World's oldest actor who worked with Hitchcock and Wells dies in Hollywood

At the 107th year of life in Los Angeles, actor, producer and director Norman Lloyd died, reports Variety. He was considered the oldest representative of the film industry in the world.

Lloyd began his acting career in the 1930s, and soon joined the troupe of the Mercury Theater, which was founded by Orson Welles. In 1940, the entire troupe, including such stars as Joseph Cotten and Vincent Price, moved from New York to Hollywood: Wells was going to film Heart of Darkness. However, the project never materialized.

Lloyd may have starred in Wells' first motion picture, Citizen Kane, but at that point he left one genius filmmaker for another. Alfred Hitchcock offered him the lead role in Saboteur (1942) - Lloyd agreed and played the villain who falls from the top of the Statue of Liberty in the film's famous final scene.

This was the beginning of a long collaboration with Hitchcock: the actor also played in "Bewitched", and in the 1950s the director insisted that Lloyd be hired as assistant producer on the television series "Alfred Hitchcock Presents". Thanks to this, Lloyd escaped the fate of becoming one of the victims of the witch hunt that Senator McCarthy launched in those years in Hollywood.

Norman Lloyd also starred with Jean Renoir and Charlie Chaplin, and worked as a producer and director on the set of Columbo. Among his most recent acting works are Martin Scorsese's Age of Innocence and Peter Weir's Dead Poets Society. Until his last days, he participated in festivals and retrospectives. According to friends of Norman Lloyd, the secret of his long and active life, he considered the ability to "avoid unpleasant people".