As he recalled in 1930, I thought I would surely be so disabled that I would never be able to work again.

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Lloyd made nearly 200 comedy films, both silent and talkies, between 1914 and 1947.

Glasses character 2 3 was a resourceful, success-seeking go-getter who matched the zeitgeist of the 1920s-era United States.

Lloyd hanging from the hands of a clock high above the street (in reality a trick shot) in Safety Last (1923) is considered one of the most enduring images in all of cinema.

Lloyd performed the lesser stunts himself, despite having injured himself in August 1919 while doing publicity pictures for the Roach studio.

An accident with a bomb mistaken as a prop resulted in the loss of the thumb and index finger of his right hand 5 (the injury was disguised on future films with the use of a special prosthetic glove, and was almost undetectable on the screen).

His paternal great-grandparents were Welsh.

In 1910, after his father had several business venture failures, Lloyds parents divorced and his father moved with his son to San Diego, California.

He was also hired by Universal Studios as an extra and soon became friends with aspiring filmmaker Hal Roach.

Lloyd began collaborating with Roach who had formed his own studio in 1913.

Roach and Lloyd created Lonesome Luke, similar to and playing off the success of Charlie Chaplin films.

Later that year, Lloyd replaced Daniels with Mildred Davis, whom he would later marry.

Reportedly, the more Lloyd watched Davis the more he liked her.

Lloyds first reaction in seeing her was that she looked like a big French doll.

Harold Lloyd would move away from tragicomic personas, and portray an everyman with unwavering confidence and optimism.

The persona Lloyd referred to as his Glass character 10 (often named Harold in the silent films) was a much more mature comedy character with greater potential for sympathy and emotional depth, and was easy for audiences of the time to identify with.

The Glass character is said to have been created after Roach suggested that Harold was too handsome to do comedy without some sort of disguise.

To create his new character Lloyd donned a pair of lensless horn-rimmed glasses but wore normal clothing; 3 previously, he had worn a fake mustache and ill-fitting clothes as the Chaplinesque Lonesome Luke.

When I adopted the glasses, he recalled in a 1962 interview with Harry Reasoner, it more or less put me in a different category because I became a human being.

He was a kid that you would meet next door, across the street, but at the same time I could still do all the crazy things that we did before, but you believed them.

Unlike most silent comedy personae, Harold was never typecast to a social class, but he was always striving for success and recognition.

Within the first few years of the characters debut, he had portrayed social ranks ranging from a starving vagrant in From Hand to Mouth to a wealthy socialite in Captain Kidds Kids.

The blast was severe enough that the cameraman and prop director nearby were also seriously injured.

Lloyd was in the act of lighting a cigarette from the fuse of the bomb when it exploded, also badly burning his face and chest and injuring his eye.

Despite the proximity of the blast to his face, he retained his sight.

Safety Last Harold Lloyd