Lloyd Nolan spent half a century on screen as the man the others turn to: the detective, the doctor, the officer who has heard it all before. He was rarely given the film, and he was rarely the reason it failed.
Fi1m perspective
In Peyton Place (1957) he is the doctor who keeps everyone's secrets. In a town of a dozen households coming apart, he is the one who knows what is behind each door and says less than he knows. That is the Nolan part, and he played it in one uniform or another for fifty years: policemen, detectives, doctors, men with a badge or a bag who are not the story but are asked to tidy it up.
He came to Hollywood in 1935, after stage work that began in the late 1920s and a training at the Pasadena Playhouse, and Paramount and Fox put him to work in B-pictures as cops and gangsters, including a run as the private detective Michael Shayne. Two 1945 films show what the studios had and did not quite use. In The House on 92nd Street he is the FBI inspector in a semi-documentary wartime thriller shot partly on location; in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn he is Officer McShane, the beat policeman, and the warmth of the part is the point. The complaint against him then, and it was a fair one, was that the notices were good and the parts stayed small.
The turn came on stage. In 1954 he originated Captain Queeg in The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial and played him again on television in 1955, a detailed study of a man coming to pieces under questioning, and for once the whole play was built around him. He described the work, to an interviewer that year, as "a workout, not a strain", which is roughly how he seems to have treated everything. Television kept him afterwards: three seasons as Dr Morton Chegley opposite Diahann Carroll in Julia (1968–71), and character parts in films and on television up to his death in 1985.
His last screen role was Evan in Woody Allen's Hannah and Her Sisters (1986). We liked that film a good deal, and honesty requires us to say our review did not single him out; he is one voice in a large and well-tuned ensemble, and that is where he spent most of his working life. It is Peyton Place where we noticed him. The film is longer and politer than it should be, and among all those doors being opened one at a time, his was the one we were glad to see swing back, because he plays the town's doctor as a man who has already decided what he thinks and is waiting to see whether anyone will ask.
Watch Peyton Place for Hope Lange and Diane Varsi, as we said at the time, and then notice who the town goes to when it is in trouble. It is usually Nolan, and he is usually right.
Biography
Lloyd Benedict Nolan (11 August 1902 – 27 September 1985) was an American stage, film and television actor. Born in San Francisco, California, he attended Santa Clara Preparatory School and briefly studied at Stanford University before pursuing acting. He began his career on stage with the Dennis Players in Cape Cod and later moved to Hollywood, where he appeared in numerous films, often as doctors, private detectives or policemen.
Nolan originated the role of private investigator Michael Shayne in a series of 1940s B movies and played notable parts in films including The House on 92nd Street (1945). On television he starred in Julia (1968–1971) and guest-starred in series such as Bonanza, Murder, She Wrote and Remington Steele. One of his final roles was as Evan, opposite Maureen O'Sullivan, in Woody Allen's Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), released after his death.
