Lloyd Bochner

Biography

Lloyd Bochner had that wonderfully sonorous type of voice that was always tailor-made for radio or for the stage. Unsurprisingly then, by the time he was eleven, Lloyd was already employed as part-time voiceover artist and reader of drama serials by radio stations in Vancouver. Lloyd Wolfe Bochner was born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, to Frieda (Kenen) and Charles Abraham Bochner. He was of Russian Jewish and Ukrainian Jewish descent. He made his acting debut as a youth with the Joseph Barrington Juveniles. Lloyd's education at the University of Toronto was interrupted in 1943 by wartime service in the Royal Canadian Navy. However, in 1947, he graduated with a B.A. and a few years later moved to New York to further hone his acting skills. In 1953, he returned to Canada to participate in the inaugural season of the Stratford Festival getting to enact choice Shakespearean roles from Horatio in "Hamlet" to Orsino in "Twelfth Night". Having made his screen bow in a small Canadian production, The Mapleville Story (1946), Lloyd's first significant exposure in television was as British army officer Nicholas Lacey in the half-hour NBC serial One Man's Family (1949), which had first been performed on radio and starred Bert Lytell and Marjorie Gateson. His real breakthrough came quite a few years later, once having moved to Hollywood, as co-star of the studio-bound crime series Hong Kong (1960). He played local British police-chief Neil Campbell, solving crime in tandem with an American newspaper correspondent (played by Australian actor Rod Taylor). This, in turn, led to other key roles including his almost legendary appearance in the classic The Twilight Zone (1959) episode "To Serve Man" in 1962 (at one time voted 11th in a TV guide poll of 100 best TV episodes of all time)…