Born and raised in Jersey City, New Jersey in the 1910s, Norman Lloyd began acting at six years old, spurred on by his mother and his love of theater. His mother enrolled him in the Stage Children's Fund, where he cultivated his dancing and singing skills with the noted vaudevillian troupe Adelaide and Hughes. At the age of 15, Lloyd decided to pursue an academic career, enrolling at New York University, where he studied for two years until he felt the lure of Broadway beckoning him. After successfully auditioning for Eva Le Gallienne's Civic Reparatory Theatre, he appeared on Broadway in productions for the Federal Theatre, a few of which were directed by Joseph Losey and Elia Kazan, before joining Orson Welles' The Mercury Theatre production of "Julius Caesar". Lloyd moved to Los Angeles in 1939 as part of Welles' Heart of Darkness production team and as a member of The Mercury Theatre, but left, going back to Broadway, when asked to stay on longer than the agreed upon time. He returned to Hollywood in 1942 to play the Nazi spy in Alfred Hitchcock’s Saboteur after John Houseman, Welles’ former producer partner, recommended him to Hitchcock. Lloyd went on to act in Jean Renoir’s The Southerner (1945), Lewis Milestone’s A Walk in the Sun (1945), Norman Taurog’s The Beginning or the End (1947), and Jacques Tourneur’s The Flame and the Arrow (1950), among other productions.
In 1951, at his agent’s insistence, Lloyd began his television directorial career on The Adventures of Kit Carson. This was followed with work on TV anthology series Chevron Theatre, Gruen Guild Theater, Omnibus, and The Pepsi-Cola Playhouse, before leaving for New York due to the Red Scare in the early 1950s. Lloyd’s Hollywood career was resuscitated when Hitchcock hired him in 1957 to associate produce Alfred Hitchcock Presents which lead to his direction of 20-plus episodes of both Alfred Hitchcock Presents and The Alfred Hitchcock Hour episodes. He went on to direct and produce movies for television such as Companions in Nightmare (1968), starring Gig Young and Anne Baxter; Awake and Sing (1972), starring Walter Matthau, Felicia Farr and Martin Ritt; and Carola (1973), starring Leslie Caron, to name a few. Lloyd continues to work as an actor and has appeared in productions helmed by Martin Scorsese, Peter Weir, Curtis Hanson, and Stephen Frears.
Norman Lloyd has been a member of the Guild since 1952.
Lloyd passed away in May 2021.