Norman Lloyd has died. At a hundred and six, I can't say he didn't have the right to. He was the last living member of the Mercury Theatre.

His most famous part on film was his first: the title role in Hitchcock's Saboteur (1942), the guilt-ghost that Robert Cummings chases across America from a burning hangar in Glendale to the cold torch of the Statue of Liberty. He's almost a human MacGuffin. Where the top fifth columnist played by Otto Kruger gets a timelessly self-serving speech about winning sides, we never know what makes the man whose mail is addressed to "Frank Fry"—who knows, it could even be his real name—tick, whether he's an ideologue or an opportunist or just an indifferent, efficient purveyor of destruction, like one of the more malevolent iterations of Loki with his wiry face and red hair, so slight his suit almost seems to be wearing him. He is implied through a clever intercut of newsreel footage and a private smile to have been responsible for the fire that sank the SS Normandie. We know he's meant to be a creep as well as a fascist from the casually invasive once-over he gives Priscilla Lane on the ferry to Bedloe's Island, but he can't be vamped with the police on his heels; even with a gun in his hand, even chased up the echoing bronze and steel of the statue's arm, he's that silhouette of violence cast meta on the screen of Radio City Music Hall until he goes over the torch's rail and suddenly he's terrified and real, a very young man with nothing but a fraying sleeve between his life and a long, long fall. Hitchcock said afterward that he'd put the wrong man in peril and corrected his error with North by Northwest (1959), but it's echt Hitchcock to jerk the audience into sympathy with a pro-Nazi saboteur through nothing more than helplessness, the hero's hand reaching desperately down. For better or worse, he should have remembered, shadows can't be caught.

His most famous part on stage was Cinna the Poet for the Mercury Theatre's 1937 Caesar, a frail, funny, fatal case of mistaken identity who really believes until it's far too late that he can convince a fascist mob of his innocence by producing his papers, which are his poems. Lloyd in his memoir Stages: Of Life in Theatre, Film and Television (1992), which I discovered and gave to spatch just this past Hanukkah, describes him as "a little clerk" with his pockets full of poetry, like a cross between Herbert Hoover and Maxwell Bodenheim, "a gentle, diffident man with a great deal of pantomimic comedy; the terror came out of comedy . . . As the gang surrounded me, I disappeared from the view of the audience save for one raised hand, with one last scream, 'The Poet!' The mob rushed me down the ramp at the back of the set out of sight of the audience, as if I were being devoured by an animal. The scene stopped the show." It inspired a painting. With a mix of the radio and stage companies of the Mercury Theatre, Lloyd went to Hollywood with Welles to make Heart of Darkness for RKO and then, fretting about the stall between productions and a financially uncertain future, did not stay to make Citizen Kane (1941). "I have always regretted it." He was born Norman Perlmutter. I imagine him as Bernstein.

His most famous part on TV was, as far as I can tell, Dr. Auschlander on St. Elsewhere (1982–88), which I have never seen. Behind the camera, he directed prolifically; before I saw him anywhere as an actor, I almost certainly saw some of his episodes for Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955–62) and The Alfred Hitchcock Hour (1962–65) because he did famous ones like Roald Dahl's "Man from the South" (1960) or Ray Bradbury's "The Jar" (1964). I may rewatch them in his honor, or one of his films I haven't seen yet. The blacklist kept him off the big screen for more than twenty years.

He was not an actor I followed in the sense of going looking, but I was glad to see him wherever he turned up, which lately was in noir; I was happy whenever I read he was still alive and now he isn't, in the way that no one should regret and yet. He took a great deal of time with him. He wasn't landscape for me, but I will still notice his absence, as if a tree or a Carnegie library had come down. He was beautiful when he was younger and I never saw him in a role that used it. He played tennis. He acted past his centenary. He fell off the Statue of Liberty.