This article is about the actor. Not to be confused with Christopher Lloyd. For others
see Christopher Lloyd. Christopher Allen Lloyd is an American actor.
Among his best-known roles are Emmett "Doc" Brown in the Back to the Future trilogy, Uncle
Fester in The Addams Family and its sequel Addams Family Values, and Judge Doom in Who
Framed Roger Rabbit. He rose to prominence in the 1980s as Jim Ignatowski in the television
series Taxi. Lloyd has won three Primetime Emmy Awards
and an Independent Spirit Award, and has been nominated for two Saturn Awards and a Daytime
Emmy Award. He has also done voiceover work in animation, usually cast as villains due
to his distinctive voice.
Early life Lloyd was born in Stamford, Connecticut, the
son of Samuel R. Lloyd, a lawyer, and his wife Ruth, a singer and sister of San Francisco
mayor Roger Lapham. He is the youngest of four girls and three boys, one of whom, Samuel
Lloyd, was an actor in the 1950s and 1960s. Lloyd's maternal grandfather, Lewis Lapham,
was one of the founders of the Texaco oil company, and Lloyd is also a descendant of
Mayflower passengers, including John Howland. Lloyd was raised in New Canaan, Connecticut.
Career Lloyd began his career apprenticing at summer
theaters in Mount Kisco, New York, and Hyannis, Massachusetts. He took acting classes in New
York City at age 19—some at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre with Sanford
Meisner—and he recalled making his New York theater debut in Fernando Arrabal's play And
They Put Handcuffs on the Flowers, saying, "I was a replacement and it was my first sort
of job in New York." He made his Broadway debut in the short-lived Red, White and Maddox,
and went on to Off-Broadway roles in A Midsummer Night's Dream, Kaspar, The Harlot and the
Hunted, The Seagull, Total Eclipse, Macbeth, In the Boom Boom Room, Cracks, Professional
Resident Company, What Every Woman Knows, The Father, King Lear, and Power Failure.
He returned to Broadway for the musical Happy End. He performed in Andrej Wajda's adaptation
of Dostoyefsky'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, on Long Island.
In 1977, he said of his training at the Neighborhood Playhouse under Meisner, "My work up to then
had been very uneven. I would be good one night, dull the next. Meisner made me aware
of how to be consistent in using the best that I have to offer. But I guess nobody can
teach you the knack, or whatever it is, that helps you come to life on stage."
His first movie role was as a psychiatric patient in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
He is perhaps best known for his roles as "Reverend" Jim Ignatowski, the ex-hippie cabbie
on the TV sitcom Taxi, for which he won two Primetime Emmy Awards for Outstanding Supporting
Actor in a Comedy Series; and the eccentric inventor Emmett "Doc" Brown in the Back to
the Future trilogy of science-fiction films, for which he was nominated for a Saturn Award.
In 1986, he played the reviled Professor B.O. Beanes in the television series Amazing Stories.
Other roles include Klingon Commander Kruge in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, Professor
Plum in Clue, Professor Dimple in an episode of Road to Avonlea; the villain Judge Doom
in Who Framed Roger Rabbit; a wacky sound-effects man named Zoltan in Radioland Murders; and
Uncle Fester in the movie adaptations of The Addams Family.
Lloyd portrayed the star character in the point-and-click adventure game Toonstruck,
released in November 1996. In 1999, he was reunited onscreen with Michael J. Fox in an
episode of Spin City entitled "Back to the Future IV — Judgment Day", in which Lloyd
plays Owen Kingston—the former mentor of Fox's character, Mike Flaherty's—who stops
by City Hall to see him, only to proclaim himself God. That same year, Lloyd starred
in the movie remake of the 1960s series My Favorite Martian. He starred in the television
series Deadly Games in the mid-1990s, and was a regular in the TV series Stacked in
the mid-2000s. In 2003 he guest starred in three of the 13 produced episodes of Tremors:
The Series as the character Cletus Poffenburger. In November 2007, Lloyd was reunited onscreen
with his former Taxi co-star Judd Hirsch in the season-four episode "Graphic" of the TV
series Numb3rs. He played Ebenezer Scrooge in a 2008 production of A Christmas Carol
at the Kodak Theatre with John Goodman and Jane Leeves. In 2009, he appeared in a comedic
trailer for a faux horror film entitled Gobstopper, in which he played Willy Wonka as a horror-movie-style
villain. In October 2009, he did a two-man show with comic performer Joe Gallois in several
Midwest cities. In the summer of 2010, he starred as Willy
Loman in a Weston Playhouse production of Death of a Salesman. That September, he reprised
his role as Doctor Emmett Brown in Back to the Future: The Game, an episodic adventure
game series developed by Telltale Games. On January 21, 2011, he appeared in the episode
"The Firefly" of the J. J. Abrams television series Fringe. That August, he reprised the
role of Dr. Emmett Brown as part of an advertising campaign for Garbarino, an Argentine appliance
company, and also as part of the Nike Company's "Back For the Future" campaign for the benefit
of The Michael J. Fox Foundation. In 2012 and 2013, Lloyd reprised the role of Brown
in two episodes of the stopmotion series Robot Chicken. He was a guest star on the 100th
episode of the USA Network sitcom Psych as Martin Khan in 2013.
In May 2013, Lloyd appeared as the narrator and the character Azdak in the Bertold Brecht
play The Caucasian Chalk Circle, produced by the Classic Stage Company in New York.
Personal life On June 6, 1959 Lloyd married Catharine Dallas
Dixon Boyd; the groom's brother, Samuel Lloyd III, was head usher. The couple divorced in
1971 after 12 years of marriage. Lloyd was next married to actress Kay Tornborg, from
1974 to 1987. He was married to third wife Carol Ann Vanek from the late 1980s to 1991,
and to his fourth wife, screenwriter Jane Walker Wood, from 1992 to 2005.
After his divorce from Wood, in Montecito, California, Lloyd bought a smaller house on
March 23, 2007, and that May listed his 8.07-acre old estate, which he and Wood bought in 2002,
and which included the 5,500-sq.-ft. home, for $11,275,000. Lloyd's smaller home was
destroyed in the Tea Fire of November 2008 in Montecito, California. On May 1, 2010,
he appeared at an outdoor screening of Back to the Future held by the Tampa Theatre at
The River Tower Park in Tampa, Florida, where he participated in a question-and-answer session.
Lloyd's philanthropist mother, Ruth Lapham Lloyd, died in 1984 at age 88. Her surviving
children at the time aside from Christopher were Donald L. Mygatt, Antoinette L. Mygatt
Lucas, Samuel Lloyd III, Ruth Lloyd Scott Ax, and Adele L. Kinney. Lloyd's nephew, Sam
Lloyd, is best known for playing Ted Buckland, the lawyer on Scrubs.
Filmography Film
Television Video games
Awards References
Further reading Napoleon, Davi. Chelsea on the Edge: The Adventures
of an American Theater. Iowa State University Press. ISBN 0-8138-1713-7. Includes discussion
of Lloyd's early work Off-Broadway, including the production of Happy End at the Chelsea
Theater Center, and on Broadway, Kaspar, and Total Eclipse.
External links Christopher Lloyd at the Internet Movie Database
Christopher Lloyd at the Internet Broadway Database
Christopher Lloyd at the Internet Off-Broadway Database
Christopher Lloyd at the TCM Movie Database Christopher Lloyd at AllMovie
Christopher Lloyd at Emmys.com