The long life and times of Norman Lloyd

Norman Lloyd has died at the age of 106 – he worked with some of the biggest names of his age including such giants as Welles, Hitchcock, Chaplin, Brecht and Renoir. The breadth and range of his career – which spanned almost a century and included acting, writing, directing and producing – is staggering. However, more importantly, he provides us today with an example of a man who continued to adapt and challenge himself through changing circumstances – and left a far richer legacy because of it.

Lloyd was born in Brooklyn in 1914, acting throughout his youth and appearing in vaudeville: he was considered a professional by the age of nine. During the Depression, he dropped out of New York University in order to provide for his family. In the 1930s he was involved in social theatre, beginning his acting career in a collective called the Theater of Action. This is where he met his wife of 75 years, Peggy Craven, in a play directed by Elia Kazan, later most famous for directing Marlon Brando in the film On the Waterfront. He joined Orson Welles’ Mercury Theater where he won acclaim for his performance of Cinna the Poet in an anti-fascist adaptation of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. In the 1940s, Lloyd followed Welles’s troupe to Los Angeles to make films, but an ill-advised trip back to New York to do radio work in 1941 meant he missed out on appearing in Citizen Kane.

The year after this disappointment, he appeared in Alfred Hitchcock’s Saboteur (1942), which marked the beginning of a lifelong friendship and working relationship with the director. In the film, he expertly portrays the villain – a fascist sympathiser with an air of sinister coldness and control that his patrician appearance matched perfectly. In what is surely one of the most memorable deaths in all cinema, we see Lloyd grasping onto the edge of the Statue of Liberty (a clear foreshadowing of the Mount Rushmore scene that appears in North by Northwest). In Hitchcock’s interviews with François Truffaut, the French director praises Hitchcock for his casting of Lloyd – and Hitchcock responds by describing him as “a very fine actor”. Truffaut points out that the iconic death in this film speaks to the meticulous attention to detail in Hitchcock’s work: as Lloyd’s character is clinging to the top of the Statue of Liberty in the dramatic crescendo, we see his coat is coming apart at the shoulder seam against the towering backdrop – “A life hangs by a mere thread.”

Lloyd also appeared in Hitchcock’s psychological thriller Spellbound (1945), as a Nazi spy, a role we imagine Hitchcock finding great amusement in due to Lloyd’s Jewish background on his father’s side (he was born Norman Perlmutter). That same year Lloyd appeared in Jean Renoir’s The Southerner, during the great director’s short-lived (1941-47) Hollywood period. Lloyd appeared in Charlie Chaplin’s Limelight (1952), later stating that it was “The greatest call sheet you could ever ask for, Chaplin and Buster Keaton.”

Due to Lloyd’s connections with Left-wing acting circles and playwrights, he fell victim to the Hollywood blacklist – actors and writers believed to have been Communists or sympathisers at the beginning of the Cold War. As a result, Lloyd could no longer find work as an actor during this period. Hitchcock, seeing his predicament, employed him as an associate producer and a director of his television show Alfred Hitchcock Presents for eight years. Lloyd again proved the diversity of his talents and continued directing and producing television throughout the 1960s and 1970s.

In the 1980s, Lloyd won a new generation of fans through his portrayal of Dr Daniel Auslander in the television show St Elsewhere: he later observed that “the writing was far superior to any show I did on television.” He worked again with iconic directors, acting in Peter Weir’s Dead Poet’s Society (1989), and Martin Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence (1993). His final film was Trainwreck (2015), which was released after his 100th birthday, in which his lines were all improvisational comedy (the first of his career). Here we see a man for whom anything was possible – at any age. His knack for winning the respect of his directors and collaborators is clear. His talent and integrity are also impressively apparent in every performance, large or small, throughout his career.

Through ever changing circumstances and the ebbing and flowing tides of time, Lloyd never failed to adapt and rise to new challenges with creativity and grace. When asked at 102 what the key to success was, he replied: “It’s an attitude of positivity, you can always find something amusing in people.”

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