Prolific actor, director Norman Lloyd dead at 106

LOS ANGELES — American actor, producer and director Norman Lloyd, whose career of more than 80 years included collaborations with legends such as Charlie Chaplin and Orson Welles, has died at the age of 106, Variety and Deadline Hollywood reported on Tuesday.

Variety said Lloyd’s friend and fellow producer Dean Hargrove confirmed the death, saying Lloyd died on Tuesday at his home in Los Angeles. Deadline Hollywood said he died in his sleep.

Reuters could not independently confirm the news.

Lloyd had a long run as cancer-stricken Dr. Auschlander on the television hospital drama St. Elsewhere in the 1980s. His last movie appearance as an actor was in the 2015 raunchy comedy Trainwreck, starring Amy Schumer and directed by Judd Apatow.

“(Lloyd) lit up the set every moment he was on it,” Apatow wrote in Vanity Fair at the time.

Lloyd’s movie work also included Martin Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence in 1993 and playing the headmaster opposite Robin Williams in the 1989 film Dead Poets Society.

In the 2007 documentary Who Is Norman Lloyd, television producer Tom Fontana, who worked with him on St. Elsewhere, described Lloyd as a combination of Peter Pan and Father Time.

He was a walking history of entertainment. With his erudite manner, he loved to entertain audiences with stories of his regular tennis matches with Chaplin, his friendships with Gregory Peck and Alfred Hitchcock, working with French director Jean Renoir and actress Ingrid Bergman and giving Stanley Kubrick one of his first film jobs.

Lloyd went so far back that he appears in the earliest surviving footage of American television — a segment of The Streets of New York from 1939. It was his first screen credit. He did not give up tennis until suffering a fall at age 100 and was still driving at 99. Lloyd and wife Peggy had two children and were married for 75 years until her death in 2011 at age 98.

Lloyd was born Norman Perlmutter on Nov. 8, 1914, in Jersey City, N.J., and grew up in the New York borough of Brooklyn. He made his Broadway debut in 1935 and the next year appeared in a staging of The Crime, which was directed by Elia Kazan and also included Peggy Craven, who he would marry.

Lloyd joined the Mercury Theatre, founded by Welles and John Houseman, in time for its 1937 debut, Caesar, an update of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar with an anti-fascist tone as Adolf Hitler pushed the world to war. Welles took Lloyd and the rest of the troupe to Hollywood with plans for a movie based on the novel Heart of Darkness. When the project fell apart, Lloyd returned to New York. That angered Welles and no doubt cost Lloyd a chance at being in Welles’ next project, the revered Citizen Kane.

Instead, Lloyd went to work with Hitchcock, which led to his 1942 film debut in Saboteur, in which his Nazi spy, the title character, dies in a memorable scene — falling from the Statue of Liberty’s upraised arm.

After some fallow years, Lloyd’s career revived in the 1980s with St. Elsewhere and recurring television roles in Wiseguy, Murder, She Wrote and The Practice. In 2010, he had a spot on the sitcom Modern Family.