The Third Comedic Genius Of The Silent Film Era? F*** Yeah!

April 20, 1893 – March 8, 1971



Harold Lloyd ranks alongside Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton as one of the most popular and influential film comedians of the silent film era. Lloyd made nearly 200 comedy films, both silent and "talkies", between 1914 and 1947. He is best known for his "Glasses Character", a resourceful, success-seeking go-getter who was perfectly in tune with 1920s era America.



After filming “Safety Last!” Harold married his leading lady, Mildred Davis, and they raised three children together.

Harold constructed an elaborate movie star home in Beverly Hills and called it, Greenacres. Harold Lloyd continues to be recognized as one of the three supreme geniuses of silent film comedy. His appeal in his heyday was different than any of his contemporaries, for his character, the optimistic plucky young man who smiled and fought his way through all adversity, mirrored his audiences in outward appearance and in inward determination, in a way that no other comedian ever did.



His best known pose - dangling from the hands of a clock, stories in the air - is just one of a host of vivid images that the Lloyd audience member comes away with. It has been said that, once you see a Lloyd film, you want to see another. Harold was an innovator in the movie business. He pioneered new camera techniques and was one of the first filmmakers to preview his comedies to a test audience, and then re-shoot, re-cut and preview them again. At a time before unions, Harold paid his crew year-round, even when they weren’t shooting a film.



In 1924, Lloyd became the independent producer of his own films. These included his most accomplished mature features Girl Shy, The Freshman, The Kid Brother, and Speedy, his final silent film. All of these films were enormously successful and profitable, and Lloyd would eventually become the highest paid film performer of the 1920s. Of all the silent film comedians, Harold Lloyd was the most profitable. His films out grossed the movies of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, and he made more films than both of them put together.



They were also highly influential and still find many fans among modern audiences, a testament to the originality and film-making skill of Lloyd and his collaborators. Like other great silent comics, Lloyd was the driving creative force in his films, particularly the feature-length films.. From this success he became one of the wealthiest and most influential figures in early Hollywood.



In 1953, Lloyd received a special Academy Award for being a "master comedian and good citizen." Harold Lloyd has two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. His was only the fourth ceremony preserving his handprints, footprints, autograph, and outline of his famed glasses (which were actually a pair of sunglasses with the lenses removed), at Grauman's Chinese Theatre, in 1927.

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