Celebrity Biographies
Norman Lloyd
Few actors can boast that their career has spanned nine decades, since to do so they would have to start at a very young age and continue to be active until old age. Norman Lloyd, who not only achieved such a feat, but also collaborated with great geniuses such as Alfred Hitchcock, Jean Renoir and Orson Welles, passed away on May 11, 2021, at the age of 106, at his Los Angeles residence.
Born in New Jersey on November 8, 1914, Norman Perlmutter –his real name– began his career at the age of nine as a child actor in vaudeville shows. After enrolling in law at New York University, he ended up dropping out. “All around me, I could see that the Depression was affecting everyone; For my family, for people in business like my father, it was a terrible time,” he said. “I was just not going to stay in college, paying tuition to get a law degree, when I could see lawyers who had turned into taxi drivers.
At 17, Norman Lloyd became the youngest apprentice in the prestigious Civic Reporty Theater company, led by actress Eva Le Gallienne. Later he associated with the director Joseph Losey , when he was dedicated to the theater, and became one of the founders of the Mercury Theatre, Orson Welles’ repertory company , with which he triumphed in 1937 as the poet Cinna in “Julius Caesar”. .
Welles himself recruited him for the cinema, as one of the main actors in Heart of Darkness, but in the end the production company, RKO, did not want to give the project the green light, due to its large budget, and the film was never shot. Shortly after he gave life to a Nazi spy in Sabotage (1942) , by Alfred Hitchcock , who signed him again for Remember . The French Jean Renoir made him the clumsy Finley in The Southerner , and he ended up becoming a prolific Hollywood actor with small roles in titles such as A Walk in the Sun , The Green Years , The True Story of Calamity Jane ,The Falcon and the Arrow, or The Two Lives of Audrey Rose .
In 1958, the master of suspense offered him to become a regular actor, director of several chapters and producer of his series Alfred Hitchcock Presents , which made history. He would be followed by numerous jobs in other television productions. Norman Lloyd continued to work for a long time, although from the 1980s he slowed down. At the end of that time he played one of the key roles in Dead Poets Club , where he was Mr. Nolan, headmaster of the Welton Academy. He decided to retire from the cinema at the age of 101 after a role in And suddenly you , from 2015.
Married to Peggy, until her death in 2011, the couple had two children. One of them, Josie Lloyd, is also dedicated to acting. At the age of eight he became passionate about tennis, and has played against movie legends such as Charlie Chaplin . “With the time that I have dedicated to him, he should have been world champion,” he joked during an interview. This sport has helped him maintain great vitality, as he was still playing at the age of 101. With a hundred he had stopped driving, but it was at the insistence of his son.