Actor Norman Lloyd, who was a regular Hollywood fixture for nine decades, has died, aged 106.
The St Elsewhere star’s career began in the 1920s and, over the years, he worked with stars ranging from Orson Welles and Charlie Chaplin to Alfred Hitchcock and Martin Scorsese.
His death was announced by his manager, Marion Rosenberg, who revealed that he died on Tuesday (1 May) at his home in Los Angeles.
Lloyd’s credits include the primary villain in Hitchcock’s Saboteur (1942), as well as the director’s 1945 thriller Spellbound.
He also appeared in Jean Renoir’s The Southerner (1945), Chaplin’s Limelight (1952) and, in 2002, Scorsese’s Gangs of New York.
Lloyd also appeared in comedy films In Her Shoes (2005), alongside Cameron Diaz, and Trainwreck (2015), which starred Amy Schumer. 1989, he acted opposite robin Williams in Dead Poets Society.
Born in New Jersey in 1914, Lloyd jumped into acting as a youngster in the 1920s. On stage, he was a regular with Welles’ Mercury Theatre, the groundbreaking 1930s troupe that also featured Joseph Cotton and Agnes Moorehead and formed the basis of Welles’ classic film debut, Citizen Kane.
He was also part of Welles’ 1937 modern-dress fascist-era production of Julius Caesar that has since gone down in history as one of America’s landmark stage productions.
His other plays included Crime, directed by Elia Kazan and featuring his future wife, Peggy Craven. The couple were married for 75 years, until Peggy Lloyd’s death in 2011, aged 98.
TV viewers knew him best as the memorable calm centre of St Eligius hospital on the 1982-99 NBC drama series St Elsewhere. His character, Dr Daniel Auschlander, was originally only supposed to appear in a few episodes, but Lloyd became a series regular and stayed with the show for the entire run. The series inspired long-running medical shows ER and Grey’s Anatomy.
His other TV credits include Star Trek: The Next Generation, Murder, She Wrote, Kojak, The Practice and Modern Family.
Additional reporting from Agencies
