Norman Lloyd ✝

Norman Nathan Lloyd (né Perlmutter; November 8, 1914 – May 11, 2021) was an American actor, producer, director, and centenarian with a career in entertainment spanning nearly a century. He worked in every major facet of the industry, including theatre, radio, television, and film, with a career that started in 1923. Lloyd's final film, Trainwreck, was released in 2015, after he turned 100. In the 1930s, he apprenticed with Eva Le Gallienne's Civic Repertory Theatre and worked with such influential groups as the Federal Theatre Project's Living Newspaper unit, the Mercury Theatre, and the Group Theatre. Lloyd's long professional association with Alfred Hitchcock began with his performance portraying a Nazi agent in the film Saboteur (1942). He also appeared in Spellbound (1945), and was a producer of Hitchcock's anthology television series Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Lloyd directed and produced episodic television throughout the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. As an actor, he appeared in over 60 films and television shows, with his roles including Bodalink in Charlie Chaplin's Limelight (1952), Mr. Nolan in Dead Poets Society (1989), and Mr. Letterblair in The Age of Innocence (1993). In the 1980s, Lloyd gained a new generation of fans for playing Dr. Daniel Auschlander, one of the starring roles on the medical drama St. Elsewhere. Lloyd was born Norman Nathan Perlmutter on November 8, 1914, in Jersey City, New Jersey. His family was Jewish and lived in Brooklyn, New York. His father, Max Perlmutter, was an accountant who later became a salesman and proprietor of a furniture store. His mother, Sadie Horowitz Perlmutter, was a bookkeeper and housewife. She had a good voice and a lifelong interest in the theatre, and she took her young son to singing and dancing lessons.: 1  He had two sisters, Ruth and Janice, who survived her brother by four months. Lloyd became a child performer, appearing at vaudeville benefits and women's clubs, and was a professional by the age of nine.: 3  Lloyd graduated from high school when he was 15 and began studies at New York University, but left at the end of his sophomore year. "All around me I could see the way the Depression was affecting everyone; for my family, for people in business like my father, it was a terrible time," he wrote. "I just wasn't going to stay in college, paying tuition to get a degree to be a lawyer, when I could see lawyers who had become taxi drivers.": 4  Lloyd's father died in 1945, at age 55, "broken by the world that he was living in."