Variety said Lloyd's friend and
fellow producer Dean Hargrove confirmed the
death, saying Lloyd died on Tuesday at his home
in Los Angeles. Deadline Hollywood said he died
in his sleep.
Reuters could not independently confirm the
news.
Lloyd had a long run as cancer-stricken Dr.
Auschlander on the television hospital drama
"St. Elsewhere" in the 1980s.
His last movie appearance as an actor was in the
2015 raunchy comedy "Trainwreck," starring Amy
Schumer and directed by Judd Apatow.
"(Lloyd) lit up the set every moment he was on
it," Apatow wrote in Vanity Fair at the time.
Lloyd's movie work also included Martin
Scorsese's "The Age of Innocence" in 1993 and
playing the headmaster opposite Robin Williams
in the 1989 film "Dead Poets Society."
In the 2007 documentary "Who Is Norman Lloyd,"
television producer Tom Fontana, who worked with
him on “St. Elsewhere,” described Lloyd as a
combination of Peter Pan and Father Time.
He was a walking history of entertainment. With
his erudite manner, he loved to entertain
audiences with stories of his regular tennis
matches with Chaplin, his friendships with
Gregory Peck and Alfred Hitchcock, working with
French director Jean Renoir and actress Ingrid
Bergman and giving Stanley Kubrick one of his
first film jobs.
Lloyd went so far back that he appears in the
earliest surviving footage of American
television - a segment of "The Streets of New
York" from 1939. It was his first screen credit.
He did not give up tennis until suffering a fall
at age 100 and was still driving at 99. Lloyd
and wife Peggy had two children and were married
for 75 years until her death in 2011 at age 98.
Lloyd was born Norman Perlmutter on Nov. 8,
1914, in Jersey City, New Jersey, and grew up in
the New York borough of Brooklyn. His mother
took him to Broadway plays and instilled a love
of acting that he began pursuing as a boy in
local shows. He was still a teenager when he
dropped out of New York University to pursue
entertainment full time.
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He made his Broadway debut in
1935 and the next year appeared in a staging of
"The Crime," which was directed by Elia Kazan
and also included Peggy Craven, who he would
marry.
Lloyd joined the Mercury Theatre, founded by
Welles and John Houseman, in time for its 1937
debut, "Caesar," an update of Shakespeare's
"Julius Caesar" with an anti-fascist tone as
Adolf Hitler pushed the world to war.
Welles took Lloyd and the rest of the troupe to
Hollywood with plans for a movie based on the
novel "Heart of Darkness." When the project fell
apart, Lloyd returned to New York. That angered
Welles and no doubt cost Lloyd a chance at being
in Welles' next project, the revered "Citizen
Kane."
Instead Lloyd went to work with Hitchcock, which
led to his 1942 film debut in "Saboteur," in
which his Nazi spy, the title character, dies in
a memorable scene - falling from the Statue of
Liberty's upraised arm.
That role led to a long relationship with
Hitchcock, including playing a mental patient in
"Spellbound" with Peck and working as executive
producer and director of the popular television
show "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" in the 1950s
and '60s.
Hitchcock hired Lloyd despite studio concerns
about his connections to left-wing New York
theater and Hollywood at a time when such
connections led to entertainers ending up on the
anti-communist blacklist.
Lloyd first got to know Chaplin on the tennis
court in the 1940s and played a key role in
"Limelight," Chaplin's 1952 film about a
washed-up comedian and a suicidal dancer, which
also featured Buster Keaton.
In the 1950s Lloyd directed a five-part
television series, "Mr. Lincoln" about President
Abraham Lincoln - a project on which he gave a
young Stanley Kubrick his first substantial
movie work.
After some fallow years, Lloyd's career revived
in the 1980s with "St. Elsewhere" and recurring
television roles in "Wiseguy," "Murder, She
Wrote" and "The Practice." In 2010 he had a spot
on the sitcom "Modern Family."
(Reporting by Jill Serjeant; Editing by Leslie
Adler and Diane Craft)
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