Who is Norman Lloyd? (2007)

You may know Norman Lloyd as Dr. Auschlander on TV’s St. Elsewhere, but if ever someone should be a household name but isn’t, he’s the guy. Born in Jersey City 93 years ago and raised in Brooklyn (he took elocution lessons to remove the accent), Lloyd is undoubtedly the only person, living or dead, who can claim to have worked with Hitchcock (both as an actor in Saboteur and Spellbound and later as director and producer of his TV series), Renoir (The Southerner), Chaplin (Limelight) and Welles (Lloyd is one of three surviving members of Welles’s Mercury Players), as well as Elia Kazan, Joseph Losey, Jules Dassin, Lewis Milestone, Bertolt Brecht, Martin Scorsese, even Cameron Diaz (Lloyd appeared with her recently in In Her Shoes). We see the amazingly vigorous nonagenarian moving from his twice-a-week tennis match at home in L.A. to spinning yarns at his installation as a life member of Manhattan’s Players Club. But then there’s: acting in the theater during the Depression with Kazan; arguing with Welles about the role of Cinna the poet in the 1937 Mercury Theater production of Julius Caesar (Lloyd won the argument--his performance was critically acclaimed); a tennis friendship with Chaplin (which led to Lloyd’s casting as the stage director in Limelight); Brecht and the world premiere of Galileo; and a long association with Hitchcock beginning with Lloyd’s film debut as the Saboteur: Hitchcock later rescued Lloyd from the blacklist by making him associate producer (later executive producer) of his weekly TV series (Lloyd also directed nineteen episodes and appeared in five of them). And in addition to his four seasons on St. Elsewhere, he also acted on such series as The Paper Chase; Murder, She Wrote; Wings; Wiseguy; and many more.