Harold Clayton Lloyd was born in Burchard, Nebraska, on April 20, 1893, the younger son of Elizabeth Fraser and James Darsie Lloyd (nicknamed "Foxy"). The Lloyd's elder son, Gaylord, was born in 1888. During Harold's childhood, the Lloyd family frequently moved from city to city, in search of a better life (Foxy Lloyd was not much good at holding a job). At various times, they lived in the towns of Pawnee City, Humboldt, Beatrice, and Omaha, Nebraska, and Fort Collins, Durango, and Denver, Colorado. In 1910, Harold's mother, fed up with the family's nomadic existence, divorced her
… More unsuccessful husband. The two boys shuffled between mother and father for a time but finally ended up with Foxy and moved to San Diego, California, in 1912.
The move to California happened this way: Harold's father was working for the Singer Sewing Machine Company. One day, while driving the little cart in which he carried the sewing machines, Foxy was hit by a beer truck and sustained some injuries. When he received $3000 in settlement for this accident, Foxy and the boys decided it was time for another move and they flipped a coin to decide whether the destination was to be New York or California, with California winning. With his settlement money, Foxy opened a restaurant in San Diego, which fared about the same as his other business ventures.
By this time, Harold had already developed an interest in show business. Sharing his mother's passion for the theater, he made his stage debut at age 12 as Little Abe in "Tess of d'Ubervilles" with the Burwood Stock Company of Omaha. In 1906, he met the actor John Lane Connor, who was a lodger with the Lloyds and encouraged Harold's interest in the theater. In San Diego, Harold met up again with John Lane Connor, who had started a drama school there, where Harold became a student and instructor. Shortly afterward, when the school closed, the Edison Company asked Connor to supply extras, which led to Harold's first movie appearance in "The Old Monk's Tale" (1913). That year, Lloyd was also cast as an extra in a movie called "Rory 'o the Bogs," where he met fellow extra, Hal Roach. They also appeared in "Samson" (1914) and "The Patchwork Girl of Oz" (1914) together. While continuing to appear in films for the Edison Company, Lloyd also worked with Mack Sennett at the Keystone Film Company for a couple of years and then moved on to Universal for a few films, after which, in 1915, upon receiving an inheritance, Roach developed a film company (called Rolin Films) and invited Lloyd to star in his own film series.
Harold's first character was called Willie Work, an imitation of Charlie Chaplin's tramp character; at least 6 films starring Willie Work were released, and many more were made, but the character needed retooling. Lonesome Luke, Lloyd's second and more popular character, varied the tramp theme slightly and was characterized by too-tight clothing, size 12 shoes, a two-dot mustache, triangular eyebrows, and wide smile. With this character, 71 films were released between 1915 and 1917. Although the films made money and Hal Roach was satisfied with the character as is, Lloyd wanted to come up with something better, or at least more original, especially after he accidentally overheard a movie patron refer to him as "that guy who's trying to be Chaplin."
In 1917, after threatening to quit, Lloyd was permitted to introduce a new character, whom Lloyd dubbed "The Glass Character." This character, wearing horn-rimmed glasses and sometimes a straw hat, became Lloyd's most popular character and eventually made him rich. As opposed to his tramp-like characters, The Glass Character, a sort of underachieving everyman who always triumphed in the end, provided Lloyd with an almost infinite number of believable and sympathetic storylines, which contributed to the character's popularity with audiences.
By the beginning of the 1920s, Roach, Lloyd, and their film company had become a happy, creative, and profitable team, but some changes were in store. The first change was in Lloyd's leading lady: in 1919, Bebe Daniels was replaced by Mildred Davis, who became Mrs. Harold Lloyd in 1923. Another change was the length of Lloyd's films; up until this time, Lloyd had limited himself to one- or two-reelers, but in 1921 he tried his first feature-length film, "A Sailor-Made Man," and continued with feature-length films for the remainder of his career. Another important change was that Lloyd gradually deemphasized the slapstick and increased the character development in his films. He replaced the slapstick with clever and increasingly daring stunts that required a great deal of athletic ability.
The epitome of these athletic stunts was Lloyd's high-climbing act, which also came to be his trademark. The idea for this type of stunt first came to Lloyd one day when he was walking down the street and saw a crowd gathered around a tall building and discovered that the big attraction was a man scaling the building. This man, Bill Strother, taught Lloyd the tricks of the trade and appeared with Lloyd in what is probably his best-known film "Safety Last!" (1923), in which Lloyd is seen dangling from a clock on the side of a high-rise building.
