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Hollywood Reporter (27/Oct/2014) - Norman Lloyd at 100

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Norman Lloyd at 100

THR's chief film critic pays tribute to the Hollywood legend, who turns 100 in November and has collaborated with everyone from Chaplin to Apatow

He's been going to Broadway shows since he paid 50 cents for a balcony seat to see Al Jolson in Bombo in 1921. During the Great Depression he worked with Elia Kazan in the Theater of Action, then joined Orson Welles' Mercury Theater to act in the Boy Wonder's legendary Julius Caesar. He made his screen debut falling from the Statue of Liberty in Alfred Hitchcock's Saboteur, produced the world premiere of Bertholt Brecht's Galileo starring Charles Laughton at the Coronet Theater in Los Angeles, acted in films for Jean Renoir and Charlie Chaplin (and was the latter's tennis partner for years), selected the stories and hired the writers and directors for Hitchcock's long-running televisions shows and later won a whole new generation of fans playing Dr. Daniel Auschlander on St. Elsewhere for six years in the 1980s. Since then he's acted in films by Martin Scorsese and Peter Weir and, this past summer, played a role in Judd Apatow's forthcoming Trainwreck.

He is the great Norman Lloyd. And on Nov. 8 he will turn 100 years old. No one in the American performing arts has been at it longer than Norman, and I would wager that nobody has a more comprehensive first-hand knowledge of 20th (and 21st) century American film, theater and television — or can describe it more evocatively.

Not long ago I mentioned to him that, as a wee lad, I was lucky to have seen the estimable Robert Ryan starring in a Broadway revival of the classic newspaper play ...