Alma Lloyd

Alma was one of the myriad of star-struck hopefuls who never quite made the grade in 1930s Hollywood. A strikingly attractive blue-eyed blonde, she began on stage as a six-year old child star in 'Berkeley Square' and 'East Lynne'. Her father was the prominent film director Frank Lloyd (of Mutiny on the Bounty (1935) fame), while her mother had acted in vaudeville. Alma was tutored at Cumnock and Marlborough private academies and studied drama at the Pasadena Community Playhouse. Following her graduation at 18, she returned to the stage for 'Cavalcade' and 'Mary of Scotland' and made her screen bow the following year in the Fox production of Jimmy and Sally (1933) (incidentally, her childhood nickname was also 'Jimmie'). She was then signed by Warner Brothers and began the merry-go-round of 'no-name' bit parts as nurses, receptionists and telephone operators. This routine, as it turned out, was only once interrupted by a rare (but small) featured part as Colette in the François Villon biopic If I Were King (1938), which was directed by her father. There had even been a female lead, but that was in a B-grade Guy Kibbee comedy, The Big Noise (1936), which, in actual fact, made no noise at all. Her career may well have turned out differently had she not been cruelly condemned to what a contemporary article called 'death on the cutting room floor': a key scene -- for which Alma had arduously prepared and which was to be her breakthrough -- as Florence Udney opposite Fredric March in the classic Anthony Adverse (1936) was quietly purged from the picture as 'excess footage'. Poor Alma never quite recovered from this setback. In 1938, she married the Broadway actor and dialogue director Franklin Gray, had four children and left film acting in her wake.