Lloyd, Norman,
1914-2021, American film and TV actor and director, b. Jersey City, N.J, as
Norman Perlmutter. Lloyd began his stage career at age 9 appearing with his
two aunts who were vaudeville performers. He joined the Federal Theater
Project and then Orson Welles’s
Mercury Theater in New York in the 1930s, gaining fame for his portrayal of
Cinna in Welles’s production of Juliet Caesar
(1937). He went with Welles’s troupe to Hollywood in 1939, but
dropped out of the company before Citizen Kane (1940) was
made; however, he won the lead role as the villain in Alfred Hitchcock’s film
Sabateur (1942) and then in Spellbound
(1945); altogether he would appear in over 60 films. Blacklisted in the
1950s, Lloyd was hired by Hitchcock to produce and direct several episodes
of his television programs. Lloyd returned to acting in the 1980s portraying
the kindly head of the hospital on St. Elsewhere
,(1982-1988), and then played the headmaster in the film
Dead Poet's Society (1989). He continued to act until
shortly before his death, with his last film role coming in 2015 in Amy
Schumer’s film Trainwreck.
See his memoir (2004); Who Is Norman Lloyd? (doc. film,
2007).
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