Harold Clayton Lloyd Sr. (April 20, 1893-March 8, 1971) was an American actor, comedian, and stunt performer who appeared in many silent comedy films.
Lloyd is considered alongside Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton as one of the most influential film comedians of the silent film era.
Lloyd made nearly 200 comedy films, both silent and talkies, between 1914 and 1947. His bespectacled Glasses character was a resourceful, success-seeking go-getter who matched the zeitgeist of the 1920s-era United States.
His films frequently contained thrill sequences of extended chase scenes and daredevil physical feats. Lloyd hanging from the hands of a clock high above the street, in reality a trick shot, in Safety Last! (1923) is considered one of the most enduring images in all cinema.
Lloyd performed the lesser stunts himself, despite having injured himself in August 1919 while doing publicity pictures for the Roach studio. An accident with a bomb mistaken as a prop resulted in the loss of the thumb and index finger of his right hand, the injury was disguised on future films with the use of a special prosthetic glove, and was almost undetectable on the screen.
He was far more prolific than Chaplin, releasing 12 feature films in the 1920s while Chaplin released just four, and made more money overall ($15.7 million to Chaplin's $10.5 million).
Lloyd was born on April 20, 1893 in Burchard, Nebraska, the son of James Darsie Lloyd and Sarah Elisabeth Fraser. His paternal great-grandparents were Welsh.
In 1910, after his father had several business venture failures, Lloyd's parents divorced and his father moved with his son to San Diego, California. Lloyd had acted in theatre since a child, but in California he began acting in one-reel film comedies around 1912.
More information: Harold Lloyd
Lloyd worked with Thomas Edison's motion picture company, and his first role was a small part as a Yaqui Indian in the production of The Old Monk's Tale. At the age of 20, Lloyd moved to Los Angeles, and took up roles in several Keystone Film Company comedies. He was also hired by Universal Studios as an extra and soon became friends with aspiring filmmaker Hal Roach.
Lloyd began collaborating with Roach who had formed his own studio in 1913. Roach and Lloyd created Lonesome Luke, similar to and playing off the success of Charlie Chaplin films.
Lloyd hired Bebe Daniels as a supporting actress in 1914; the two of them were involved romantically and were known as The Boy and The Girl.
In 1919, she left Lloyd to pursue her dramatic aspirations. Later that year, Lloyd replaced Daniels with Mildred Davis, whom he would later marry. Lloyd was tipped off by Hal Roach to watch Davis in a film. Reportedly, the more Lloyd watched Davis the more he liked her. Lloyd's first reaction in seeing her was that she looked like a big French doll.
Beginning in 1921, Roach and Lloyd moved from shorts to feature-length comedies. These included the acclaimed Grandma's Boy, which along with Chaplin's The Kid pioneered the combination of complex character development and film comedy, the highly popular Safety Last! (1923), which cemented Lloyd's stardom and is the oldest film on the American Film Institute's List of 100 Most Thrilling Movies, and Why Worry? (1923). Although Lloyd performed many athletic stunts in his films, Harvey Parry was his stunt double for the more dangerous sequences.
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, The Freshman his highest-grossing silent feature, The Kid Brother, and Speedy, his final silent film. Welcome Danger (1929) was originally a silent film but Lloyd decided late in the production to remake it with dialogue. All of these films were enormously successful and profitable, and Lloyd would eventually become the highest paid film performer of the 1920s.
In 1924, Lloyd formed his own independent film production company, the Harold Lloyd Film Corporation, with his films distributed by Pathé and later Paramount and Twentieth Century-Fox. Lloyd was a founding member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
More information: Vanity Fair
In 1924, Lloyd formed his own independent film production company, the Harold Lloyd Film Corporation, with his films distributed by Pathé and later Paramount and Twentieth Century-Fox. Lloyd was a founding member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
Released a few weeks before the start of the Great Depression, Welcome Danger was a huge financial success, with audiences eager to hear Lloyd's voice on film. Lloyd's rate of film releases, which had been one or two a year in the 1920s, slowed to about one every two years until 1938.
The films released during this period were: Feet First, with a similar scenario to Safety Last which found him clinging to a skyscraper at the climax; Movie Crazy with Constance Cummings; The Cat's-Paw, which was a dark political comedy and a big departure for Lloyd; and The Milky Way, which was Lloyd's only attempt at the fashionable genre of the screwball comedy film.
To this point the films had been produced by Lloyd's company. However, his go-getting screen character was out of touch with Great Depression film audiences of the 1930s. As the length of time between his film releases increased, his popularity declined, as did the fortunes of his production company. His final film of the decade, Professor Beware, was made by the Paramount staff, with Lloyd functioning only as actor and partial financier.
On March 23, 1937, Lloyd sold the land of his studio, Harold Lloyd Motion Picture Company, to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The location is now the site of the Los Angeles California Temple.
Lloyd produced a few comedies for RKO Radio Pictures in the early 1940s but otherwise retired from the screen until 1947. He returned for an additional starring appearance in The Sin of Harold Diddlebock, an ill-fated homage to Lloyd's career, directed by Preston Sturges and financed by Howard Hughes.
More information: JSTOR Daily
I just took life and poked fun at it.
We made it, so it could be understood the world over,
without language barriers.
We seem to have conquered the time barrier, too.
Harold Lloyd
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