Silent shorts and features 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 juvenile roles in several
Keystone Film Company comedies. He tried to find work at the
Universal studio, but "the gatekeeper was a crabby old soul who let me understand that it would be a great pleasure to keep me out", as Lloyd recalled in his 1928 memoir. He solved his problem with the ingenuity of his later screen character: "The next morning I brought a makeup box. At noon I dodged behind a billboard, made up, mingled with the [extras] and returned with them through the gate without challenge." Lloyd soon became friendly with aspiring filmmaker
Hal Roach. Lloyd began collaborating with Roach, who had formed his own studio in 1913. Roach and Lloyd created "Lonesome Luke", a comic character inspired by the success of
Charlie Chaplin. Luke was a comic grotesque with loud clothes and a false moustache, similar to many early screen comics, but the young Lloyd gave the character great energy and enthusiasm. His antics won a popular following, and his one-reel, 10-minute comedies were soon expanded to two-reel, 20-minute comedies. Hal Roach hired
Bebe Daniels to support Lloyd in 1914; Lloyd and Daniels became involved romantically and were known as "The Boy" and "The Girl". and
Bebe Daniels By late 1917, Lloyd had tired of Lonesome Luke and wanted to develop his screen presence beyond an imitation of his contemporaries. He envisioned an entirely new character, not a costumed clown but an everyday young man in street clothes who faced comic situations with resourcefulness. To make the look of the new character distinctive, he adopted a pair of lensless, horn-rimmed glasses. Lloyd thought that
Pathé, Roach's distributor, would resist the new character because the Lonesome Luke films were proven moneymakers, and the company didn't want to lose that revenue. "Privately I believed that Pathé would conclude to hire another comedian and carry on with Lonesome Luke", wrote Lloyd. "Roach, however, argued my case better than I could have done." Lloyd agreed to a compromise: He would continue to make Lonesome Luke two-reelers, but he would introduce his new "Glass" character in less expensive one-reel shorts. As the new character caught on, Lonesome Luke was phased out. The "Glass" character (often named "Harold" in the silent films) was a much more mature comedy character with greater potential for sympathy and emotional depth, and was easy for audiences of the time to identify with. "When I adopted the glasses", Lloyd recalled in a 1962 interview with
Harry Reasoner, "it more or less put me in a different category because I became a human being. He was a kid that you would meet next door, across the street, but at the same time I could still do all the crazy things that we did before, but you believed them. They were natural and the romance could be believable." Unlike most silent comedy personae, "Harold" was never typecast to a social class, but he was always striving for success and recognition. Within the first few years of the character's debut, he had portrayed social ranks ranging from a starving vagrant in
From Hand to Mouth to a wealthy socialite in ''
Captain Kidd's Kids''. in
A Sailor-Made Man (1921) In 1919, Bebe Daniels declined to renew her contract with Hal Roach, leaving the Lloyd series to pursue her dramatic aspirations. Later that year, Lloyd replaced Daniels with
Mildred Davis after being told by Roach to watch Davis in a movie. 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". Lloyd and Davis married in 1923. '' (1922) On August 24, 1919, while posing for some promotional still photographs in the Los Angeles Witzel Photography Studio, he picked up what he thought was a prop bomb and lit it with a cigarette. It exploded and mangled his right hand, causing him to lose a thumb and forefinger. The blast was severe enough that the cameraman and prop director nearby were also seriously injured. Lloyd was in the act of lighting a cigarette from the fuse of the bomb when it exploded, also badly burning his face and chest and injuring his eye. Despite the proximity of the blast to his face, he retained his sight. As he recalled in 1930: "I thought I would surely be so disabled that I would never be able to work again. I didn't suppose that I would have one five-hundredth of what I have now. Still I thought, 'Life is worth while.
Just to be alive. I still think so." 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 formed his own independent production company, the Harold Lloyd Film Corporation, He now made feature films exclusively, releasing them first through Pathé, then
Paramount. These included his accomplished comedies
Girl Shy,
The Freshman (his highest-grossing silent feature),
The Kid Brother and
Speedy, his final silent film. All of these films were enormously successful and profitable, and Lloyd eventually became the highest-paid film performer of the 1920s. Gladys Lloyd Cassell (wife of
Edward G. Robinson),
Sam Hardy, and Lloyd's mother raised funds for it. 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, including
Lucille Ball's
A Girl, a Guy, and a Gob in 1941, but otherwise retired from the screen until 1947. He returned for an additional starring appearance in
The Sin of Harold Diddlebock, Such was Lloyd's disdain that he sued Howard Hughes, the California Corporation, and RKO for damages to his reputation "as an outstanding motion picture star and personality", eventually accepting a $30,000 settlement.
