NORMAN LLOYD

(8 November 1914 - 11 May 2021)

The American actor Norman Lloyd, who has died aged 106, was an incredibly hard-working professional. He acted on stage and in films, and was also a producer and director. He was born Norman Perlmutter in New Jersey to Jewish immigrants from Hungary and Russia. Deciding to be an actor at age eight, he was actually a dancer first. His initial theatre job was with Eva Le Gallienne’s Civic Repertory in New York. He also joined Orson Welles’ Mercury Theatre and did a lot of stage work from the 1930s to the 1950s, including acting and directing in New York and the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Connecticut. Alfred Hitchcock cast him in Saboteur (1942) and then he worked on Lewis Allen’s The Unseen, Jean Renoir’s The Southerner and with Hitchcock again on Spellbound. He appeared in Jacques Tourneur’s The Flame and the Arrow, Joseph Losey’s M, Chaplin’s Limelight, Lewis Milestone’s A Walk in the Sun, Robert Wise’s Audrey Rose, Peter Weir’s Dead Poets Society, Martin Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence, Curtis Hanson’s In Her Shoes, and Judd Apatow’s Trainwreck, his last film (in 2015). But he had appeared in scores of other film and TV shows (One Step Beyond, Night Gallery, The Twilight Zone, St Elsewhere, Murder, She Wrote etc) always playing character roles, at which he was a past master. For a while he was blacklisted by Hollywood for having too many left-wing associates, but Hitchcock saved him and employed him as a TV producer. As a director he worked exclusively in television but, apart from his acting, Lloyd’s main work was as a producer from 1960 to 1985 of such programmes as the Alfred Hitchcock series (nearly 260 episodes), Journey to the Unknown, The Name of the Game, Tales of the Unexpected and umpteen one-off TV movies. Norman Lloyd was married to his wife Peggy for 75 years until her death at 98 in 2011. They had two children. Their actress daughter Josie Lloyd died in 2020.

MICHAEL DARVELL