Norman Lloyd
Veteran Hollywood actor rescued by Alfred Hitchcock during the McCarthy witch-hunt
ONE OF the last links to the Golden Age of Hollywood still working in the film industry, Norman Lloyd, who has died aged 106, had a staying power that made him one of Hollywood’s oldest working actors.
His career spanned the history of cinema over the 20th century and involved working with such stars as Charlie Chaplin, with whom he played tennis, Alfred Hitchcock or “Hitch,” as his close friends knew him, and Orson Welles when he was just a young novice. His own friends included Bertolt Brecht, Arnold Schoenberg and Hanns Eisler. He also collaborated with more modern Jewish directors like Judd Apatow and Joel and Ethan Coen.
Norman Nathan Perlmutter was born in Jersey City, New Jersey, the son of Max Perlmutter, an accountant who later became a proprietor of a furniture store. His mother Sadie Horowitz Perlmutter was a bookkeeper and homemaker but also a frustrated singer. He had two sisters, Ruth and Janice.
Because Sadie had a good voice and a lifelong interest in the theatre, she took her young son to singing, pronunciation and dancing lessons. He became a child performer, appearing at vaudeville benefits and women’s clubs. They adored the Broadway musicals of the 1920s and 1930s, idolising such performers as Al Jolson and Eddie Cantor, as well as the composers George Gershwin,
Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin and Harold Arlen.
Lloyd attended the Boy’s High School in Brooklyn, alma mater of many others who rose to fame, such as the science fiction writer Isaac Asimov, composer Aaron Copland, screenwriter I. A. L. Diamond, artist Man Ray and novelist Norman Mailer.
On graduating, Lloyd attended New York University but left after two years. Then aged 17, he already knew he wanted to act full time. He spent the first decade of his career in the theatre, with an emphasis on social theatre collectives including the Theater of Action and the Federal Theater Project. He appeared in several Living Newspapers productions, dramatising current events.
It was while working in the theatre that he first met Orson Welles. In 1935, he appeared on Broadway as Japhet in André Obey’s biblical play Noah. Producer John Houseman had spotted him and recommended him to Welles, which led to his casting as Cinna the Poet in his 1937-1938 adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, with his critically acclaimed Mercury Theater in New York City.
Welles invited Lloyd to take part in his adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, but it never materialised. Lloyd then returned to Broadway, thus missing being cast in Citizen Kane. Instead, Lloyd’s big Hollywood break came when Houseman recommended him to Alfred Hitchcock, who was seeking an unknown actor to play the title role in his 1942 spy thriller Saboteur. Hitchcock cast him as the Nazi spy who falls from the Statue of Liberty.
He stayed in Los Angeles and took a role in a second Hitchcock film, Spellbound, in 1945. Charlie Chaplin cast Lloyd in Limelight in 1952 as well as Spellbound. He also appeared in Lewis Milestone’s A Walk in the Sun and Arch of Triumph.
But due to his close associations with certain victims of the McCarthy witch-hunts, including Charlie Chaplin, Lloyd was blacklisted and no longer hired by Hollywood executives. However, it was Hitchcock who rescued him by making him associate producer and a director on his TV series, Alfred Hitchcock Presents in the 1950s and 1960s, in which he worked both in front of the camera and behind it, directing and producing several episodes.
It was while directing for TV during the 1950s that he gave a job to a young and then largely unknown director, Stanley Kubrick, on a five-part TV series about President Abraham Lincoln, called Mr Lincoln. When he became aware that Kubrick was telling the press that he was, in effect, the director of the show, Lloyd effectively dismissed him from the production, sending him back to New York once the second unit directing was completed.
His career in performing and directing continued for the next two decades but his next highprofile role didn’t come until 1982, when he agreed to do a short stint on the awardwinning medical TV drama St.
Elsewhere. His part was intended to last for just four episodes, but when the show’s creators discovered how much they enjoyed writing for and working with him, they invited him to stick around. His Dr Daniel Auschlander became a popular featured character, staying with the show for its entire six-season run.
In Peter Weir’s acclaimed 1989 film, Dead Poets
Society,
Lloyd played alongside Robin Williams as Mr Nolan, the strict disciplinarian of the school. For the rest of the century, he continued to work on television, appearing as Captain Picard’s former mentor, Professor Richard Galen, on a 1993 episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. He also made guest appearances on Modern Family and Murder, She Wrote, as well as a recurring role on The Practice.
Lloyd returned to the big screen in 2015 for the comedy movie, Trainwreck, directed by Judd Apatow. After his eight-decade career, Norman Lloyd died at his home in Los Angeles. His wife Peggy Craven, and daughter, actress Josie Lloyd, predeceased him. He is survived by his son Michael.
Norman Lloyd. Born: November 8, 1914. Died May 10, 2021