The Return of the Classic Films Obituary Thread

[CBHagman]

10. Actor, director, and producer Norman Lloyd, 106

Ladies and gentleman — or whoever's out there at this writing — I give you Norman Lloyd, who lived through two world wars and that other pandemic, who worked in every medium, who had a career that stands as proof there aren't even six degrees of separation between Charlie Chaplin and Amy Schumer.

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2021/may/12/norman-lloyd-obituary

Born Norman Perlmutter in Jersey City, New Jersey, to Max Perlmutter, an accountant who later ran a furniture store, and Sadie (nee Horowitz), a bookkeeper, he grew up in Brooklyn, New York. He had performed as a child, but began his acting career in earnest, aged 17, as an apprentice with Eva Le Gallienne’s Civic Repertory in the city. It was there, in a series of classic plays, that he acquired his sonorous voice and excellent diction. He made an impressive Broadway debut in 1935 as Japhet in André Obey’s Noah, with the great French actor Pierre Fresnay in the title role. After the two Welles productions, he took part in one of the radical Living Newspaper series called Power (1937), a project of the Work Projects Administration (WPA) created by the New Deal.

Following Saboteur, Lloyd began a long association and friendship with “Hitch”. He acted in five films in 1945 for various studios, including Hitchcock’s Spellbound, in which he was a psychiatric patient. Among the others were Lewis Milestone’s second world war drama A Walk In the Sun, in which Lloyd portrayed a cynical private soldier who feels that the war will last for ever with or without him, and Renoir’s The Southerner, in which he played a vindictive neighbour of a farmer.