MOST people recog nize Norman Lloyd these days as Dr. Aus chlander, the crusty but lovable hospital administrator he played on the 1980s TV series “St. Elsewhere.”
But the 93-year-old – who will demonstrate his gifts as a legendary raconteur in a Q&A Monday night at Film Forum – has worked with everyone from Orson Welles to Cameron Diaz in a career as an actor, director and producer that spans seven decades.
Film Forum is also showing an excellent new documentary, “Who Is Norman Lloyd?” on a double-feature with his most famous movie – Alfred Hitchcock’s “Saboteur,” starring Lloyd in the title role, dangling precariously from the Statue of Liberty.
Hitchcock hired the Brooklyn-raised Lloyd after Welles – with whom he had worked on Broadway as one of the original members of the Mercury Theatre – was forced to abandon plans to film “The Heart of Darkness” with Lloyd.
And it was Hitchcock who defied the Hollywood blacklist to hire Lloyd as an associate producer for his legendary TV anthology series, “Alfred Hitchcock Presents.”
“The network told Hitch, there’s a problem with Lloyd, and he simply said, ‘I want him.’ They all could have done that,” Lloyd says from his home in California, his voice rising in anger. “But they were cowards. It was Hitch who freed me.”
Lloyd also directed and acted in numerous episodes, and it was his role as a “10th-rate mind reader who falls in love with a monkey” that lead to “one of the greatest moments in my entire 75-year-career in show business.”
In the episode, based on a short story by Ray Bradbury, the monkey turns into a woman who was played “by what we’d call a small person today, a Mexican burlesque stripper who went by the name of Venus de Mars.”
But the part was played mainly by a chimp named Joe, who appeared in many movies and TV shows and was interviewed, along with his trainer, by Lloyd and his co-producer on the show, Joan Harrison.
“Joe arrives in Joan’s Regency office dressed like a Parisian painter, with his stand-in, an ordinary chimp dressed in an ordinary suit,” Lloyd recalls.
“As we talk to the trainer about how to handle all this, the chimp begins to eye Miss Harrison, who was a beautiful woman. The trainer hands Joe a cigarette to distract him, but after a few puffs he loses interest.
“He wants Miss Harrison, and lo and behold, his tongue flops out, and he put his hand inside his trousers and starts to pull. The trainer excuses himself and says, ‘I have a little BB gun in the car – and I shoot him in the [butt] when he does that.’ ”
Lloyd, who most recently portrayed a blind nursing home patient opposite Cameron Diaz in “In Her Shoes,” and still plays tennis every day, doesn’t mind that most people know him as Dr. Auschlander.
“In one of my favorite episodes, a boy thinks he has cancer when he has his first wet dream, and I walk into the broom closet where he’s hiding and discuss it with him,” the actor says.
“It was a wonderful idea for a scene,” he says. “That series was like doing a very good Broadway show where you don’t have to do the same thing every night.”
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