Tuesday Minute
No. 173 | October 5, 2010

Roaring Nineties

Our theme this week
Actors in their 90s, still going strong

Featured this week (theme introduction)
Monday         —   Eli Wallach

Norman Lloyd

Born November 8, 1914
Age 95

Who is Norman Lloyd?  Well, if you don’t know Norman Lloyd, you should know Norman Lloyd.  Because he is the history of our industry up to now.

—Karl Malden, in Who Is Norman Lloyd?

Born in Jersey City and raised in Brooklyn, Norman Lloyd has had a long and illustrious career spanning stage, film, and television, with a long list of credits as an actor, director, and producer.  Early on, Lloyd joined the Mercury Theater of Orson Welles–John Houseman fame.  In 1937, he played Cinna the poet in Julius Caesar, a stirring performance in a production famous for being as much Welles as Shakespeare, which was dramatized in a fine film from last year, Orson Welles and Me.

Lloyd moved west in the early 1940s to be in a Welles movie that never came to be.  But he soon made his feature film debut as Nazi spy Frank Fry in Saboteur (1942).  His Hollywood collaborations with Alfred Hitchcock would be among the most fruitful of his career.  He played a patient at the asylum in Spellbound, in 1945, and later worked as actor, director, and producer for the TV series Alfred Hitchcock Presents and The Alfred Hitchcock Hour.  His other movie performances include The Green Years (1946), Reign of Terror (1949), Limelight (1952), Audrey Rose (1977), Dead Poets Society (1989), and The Age of Innocence (1993).  His most recent big screen performance was for the comedy-romance In Her Shoes, in 2005.  Over the years, Lloyd has appeared in many TV productions, including recurring roles in St. Elsewhere, Wiseguy, Home Fires, Seven Days, and The Practice.  In 2007, documentary filmmaker Matthew Sussman made Who Is Norman Lloyd?,which the New York Times called “a valentine to a show business legend.”  Reviewer Matt Zoller Seitz added, “But luckily this is a rare case in which the subject is, by consensus, such an accomplished man and decent fellow that the director can’t be accused of overdoing it.”

In a town famous for short marriages, Lloyd has had one of the longest.  He married his wife, Peggy, in the the summer of 1936, and 74 years later they are together still.

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Dead Poets Society (1989)
Peter Weir, director
Tom Schulman, writer
John Seale, director of photography
Norman Lloyd as Mr. Nolan:  “Sit down!  I want you seated!”

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Who Is Norman Lloyd? (2007)
Documentary
Matthew Sussman, director
Website:  Includes a trailer and interview with Keith Olbermann

Saboteur (1942)
Alfred Hitchcock, director
Norman Lloyd as Frank Fry
Clip 1:  Trying to blow up a battleship; shooting up Radio City Music Hall
Clip 2:  Clinging to the Statue of Liberty

Me and Orson Welles (2009)
Leo Bill as Norman Lloyd
Clip 1:  “Did she get a firm grip on your monkey bar?”

Interview with Norman Lloyd
September 2000
Part 1

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Quote of note
[Speaking on a stapler phone]
“Carruthers here.  I am leaving the stapler location.  I’ll be at my piano number in half an hour.  If you need me earlier, call me on my jock strap.  But please, just ring once.
—Carruthers (Norman Lloyd), The Nude Bomb (Maxwell Smart and the Nude Bomb) (1980)

…58…59…60.