Charles Laughton - Early life and career, Later career, Private life, Trivia

Film and stage actor, born in Scarborough, North Yorkshire, N England, UK. He trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, London, and first appeared on stage in London in 1926. This was followed by successes in The Cherry Orchard, A Man with Red Hair, and Payment Deferred. He appeared with the Old Vic Company in 1933, played in and produced Shaw's Don Juan in Hell and Major Barbara, and as a Shakespearean actor gave fine performances in Macbeth, Measure for Measure, and King Lear. He began to act in films in 1932 and among his memorable roles are The Private Life of Henry VIII (1932, Oscar), Mr Barrett in The Barretts of Wimpole Street (1934), Captain Bligh in Mutiny on the Bounty (1935), and Quasimodo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939). He was married to the actress Elsa Lanchester (1902–86), and became a US citizen in 1950.

Charles Laughton
Charles Laughton as photographed in 1940 by Carl Van Vechten
Born	1 July 1899 Scarborough, Yorkshire, England
Died	15 December 1962 Hollywood, California, USA

Charles Laughton (1 July 1899 – 15 December 1962) was an English stage and film actor. While best known for his historical roles in films, he started his career as a remarkable stage actor. In a moment when stage actors despised movies as a legitimate medium, only being interested in them as a source of income, Laughton showed keen and serious interest in the pioneering possibilities of film, and later other new media as radio and TV, proving that it was worth that quality work could be available to larger audiences other than theatre goers.

Early life and career

Laughton was born in Scarborough, Yorkshire. Despite not having the looks for a romantic lead, he impressed audiences with his talent and played many classical roles before making his film debut in 1932.

His association with film director Alexander Korda began with The Private Life of Henry VIII (loosely based on the life of King Henry VIII of England), for which Laughton won an Academy Award.

Later career

Later films included The Barretts of Wimpole Street (1934), Les Misérables (1935), Mutiny on the Bounty (1935) (as Captain Bligh, one of his most famous screen roles, co-starring with Clark Gable as Fletcher Christian), Ruggles of Red Gap (1935), Rembrandt (1936) and The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939). In 1937, he was to have starred in an ill-fated film version of the classic novel, I, Claudius, by Robert Graves, which was abandoned only part-way into filming due to the injuries suffered by co-star Merle Oberon in a car crash.

After I, Claudius, he and the legendary German film producer Erich Pommer teamed up founding the company Mayflower Pictures in the UK, which produced three films starring Laughton: Vessel of Wrath, based on a story by W. Somerset Maugham, St. Martin's Lane, a story about London street entertainers, and Jamaica Inn, based in a novel by Daphne du Maurier, and the last film Alfred Hitchcock directed in Britain before moving to Hollywood in the late 1930s. (Note: Hitchcock returned to London to film Frenzy in the early 1970s.) The films produced were not successful enough, and the company was saved from bankruptcy when RKO Pictures offered Laughton the role of Quasimodo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939). Laughton and Pommer had plans to make further films, but the outbreak of World War II, which implied the loss of many foreign markets, meant the end of the company.

Laughton received Academy Award and Golden Globe nominations for his role as Sir Wilfrid Robarts in the screen version of Agatha Christie's play Witness for the Prosecution (1957).

His final film was Advise and Consent (1962), for which he received favorable comments for his performance as a southern U.S. Senator (for which accent he studied recordings of the late Mississippi Senator John Stennis). Laughton worked on the film, which was directed by Otto Preminger, while he was dying from bone cancer.

Laughton took a stab at directing a movie, and the result was the legendary The Night of the Hunter (1955), starring Robert Mitchum, Shelley Winters and Lillian Gish. He did not appear in the film, but worked solely as a director.

Private life

He had a long and resilient marriage to actress Elsa Lanchester, although, in her autobiography, Lanchester claimed that Laughton was homosexual.

Elsa Lanchester appeared opposite him in several films, including Rembrandt (1936) and Witness for the Prosecution (1957) for which both received Academy Award nominations.

Laughton is interred in the Forest Lawn, Hollywood Hills Cemetery in Los Angeles, California.

Trivia

Charles Laughton is caricatured as the prefect (and the villain) in the comic Asterix and the Golden Sickle. Biography and analysis of his film and stage work.