The American Jewish actor, director, and producer Norman Nathan Lloyd, who died May 10 at age 106, proved over a long career how in show business, it’s who you know as well as what you know that counts. In his 1990 memoir “Stages” from Scarecrow Press, reprinted in 2004 by Limelight Editions, Lloyd explains how he was born in Jersey City to Conservative Jewish parents who hastened back to the Bronx and eventually to Flatbush to enjoy New York culture.
His father Max managed a furniture store while his mother Sedia was a frustrated singer. When Lloyd was around nine years old, his mother took him for elocution and dance lessons. Lloyd and his mother haunted Broadway musicals of the 1920s and 30s, idolizing Al Jolson and Eddie Cantor, as well as the composers George Gershwin, Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin and Harold Arlen. As Lloyd told “The Jewish Week” in 2007: “The Jews are an artistic people… It’s clear from the music, the actors, the writers. They are just artists. In the early part of the 20th century when they first came over they had no money, but they still went to theater. The theater and education were the two biggest things in their lives. More important than clothes. I think it’s always been inherent in the race.”