Alma Lloyd

Alma Lloyd (April 3, 1914 – June 14, 1988) was an American actress and the daughter of film director Frank Lloyd and his wife Alma Haller, a vaudeville actress. Born into a family with deep ties to the entertainment industry, Lloyd began her performing career on stage, training at the Pasadena Community Playhouse before transitioning to film and theater work as an adult.

Lloyd's stage experience preceded her film career, and in 1935 she appeared on Broadway in The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles. That same year, Warner Brothers signed her to a long-term contract in July, and by late 1935 she was among a group of actresses — including Kay Linaker, June Travis, Paula Stone, and Marie Wilson — identified by the studio as candidates for stardom. A 1935 edition of the Nashua Telegraph pictured her presenting a winner's trophy to athlete Frank Wykoff.

Her film work had begun in childhood, when she took a small part in The Wise Guy, a 1925 film directed by her father. As an adult, she co-starred in the 1936 Louis King-directed western Song of the Saddle, playing Jen Coburn alongside Dick Foran and Charles Middleton. Also in 1936, she appeared in The Big Noise, known alternatively as Modern Madness, as Betty Trent, a young woman who falls in love with her father's business partner, a character played by Warren Hull. The film's plot also centers on an extortion scheme by gangsters targeting her father and her lover.

Lloyd was cast as Florence Udney in the Warner Bros. production Anthony Adverse, listed alongside Claude Rains, Olivia de Havilland, and Steffi Duna as additions to the cast. She prepared extensively for the role, and her scenes with Fredric March were noted by those involved in the production. However, when she attended the film's preview with her parents and friends, she discovered that all of her scenes had been cut due to excessive footage. A similar fate had befallen other performers in other productions, including Valerie Hobson in Great Expectations and Sara Haden in A Midsummer Night's Dream.

In 1938, Lloyd appeared in If I Were King, directed and produced by her father Frank Lloyd, in the supporting role of Colette. Despite earlier promise — including a co-starring credit in Song of the Saddle — her career did not advance at the pace that had been predicted, in contrast to a fellow cast member, Ellen Drew. In a March 1936 article in the Chicago Daily Tribune, Lloyd had spoken candidly about the complications of being Frank Lloyd's daughter, noting that his habit of checking on her progress with colleagues such as Guy Kibbee, and his practice of taking her out socially, interfered with her ability to study lines and attend to rehearsals.

On November 11, 1939, Lloyd married actor and playwright Franklin Gray in Los Angeles. The two had met five years earlier during a theater guild production. She subsequently left acting to raise a family, and the couple had four children: Christopher, born in 1942; Antonia, born in 1947; Jonathan, born in 1951; and Miranda, born in 1954. Three of her children went on to work in film: Christopher makes documentary films, Miranda works as a film editor, and Antonia, also known as Tonia Guerrero, became a teacher and translator and has been active in efforts to preserve and promote her grandfather Frank Lloyd's films. Lloyd's final place of residence was in California, where she died on June 14, 1988, at the age of 74.