Lloyd Benedict Nolan (August 11, 1902 – September 27, 1985) 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.
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.
The majority of his films comprised light entertainment with an emphasis on action. His most famous films include: Atlantic Adventure, costarring Nancy Carroll; Ebb Tide; Wells Fargo; Every Day's A Holiday, starring Mae West; Bataan; and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, with Dorothy McGuire and James Dunn. He also gave a strong performance in the 1957 film Peyton Place with Lana Turner.
Nolan subsequently contributed many solid and key character parts in numerous other films. And later in his career, he returned to the stage and appeared on TV to great acclaim in The Caine Mutiny Court Martial, for which he received an Emmy award for portraying Captain Queeg, the role made famous by Humphrey Bogart. He also appeared in the pioneering TV series, Julia, starring Diahann Carroll.
Nolan died of lung cancer in Los Angeles, at the age of eighty-three.
