Norman Lloyd, who worked with Orson Welles, Charlie Chaplin and Alfred Hitchcock and won the hearts of TV viewers as Dr. Daniel Auschlander on St. Elsewhere, died today. He was 106.
He was cast as Cinna the Poet in Welles’ modern-dress production of Caesar in 1937. He was also featured in the Mercury Theatre’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday.
Decades later, Lloyd recounted how producer John Houseman brought him into the Mercury and how he stole the show as Cinna the Poet.
“I think that’s why probably I was never warmly embraced by Orson,” Lloyd told the A.V. Club in a 2015 interview.
“Years later we appeared together on a tribute to Orson… And after that evening, all of us who were involved in the evening, like Kenneth Tynan, the critic, and so forth – we gathered on the stage to say hello and goodbye, at which point Orson embraced me in this tremendous embrace and whispered in my ear, ‘You son of a bitch.’ And that was the last time I saw him! (Laughs) I took it as a mark of affection… I think he just was saying, ‘You’re impossible, and I love you.’ And that was true.”
Lloyd’s other stage credits 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 at age 98.
His screen credits included Hitchcock’s Saboteur and Spellbound and Charlie Chaplin’s Limelight.
Lloyd worked in television in the early 1950s, but the liberal actor found his career in jeopardy during the Hollywood blacklist.
In 1957, Hitchcock came to his rescue, Lloyd told the Los Angeles Times in 2014. When the famed director sought to hire Lloyd as associate producer on his series Alfred Hitchcock Presents but was told “There is a problem with Norman Lloyd.” Hitchcock didn’t back down, Lloyd recalled.
“He said three words: ‘I want him,’” Lloyd said. He was immediately hired and eventually worked as executive producer on another series, The Alfred Hitchcock Hour.
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