a Tony Award for Best Direction of a Musical for The Lion King. The production won the Tony Award for Best Musical.

Taymor has found continued success since The Lion King but perhaps will be best known for her stage adaption of the Disney animated classic.