Lloyd Nolan Biography
Lloyd Benedict Nolan (August 11, 1902 – September 27, 1985) was an American film and television actor.
Biography
Nolan was born in San Francisco, California, the son of Margaret and James Nolan, who was a shoe manufacturer. He began his career on stage and was subsequently lured to Hollywood, where he played mainly doctors, detectives, and police officers in many movie roles.
He was a brother to the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity (Sigma Rho chapter).
Film career
Although many critics hailed his acting ability and it was generally acknowledged that he never gave a bad performance, Nolan was relegated to B movies for the most part. Yet even so, he costarred with such actresses as Mae West, Dorothy McGuire, and the former Metropolitan Opera soprano, Gladys Swarthout. Under contract to Paramount and 20th Century Fox studios, he assayed starring roles in the late 30s and early-to-mid 40s and appeared as the lead character of the "Michael Shayne" detective series. Oddly, the first screen version of Raymond Chandler's novel
The High Window was transformed in 1942 from a Philip Marlowe adventure into part of the Michael Shayne series starring Nolan as Shayne. The film was remade five years later as
The Brasher Doubloon with George Montgomery as Marlowe.
The majority of Nolan's films comprised light entertainment with an emphasis on action. His most famous films include:
Atlantic Adventure, costarring Nancy Carroll;
Ebb Tide;
Wells Fargo;
Every Day's A Holiday, starring Mae West;
Bataan; and
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, with Dorothy McGuire and James Dunn. He also gave a strong performance in the 1957 film
Peyton Place with Lana Turner.
Nolan subsequently contributed many solid and key character parts in numerous other films. One of these films,
The House on 92nd Street, was a startling anomaly to audiences in 1945. It was a conflation of several true incidents of attempted sabotage by the Nazi regime - incidents which the FBI was able to thwart during World War II - and many scenes were filmed on location in New York City, an unusual occurrence at the time. Nolan portrayed FBI agent Briggs, and actual FBI employees interacted with Nolan throughout the film. He repeated the role in a subsequent movie,
The Street with No Name.
Other endeavors
Later in his career, he returned to the stage and appeared on television to great acclaim in
The Caine Mutiny Court Martial, for which he received an Emmy award for portraying Captain Queeg, the role made famous by Humphrey Bogart. Nolan also made guest appearances in television shows including NBC's
The Ford Show, Starring Tennessee Ernie Ford,
The Bing Crosby Show, a sitcom on ABC and the Emmy-winning NBC anthology series
The Barbara Stanwyck Show. He appeared in the NBC western
Bonanza as LaDuke, a New Orleans detective. In 1967, he and Strother Martin guest starred in the episode "A Mighty Hunter Before the Lord" of NBC's
The Road West series starring Barry Sullivan. Nolan co-starred in the pioneering NBC series
Julia, with Diahann Carroll, who became the first African American to star in her own television series outside of the role of a domestic worker.
He founded the Jay Nolan Autistic Center (now known as Jay Nolan Community Services) in honor of his son Jay who had autism and was chairman of the annual Save Autistic Children Telethon.
Nolan died of lung cancer in Los Angeles at the age of eighty-three.
Source: Wikipedia Lloyd Nolan page