Radio, nude photography and retirement In October 1944, Lloyd emerged as the director and host of
The Old Gold Comedy Theater, an NBC radio anthology series, after Preston Sturges, who had turned the job down, recommended him for it. At the installation ceremony for this position on July 25, 1949, 90,000 people were present at Soldier Field, including then sitting U.S. President
Harry S Truman, also a 33° Scottish Rite Mason. In recognition of his services to the nation and
Freemasonry, Lloyd was invested with the Rank and Decoration of Knight Commander Court of Honour in 1955 and coroneted an Inspector General Honorary, 33°, in 1965. He appeared as himself on several television shows during his retirement, first on
Ed Sullivan's variety show
Toast of the Town June 5, 1949, and again on July 6, 1958. He appeared as the mystery guest on ''
What's My Line? on April 26, 1953, and three times on This Is Your Life'': in 1954 for a tribute to Mack Sennett and another for Bebe Daniels, and in 1955, when he was surprised for his own tribute. On November 6, 1956,
The New York Times reported "Lloyd's Career Will Be Filmed". It said, as the first step, Lloyd would write the story of his life for Simon and Schuster. Then, the movie would be produced by
Jerry Wald for
20th Century-Fox, limiting the screenplay to Lloyd's professional career. The tentative title for both was
The Glass Character, based on the glasses which were Lloyd's trademark. Neither project materialized. Lloyd studied colors and
microscopy, and he was very involved with photography, including
3D photography and color film experiments. Some of the earliest two-color
Technicolor tests were shot at his Beverly Hills home (these are included as extra material in the
Harold Lloyd Comedy Collection DVD Box Set). He became known for his nude photographs of models, such as
Bettie Page and stripper
Dixie Evans, for a number of men's magazines. He also took photos of
Marilyn Monroe lounging at his pool in a bathing suit, which were published after her death. In 2004, his granddaughter Suzanne produced ''Harold Lloyd's Hollywood Nudes in 3D!'', a book of selections from his photographs.(). Lloyd also provided encouragement and support for a number of younger actors, such as
Debbie Reynolds,
Robert Wagner and particularly
Jack Lemmon, whom Harold declared as his own choice to play him in a movie of his life and work.
Renewed interest Lloyd kept copyright control of most of his films and re-released them infrequently after his retirement. In 1965 he was interviewed by the
Social Security Administration. The film was well received by most critics and audiences as a reminder of Lloyd's creative output as the third (with Chaplin and Keaton) of the "Big Three" great
silent comedy filmmakers. The renewed interest in Lloyd helped restore his status among film historians. Throughout his later years, he screened his films for audiences at special charity and educational events, to great acclaim, and found a particularly receptive audience among college audiences: "Their whole response was tremendous because they didn't miss a gag; anything that was even a little subtle, they got it right away." Following his death, and after extensive negotiations, most of his feature films were leased to
Time-Life Films in 1974. As Tom Dardis confirms: "Time-Life prepared horrendously edited musical-sound-track versions of the silent films, which are intended to be shown on TV at sound speed [24 frames per second], and which represent everything that Harold feared would happen to his best films". The Time-Life series was frequently repeated by the BBC in the United Kingdom during the 1980s, and in 1990 the documentary
Harold Lloyd: The Third Genius was produced by Kevin Brownlow and David Gill, following two similar series based on Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. Composer
Carl Davis wrote a new score for
Safety Last! which he performed live during a showing of the film with the
Royal Scottish National Orchestra to great acclaim in 1993. The Brownlow and Gill documentary was shown as part of the PBS series
American Masters, and created a renewed interest in Lloyd's work in the United States, but the films were largely unavailable. In 2002, the Harold Lloyd Trust re-launched him with the publication of the book
Harold Lloyd: Master Comedian by
Jeffrey Vance and Suzanne Lloyd, and a series of feature films and short subjects called "
The Harold Lloyd Classic Comedies" produced by Jeffrey Vance with executive producer Suzanne Lloyd and Harold Lloyd Entertainment. The new cable television and home video versions of Lloyd's great silent features and many shorts were remastered with new orchestral scores by
Robert Israel. These versions are frequently shown on the Turner Classic Movies (TCM) cable channel. A DVD collection of these restored or remastered versions of his feature films and important short subjects was released by New Line Cinema in partnership with the Harold Lloyd Trust in 2005, along with theatrical screenings in the United States, Canada and Europe.
Criterion Collection has acquired the home video rights to the Lloyd library and has released
Safety Last!, The
Freshman,
Speedy, and
The Kid Brother. In the June 2006, Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra Silent Film Gala program book for
Safety Last!, film historian Jeffrey Vance stated that Robert A. Golden, Lloyd's assistant director, routinely doubled for Harold Lloyd between 1921 and 1927. According to Vance, Golden doubled Lloyd in the bit with Harold shimmy shaking off the building's ledge after a mouse crawls up his trousers. ==Personal life==