Actors - Harold Lloyd

Home > Listing Index > Actors > Harold Lloyd

	Actors - Harold Lloyd

Harold Clayton Lloyd (April 20, 1893–March 8, 1971) was an American actor and film maker, most famous for his hugely successful and influential silent film comedies.

Harold Lloyd ranks alongside Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton as one of the most popular and influential film comedians of the silent film era. Lloyd made nearly 200 comedy films, both silent and sound, between 1914 and 1947. He is best known for his "Glasses Character", a resourceful, success-seeking go-getter who was perfectly in tune with 1920s era America.

His films frequently contained "thrill sequences" of extended chase scenes and daredevil physical feats, for which he is best remembered today. The image of Lloyd hanging from the hands of a clock high above the street in Safety Last (1923) is one of the most enduring images in all of cinema. Lloyd did many of these dangerous stunts himself, despite having severely injured himself in a 1919 accident with a prop bomb that resulted in the loss of the thumb and index finger of his right hand (the injury was disguised on film with the use of a special prosthetic glove).

Early Life, Entry Into Films

Lloyd, born in Burchard, Nebraska, had moved west with his family after his father failed in numerous business ventures. He had acted in theater since boyhood, and started acting in one-reel film comedies shortly after moving to California in 1912 in San Diego, California.

Lloyd soon began working with Thomas Edison's motion picture company, Universal, and eventually formed a partnership with fellow struggling actor and director Hal Roach, who had formed his own studio in 1913. Lloyd became the most successful of Roach's comic actors between 1915 and 1919. In his early career, Lloyd's film character Lonesome Luke was a frenetic imitation of Chaplin. By 1918 Lloyd and Roach had developed the "Glasses Character" (always named "Harold" in the films), a much more mature comedy character with greater potential for sympathy and emotional depth. Beginning in 1921, they moved from shorts to feature length comedies. These included the acclaimed Grandma's Boy (1922), which pioneered the combination of complex character development and film comedy, the sensational Safety Last (1923), which cemented Lloyd's stardom, and Why Worry? (1923).

Lloyd and Roach parted ways in 1924, and Lloyd became the independent producer of his own films. These included his most accomplished mature features Girl Shy (1924), The Freshman (1925), The Kid Brother (1927), and Speedy (1928). His final silent film, Welcome Danger (1929), was originally a silent film but Harold Lloyd decided late in the production to remake it with a soundtrack. All of these films were enormously successful and profitable. They were also highly influential and remain entertaining (even astonishing) to modern audiences, a testament to the originality and film-making skill of Lloyd and his talented collaborators. Like the other silent great comics, Lloyd was the driving creative force in his films, particularly the feature-length films. From this success he became one of the wealthiest and most influential figures in early Hollywood; his palatial sixteen-acre Beverley Hills estate, nicknamed "Greenacres", was legendary for its elaborate landscaping and architecture.

'Talkies' and Semi-Successful Transition

In 1924 he formed his own independent film production company, the Harold Lloyd Film Corporation, with his films distributed by Pathe and later Paramount. Lloyd was a founding member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Lloyd made the transition to sound in 1929 with Welcome Danger (the original unreleased silent version of this film was screened in various cities on the 2005 rerelease of Lloyd's films), but made only a handful of sound films until 1937 (most notably "Movie Crazy" in 1932 and the excellent ensemble film Milky Way in 1936).

Unfortunately, his character was out of tune with movie audiences of the Great Depression, who failed to respond as before. His career began to decline, and Lloyd retired from the screen, but he returned for an additional starring appearance in The Sin of Harold Diddlebock (1948), an homage to Lloyd's career directed by Preston Sturges and financed by Howard Hughes.

Marriage and Home

Lloyd married his leading lady, Mildred Davis, in February 1923. Together, they had two children: Gloria (born in 1923), and Harold jr., (born 1931, died 1971). They also adopted Peggy in 1930. Lloyd, for a time, prevented Davis from continuing her acting career. He later relented, but by that time her career momentum was lost. Mildred died in 1969, two years before Lloyd's death.

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for Harold Lloyd ]

This page is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia article Harold Lloyd; it is used under the GNU Free Documentation License. You may redistribute it, verbatim or modified, providing that you comply with the terms of the GFDL.

Actors - Harold Lloyd

Early Life, Entry Into Films

'Talkies' and Semi-Successful Transition

Marriage and Home

Searches on eBay

Related searches on eBay