Danny Torrance of ‘The Shining’ is Now a Biology Professor
The Shining owes much of its success to the contrast between the childish creepiness of the Grady twins, and the childish innocence of five-year-old Danny Torrance (real name Danny Lloyd). That jarring juxtaposition helped elevate the movie from just another horror flick, and transformed it into an instant-classic that can still thrill viewers four decades later.
A five-year-old Lloyd was selected for the role of Jack Torrance’s (Jack Nicholson) son because, unlike most kids his age, he could stay focused for extended periods of time. The child actor with the pudding bowl haircut was six when he and his family were flown to London for filming. They thought it would be a relatively brief process, but the perfectionist Kubrick kept reshooting scene after scene, until nearly a year had passed on set. Throughout, Lloyd was unaware that he was in a horror movie: his parents and Kubrick led him to believe that it was just a movie about a family in a hotel. He did not see the actual film until he was ten or eleven years old.
Lloyd’s performance was well received, but after The Shining, he appeared in just one more film, Will: G. Gordon Liddy, a TV movie in which he played the young Liddy. He then quit acting and disappeared from the public eye. In the following years, Stephen King was so frequently pestered by fans about the fate of little Danny Torrance, that he wrote a sequel in 2013, Doctor’s Sleep.
As to the real-life Danny, Danny Lloyd, the question of his fate buzzed around the internet for years, with plenty of fake news about just what had happened to him and where he had disappeared to. As he recently told an interviewer: “I once read that I had six kids and was a pig farmer“, before going on to note “that is not entirely accurate“.
In reality, after quitting acting, Lloyd went on to a pretty prosaic and run-of-the-mill life. After school, he went to college, and to help pay for tuition, he worked in a Walmart and drove a tractor in a hog farm – the origin of the rumors about his being a pig farmer. In 2007, he became a biology professor at a community college in Elizabethtown, Kentucky, where he still teaches today, often downplaying his role as “that kid from The Shining“.
He has fond memories of his time on the film set, but while it was a remarkable and interesting chapter of his childhood, it never became a defining one for the rest of his life. Fortunately for him, his parents were not stage parents, and when he told them that he was ready to quit, they were fine with it, and saw to it that he had a normal upbringing. Reflecting on how life panned out, he stated: “I don’t regret trying acting. When I decided to stop, I don’t regret that either. At the end of the day, it’s not a huge deal. Well, it is and it isn’t. I still have to grade the tests at school, get the kids to bed. All the regular stuff“. As of 2018, Dan Lloyd – he outgrew and ditched the “Danny” long ago – has four children, including teenagers who frequently tease their now balding father about his bowl haircut in The Shining.