Harold Lloyd

Harold Lloyd came out of Nebraska with ambitions to act, and he broke into the movies in the 1910s as one of countless young hopefuls scrambling for work in the new comedy factories of Los Angeles. His early attempts to build a character borrowed too heavily from Chaplin, and they went nowhere. His breakthrough came when he threw out the tramp costumes and put on a pair of round horn-rimmed glasses.

The "Glass Character," as he called him, was something new in screen comedy: not a clown or an outsider but an ordinary, ambitious American boy, eager, optimistic, a striver who wanted the girl and the job and would climb anything to get them. That last part was literal. Lloyd built a series of "thrill" comedies around dizzying feats of height and nerve, and in "Safety Last!" he gave the world one of the most famous images in film history, hanging from the hands of a clock high above a city street. The stunt was more remarkable still because Lloyd performed it having already lost the thumb and forefinger of his right hand in a prop-bomb accident, working ever after in a flesh-colored prosthetic glove.

His films were carefully engineered crowd-pleasers, tested before audiences and cut for maximum laughs, and in the 1920s he was often more commercially successful than either Chaplin or Keaton. "The Freshman," "The Kid Brother," and "Speedy" showed his everyman charm and his flair for building a comic set piece to a frenzied climax. Crucially, Lloyd owned his own films outright, a business instinct that made him wealthy and, in later decades, the guardian of his own legacy.

Sound and changing tastes slowed him in the 1930s, and he gradually retired from acting to enjoy his fortune, his estate, and his hobbies. Because he kept his films locked away and out of circulation for years, his reputation faded while Chaplin's and Keaton's grew, and only later did audiences rediscover just how inventive and daring he had been. He received an honorary Academy Award in 1953 and died in 1971.