Norman Lloyd, the celebrated actor, director, and producer who enjoyed a decades-long career on screen and stage, died at age 106 on Tuesday. He passed away at his home in Los Angeles, his son, Michael Lloyd, confirmed. His acting career spanned nearly nine decades—from making his Broadway debut in 1935 at age 20 to costarring alongside Amy Schumer in 2015’s Trainwreck at age 99.
Lloyd was perhaps best known for playing Dr. Daniel Auschlander on 132 episodes of the medical drama St. Elsewhere. Originally meant to appear in only four episodes, Lloyd remained with the series throughout its six-season run. “He was completely open to any new adventure,” St. Elsewhere showrunner Tom Fontana told Variety. “Here’s a guy who had worked with Hitchcock and Welles and yet here he was with us doing this crazy show and breaking all the rules. He totally embraced it.”
He was born Norman Perlmutter in Jersey City, New Jersey on November 8, 1914. After attending New York University, Lloyd became a member of Orson Welles’s innovative Mercury Theatre troupe. Lloyd performed with the group in the legendary 1937 production Caesar, which told the Shakespearean tale through the lens of modern fascism. Other stage credits from early in his career included the Elia Kazan–directed play Crime, during which he met his wife, Peggy Craven, and the 1950 Broadway production of King Lear. Craven and Lloyd were married for 75 years and had two children before her death in 2011 at age 98.
Lloyd was originally cast in Welles’s Citizen Kane, a project he departed due to the filmmaker’s budgetary problems. Instead, his major film break arrived via Alfred Hitchcock’s 1942 thriller Saboteur, in which he played a villain who topples from the Statue of Liberty. Their bond led to Lloyd’s role in 1945’s Spellbound and his job as associate producer and director on Alfred Hitchcock Presents after a period when his career was affected by the Hollywood Blacklist.
In addition to his Hitchcock collaborations, Lloyd worked on Charlie Chaplin’s Limelight, Jean Renoir’s The Southerner, Martin Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence, and Dead Poets Society, in which he played the straight-laced headmaster after a nearly decade-long break from film.
Lloyd was known for his ability to vividly recount memories from his illustrious career, as in his 1993 memoir Stages and the 2007 documentary Who Is Norman Lloyd? According to Judd Apatow, who directed him in Trainwreck, Lloyd maintained his colorful spirit in the final years of his life. “Recently, he told me he wasn’t able to have lunch with me because he was having minor surgery on his leg,” Apatow recalled in a 2016 essay for Vanity Fair. “I asked him what was wrong, and he said, ‘That’s what happens when you kick too much ass!’”
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