Christopher Lloyd

Christopher Lloyd is an American actor born on October 22, 1938, in Stamford, Connecticut, and raised in Westport, Connecticut. The youngest of six children, he is the son of Ruth Lloyd, a singer and sister of San Francisco mayor Roger Lapham, and Samuel R. Lloyd Jr., a lawyer. His maternal grandfather, Lewis Henry Lapham, was among the founders of the Texaco oil company, and Lloyd counts Mayflower passenger John Howland among his ancestors. He attended Staples High School in Westport, where he was involved in founding the school's theater company, the Staples Players.

Lloyd began his professional training as an apprentice at summer theaters in Mount Kisco, New York, and Hyannis, Massachusetts. At age 19 he took acting classes in New York City, including study at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre under Sanford Meisner. He recalled his New York theater debut as a replacement in a 1961 production of Fernando Arrabal's And They Put Handcuffs on the Flowers. His Broadway debut came in the short-lived Red, White and Maddox in 1969, and he returned to Broadway in 1977 for the musical Happy End. His third Broadway credit was Morning's at Seven. His stage work during the late 1960s and early 1970s earned him a Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Performance in 1973, as well as an Obie Award. Off-Broadway credits from that period include A Midsummer Night's Dream, Kaspar, The Harlot and the Hunted, The Seagull, Total Eclipse, Macbeth, In the Boom Boom Room, and a Jean Cocteau double bill of Orphée and The Human Voice at the Jean Cocteau Theater at 43 Bond Street in mid-1972. He also performed in Andrzej Wajda's adaptation of Dostoevsky's The Possessed at Yale Repertory Theater and in Jay Broad's premiere of White Pelican at the P.A.F. Playhouse in Huntington Station, New York.

Lloyd made his film debut in 1975 as psychiatric patient Max Taber in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, alongside Danny DeVito. Wider public recognition came with his role as the ex-hippie cab driver "Reverend" Jim Ignatowski on the television comedy series Taxi, which ran from 1978 to 1983 and earned him two Primetime Emmy Awards for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series. He won a third Emmy for a 1992 guest appearance as Alistair Dimple in Road to Avonlea, this time for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series, and received an Independent Spirit Award for his performance in Twenty Bucks.

Among his most recognized film roles is the eccentric inventor Emmett "Doc" Brown in the Back to the Future trilogy, spanning 1985 to 1990, for which he received a Saturn Award nomination. Additional film credits include Commander Kruge in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (1984), Professor Plum in Clue (1985), Judge Doom in Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), Uncle Fester in The Addams Family (1991) and Addams Family Values (1993), Switchblade Sam in Dennis the Menace (1993), Mr. Goodman in Piranha 3D (2010), Bill Crowley in I Am Not a Serial Killer (2016), and David Mansell in Nobody (2021) and its sequel Nobody 2 (2025).

Lloyd has also contributed extensively to voice acting, providing the voice of Merlock in DuckTales the Movie: Treasure of the Lost Lamp, Grigori Rasputin in Anastasia, the Hacker in the PBS Kids series Cyberchase, a role that earned him Daytime Emmy nominations, and the Woodsman in Cartoon Network's Over the Garden Wall. In 1996 he portrayed the lead character in the adventure game Toonstruck, and in 2010 he reprised the role of Doc Brown in Back to the Future: The Game, developed by Telltale Games.

On stage beyond Broadway, Lloyd played Willy Loman in a 2010 production of Death of a Salesman at the Vermont-based Weston Playhouse, and in 2013 appeared as both narrator and the character Azdak in Bertolt Brecht's The Caucasian Chalk Circle, produced by the Classic Stage Company in New York. He played Ebenezer Scrooge in a 2008 production of A Christmas Carol at the Kodak Theatre alongside John Goodman and Jane Leeves. Lloyd's Broadway career spans 1969 to 2002.