Harold Lloyd

Biography

HAROLD CLAYTON LLOYD was born in Burchard, Nebraska, USA, on April 20, 1893, the second son of James Darsie Lloyd and Elizabeth Fraser. During his childhood, he lived, at various times, in the towns of Pawnee City, Humboldt, Beatrice, and Omaha, Nebraska, and Fort Collins, Durango, and Denver, Colorado. The reason for this nomadic existence was his father's difficulty in keeping a job; it was this inconsistency that led Elizabeth to divorce her husband, nicknamed "Foxy," in 1910. The two boys (elder brother Gaylord Fraser Lloyd was born in 1888, and died in 1943) shuffled between mother and father for a time, before making permanent home with Foxy.

Throughout Harold's childhood, he shared with his mother a passion for the theatre, and engaged in amateur theatrics for most of his adolescence. In 1906, young Harold had met the single greatest influence on his histrionic art: actor and mentor John Lane Connor, who took the youngster under his wing and engrained in him the desire for perfection which was to stay with Lloyd for the rest of his life. With each role Harold played, his notices got stronger, and his zeal for theatrics grew alongside.

In 1912, Foxy, now working for the Singer Sewing Machine Company, had an accident, which produced a monetary settlement of three thousand dollars. With this money, the Lloyd men could really live, but the question was: where? The flip of a coin sent the men to San Diego, California, where Connor had established a dramatic school, which Harold joined immediately, as both a student and an instructor.

Later that year, after the dramatic school closed, Harold and some of the other students took roles in The Old Monk's Tale, a production of The Edison Company. This brief role as a Yaqui Indian was the film debut of Harold Lloyd, and was followed by sporadic extra work with Edison, Keystone and Universal. While at Universal City, Lloyd met a fellow extra, Hal Roach, who would later establish his own production house, The Rolin Film Company, and take on Lloyd as principal talent. Together, the young men would learn how to make films, and would grow to virtually define film comedy in the process.