Doris Lloyd

Biography

Doris Lloyd was an English actress with a lengthy film career. She appeared in over 150 films between 1920 and 1960. She spent most of her life abroad in the United States. In 1891, Lloyd was born in Walton, Liverpool. Her parents were Edward Franklin Lloyd and Hessy Jane McCappin. One of her grandfathers was reportedly an amateur actor,. Lloyd made her theatrical debut c. 1914, Liverpool Repertory Company. She made her film debut in the crime film The Shadow Between (1920), based on a novel by Silas Kitto Hocking (1850-1935). In the early 1920s, Lloyd traveled to the United States to visit her sister who had settled there. She found work as an actress in the United States, and decided to permanently settle there. Besides film appearances, Lloyd appeared in Broadway theater, in the Ziegfeld Follies, and with touring theaters, Though mostly playing minor and supporting roles, Lloyd had a few highlights in her film career. She played the sinister Russian spy Mrs. Travers in Disraeli (1929), Mrs. Cutten in Tarzan the Ape Man (1932), sympathetic thief Nancy Sikes in Oliver Twist (1933), school superintendent Miss Wetherby in Tarzan and the Leopard Woman (1946), and the "meek housekeeper" Mrs. Watchett in The Time Machine (1960). Lloyd voiced one of the talking roses in the animated film Alice in Wonderland (1951). Towards the end of her career she had bit parts as an unnamed depositor in Mary Poppins (1964), and as Baroness Ebberfeld in The Sound of Music (1965). Her last film appearance was in the comedy film Rosie! (1967). Lloyd died in May 1968, at the age of 76. She died in Santa Barbara, California, and was buried in the Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery of Glendale.