LOS ANGELES • American actor, producer and director Norman Lloyd - whose career of more than 80 years included collaborations with legends such as comedian Charlie Chaplin and director Orson Welles - has died at the age of 106, United States media reported on Tuesday.
Variety said Lloyd's friend and fellow producer Dean Hargrove confirmed the death, saying Lloyd had died on Tuesday at home in Los Angeles. Deadline Hollywood said he died in his sleep.
Lloyd had a long run in the role of cancer-stricken Dr Auschlander on the television hospital drama St Elsewhere in the 1980s. His last film appearance as an actor was in the 2015 raunchy comedy Trainwreck, starring Amy Schumer and directed by Judd Apatow.
Lloyd's other movie work included director Martin Scorsese's The Age Of Innocence (1993) and a role opposite Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society (1989).
In the 2007 documentary Who Is Norman Lloyd?, TV 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 entertaining audiences with stories of his regular tennis matches with Chaplin; his friendships with American actor Gregory Peck and director Alfred Hitchcock; working with French director Jean Renoir and actress Ingrid Bergman; and giving director Stanley Kubrick one of his first film jobs.
Lloyd did not give up tennis until suffering a fall at age 100 and was still driving at 99.
He and his actress wife Peggy Craven had two children and were married for 75 years until her death in 2011 at 98.
Lloyd 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 starred Craven.
He joined the Mercury Theatre, founded by Welles and producer John Houseman, in time for its 1937 debut Caesar, an update of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar with an anti-fascist tone as Nazi leader Adolf Hitler was pushing 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. However, when the project fell apart, Lloyd returned to New York.
He went to work with Hitchcock, which led to his 1942 film debut in Saboteur. Lloyd's character, the titular Nazi spy, dies in a memorable scene - in a fall from the Statue of Liberty's upraised arm.
The role led to a long relationship with Hitchcock, including playing a mental patient in Spellbound (1945) and working as executive producer and director of the TV show Alfred Hitchcock Presents in the 1950s and 1960s.
Lloyd met 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.
In the 1950s, Lloyd directed a five-part TV series, Mr Lincoln, about former US president Abraham Lincoln - a project on which he gave a young Kubrick his first substantial movie work.
After some fallow years, his career revived in the 1980s with St Elsewhere and recurring TV roles in Murder, She Wrote and The Practice. In 2010, he had a spot on the sitcom Modern Family.
REUTERS
