Through the years, I have interviewed my share of Hollywood figures, but in terms of sheer powers of intimidation, none will ever top Norman Lloyd.
It wasn’t that Lloyd, who died May 11 at the age of 106, was a big star or even particularly well known; he was neither. What inspired my fear was the way in which Lloyd presented himself on-screen: his haughty tone of voice, his fierce intelligence, his seemingly unforgiving manner.
That impression was solidified when, in 2004, I called Lloyd at his Los Angeles home to talk about Orson Welles, with whom he had worked at the fabled Mercury Theatre and about whom I was then writing an article.
The conversation began inauspiciously, with my apologizing for calling past the appointed hour (my mea culpa was met with stony silence) and Lloyd peppering me with questions that seemed designed to ascertain just how much I actually knew about Welles. “Say that again, more slowly, please,” he said to one of my breathless replies.
I went on and on, and things did not improve: “You’ll have to speak more clearly and a little slower,” said Lloyd, then 89, at one point.
Then came my biggest mistake. “Had you always wanted to be an actor?” I asked, committing the unpardonable sin of straying from what Lloyd had understood to be the subject of our interview: Welles. “Who? Me?” he shot back. “What has that got to do with Orson?”
Eventually, I found my footing as I coaxed Lloyd into rehashing memories of the Mercury — he had appeared as Cinna the Poet in Welles’s much-noted 1937 production of Julius Caesar — and the countless other notables into whose orbit he had wandered: He had acted and produced for Alfred Hitchcock, acted for Charlie Chaplin, and acted for and directed a film version of a play by Jean Renoir.
Any conversation with Lloyd was bound to circle back to this parade of geniuses, though he himself was not and did not claim to be a genius. In fact, despite the rather high-flown manner in which he carried himself, Lloyd, who was born in New Jersey, was a fine but not extraordinary actor. His immaculate diction and prickly disposition encouraged typecasting that limited his range; contemporary audiences will remember him as the ornery boarding school headmaster in Peter Weir’s Dead Poets Society (1989), which was surely a representative role.
On the other hand, Lloyd had a kind of genius in honing in on other geniuses. After his collaboration with Welles came to an end, Lloyd hitched his wagon to Hitchcock, who first cast him as the surly spy in Saboteur (1942) and then tapped him to become one of the producers on TV’s Alfred Hitchcock Presents and The Alfred Hitchcock Hour. Helping to oversee those iconic shows, Lloyd again understood that his job was not to be the star but to support the star. “The television show had to reflect Hitch,” Lloyd wrote in his modest, engaging 1993 autobiography Stages Of Life in Theatre, Film, and Television.
During a long career, Lloyd also appeared in films by Joseph Losey (1951’s M), Robert Wise (1977’s Audrey Rose), and Martin Scorsese (1993’s The Age of Innocence), and he had a renewed burst of visibility as part of the ensemble on TV’s St. Elsewhere. Despite his association with old dinosaurs such as Welles and Hitchcock, he was remarkably open to fresh, new talent, plucking future A-list filmmaker James Bridges from obscurity to pen episodes of the Hitchcock show and eagerly signing up to work with Judd Apatow in the 2015 comedy Trainwreck (Lloyd’s final film).
In his last years, Lloyd, whose wife of many decades, Peggy, predeceased him in 2011, became a figure of curiosity for his longevity and his increasingly lonely status as one of the final emissaries from a glorious era in theater and movies. I interviewed him several times after our initial uneasy encounter, an encounter that actually had a happy ending. After I mailed him a copy of the article for which I had interviewed him, he sent me a handwritten note that was, typically, warm and slightly spiky: “Much thanks for the piece on Orson. It is splendid. It is faithful to what I said, which makes it a rarity.”
As showbiz curmudgeons go, few were more endearing than Norman Lloyd.
Peter Tonguette writes for many publications, including the Wall Street Journal, National Review, and Humanities.
