Lloyd, Harold (Clayton) ), American motion-picture
actor, one of the leading performers of the golden age of comedy.
Lloyd made nearly 500 films, both silent and sound, all of them
comedies and all of them featuring extended chase sequences with
daredevil physical feats.
Lloyd was born in Burchard, Nebraska, and started acting in one-reel
film comedies in 1912 in San Diego, California. In 1917 Lloyd
(in conjunction with his producer and director, Hal Roach) invented
his familiar characterization of the bespectacled, bumbling optimist,
and in 1921 he played this role in his first feature-length film,
A Sailor-Made Man. Lloyd's best-known films include Safety Last
(1923), Why Worry (1923), Girl Shy (1924), The Freshman (1925),
For Heaven's Sake (1926), The Kid Brother (1927), Feet First
(1931), Movie Crazy (1932), The Cat's Paw (1934), and The Milky
Way (1936).
By the 1940s Lloyd was no longer active in the film industry,
but in 1947 director Preston Sturges lured him out of retirement
for a film intended to explore the later life of Lloyd's innocent
optimist character of the 1920s (it included footage from his
popular motion picture The Freshman). The film, The Sin of Harold
Diddlebock, was a failure, and a later truncated version, Mad
Wednesday (1950), did no better. In 1962 Lloyd produced a compilation
film featuring scenes from his old comedies, Harold Lloyd's World
of Comedy. This and its sequel, The Funny Side of Life (1953),
spurred a renewed interest in his work. Lloyd's autobiography,
An American Comedy, was published in 1928 and was later reissued.
In 1952 he received a special Academy Award hailing him as a
"master comedian."
