Lloyd Nolan

Lloyd Benedict Nolan was an American film and television actor.

Nolan was born in San Francisco, California, the son of Margaret and James Nolan, who was a shoe manufacturer. He began his career on stage and was subsequently lured to Hollywood, where he played mainly doctors, detectives, and police officers in many movie roles.

He was a brother to the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity. Although many critics hailed his acting ability and it was generally acknowledged that he never gave a bad performance, Nolan was relegated to B movies for the most part. Yet even so, he costarred with such actresses as Mae West, Dorothy McGuire, and the former Metropolitan Opera soprano, Gladys Swarthout. Under contract to Paramount and 20th Century Fox studios, he assayed starring roles in the late 30s and early-to-mid 40s and appeared as the lead character of the “Michael Shayne” detective series. Oddly, the first screen version of Raymond Chandler’s novel The High Window was transformed in 1942 from a Philip Marlowe adventure into part of the Michael Shayne series starring Nolan as Shayne. The film was remade five years later as The Brasher Doubloon with George Montgomery as Marlowe.