Although safety precautions were taken during the filming of these stunts, their accomplishment is remarkable nevertheless, especially in that Lloyd was working with a disability resulting from injuries sustained during an accident at a photo shoot. On August 24, 1919, while posing for a publicity still at Witzel's Photographers in Los Angeles, Lloyd lit the fuse of a prop bomb with his cigarette, but the excessive smoke prohibited a good picture. As he was about to ask for a new fuse, the bomb exploded, temporarily blinding him and blowing the thumb and forefinger off his right hand. Not wanting his audience to know about his disability, Lloyd hid his impairment within a prosthetic glove, courtesy of Hal Roach and former glove salesman Sam Goldwyn.
In 1924, Lloyd left Roach and formed his own film company called "The Harold Lloyd Corporation." Elder brother, Gaylord, who had a short-lived career as a silent film comedian, became an assistant director and vice-president for Lloyd's company. Arguably his most popular film coming from this time was "The Freshman" (1925); the film "Speedy" finished up his silent film career in 1928. Releasing 11 silent features between 1921 and 1928, Lloyd was a more prolific film-maker than his contemporaries (e.g., Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton).
Lloyd, believing that audiences would never accept talking comedy films, entered the new business of sound films with trepidation. "Welcome Danger" (1929), although originally shot as a silent film, was reshot and released as Lloyd's first talkie. After this film, Lloyd returned to the daring stunts that had become his trademark in "Feet First" (1930), but his talkies did not prove as popular as his silents. This decline in popularity may have been partly due to Lloyd's inability to transfer his style of comedy to sound, but it was more likely due to the lack of appeal of his character's eternal optimism to Depression audiences. Lloyd limited his output to one film every 2 years, but he continued to lose popularity. In 1932, Lloyd released "Movie Crazy," which is now considered his funniest sound feature. Convinced it was going to be a hit, Harold and his family went on a trip to Europe, only to find out later upon their return that the film was a flop. Trying something different, Lloyd made the unusual film "The Cat's-Paw" in 1934. He followed this up with "The Milky Way" in 1936, which was a return to his more usual film style.
When his last movie "Professor Beware" (1938) flopped, Lloyd decided his acting career was over, but he did not withdraw from the film industry altogether at this point. He produced two films for RKO, "A Girl, A Guy, and a Gob" (1941) and "My Favorite Spy" (1942), before retiring from show business. Aside from losing his career in the 1940s, Lloyd suffered the losses of his mother (in 1941), his brother (in 1943), and his father (in 1947) as well.
In 1947, director Preston Sturges, who had enjoyed 'The Freshman," thought that revisiting this character later in life might make a good film, which would, at the same time, constitute a tribute to Lloyd's career. The resulting film, "The Sin of Harold Diddlebock," was not a resounding success, and 3 years later, producer Howard Hughes reissued it in a shortened form and renamed it "Mad Wednesday." Although the film was not particularly successful, Lloyd was nominated for a Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture Actor in a musical or comedy in 1951. He did not win, but he did receive an honorary Oscar for being a master comedian and good citizen in 1953. Around this time, Lloyd also made a few television appearances, mostly on game shows and talk shows.
Although Lloyd's show business career was over, he was not the type to stay idle for long. In fact, throughout his life, Lloyd had pursued a wide variety of hobbies, including stereo photography, bowling, dog breeding, color film research, magic, tennis, golf, painting, microscopy, and handball. In regard to photography and color film, some of the earliest 2-strip Technicolor tests were shot at his Beverly Hills home and he also took numerous 3-dimensional still photographs of friends, models, and celebrities, such as Marilyn Monroe. At his death, his collection of 3-D stills numbered 250,000. Lloyd received two George Eastman House Lifetime Achievement Awards in 1955 and 1957 for his work in photography.
In 1924, Harold and his father joined The Ancient Arabic Order of the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine, or The Shriners. In 1949, Harold was elected Imperial Potentate, the highest national office. During his year-long term in this office, and for the remainder of his life, he worked tirelessly on behalf of The Shriner's Hospitals for Crippled Children.
In the early 1960s, Lloyd introduced The Glass Character to a new generation of film-goers with a couple of compilation films, the first entitled "Harold Lloyd's World of Comedy" and the second entitled "Harold Lloyd's Funny Side of Life." These documentary-like films were composed of clips from his silent comedies accompanied by voice-over narration. At the same time, Lloyd began touring colleges and high schools, showing his films to young audiences. The renewed interest in his films brought Lloyd a great deal of pleasure in his last remaining years.
Mildred Davis, Lloyd's wife of 46 years, died on August 18, 1969, at the age of 68. The next year, Lloyd was diagnosed with prostate cancer and underwent surgery and cobalt treatments, which ultimately proved to be ineffective. Lloyd died at home on March 8, 1971, at the age of 77.
Since his death, Lloyd's achievements as a silent star have been recognized and appreciated by an ever-increasing audience, thanks to cable television channels such as Turner Classic Movies, to home video, and to The Harold Lloyd Trust, which is helping to keep his memory alive in future generations.
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