Charles Laughton

At 63 years old, Charles Laughton has this physical status:

Charles Laughton (1 July 1899 – December 1962) was an English stage and film actor.

Laughton was educated at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London and first appeared on stage in 1926.

He was cast in a play with his future wife Elsa Lanchester, with whom he lived and worked until his death in 1927. He appeared in Shakespeare at the Old Vic in a variety of classical and modern roles, making an appearance in Shakespeare.

His film career brought him to Broadway and then Hollywood, but he also collaborated with Alexander Korda on important British films of the period, including The Private Life of Henry VIII, for which he received the Academy Award for Best Actor for his portrayal of the title character.

He portrayed everything from monsters and misfits to kings.

The Barretts of Wimpole Street, Mutiny on the Bounty, Ruggles of Red Gap, Jamaica Inn, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and The Big Clock were among Laughton's top film hits.

He took up stage directing in his later years, most notably in The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial and George Bernard Shaw's Don Juan in Hell, in which he also appeared.

The Night of the Hunter was directed by Stephen Coveney in one film, The Night of the Hunter. Daniel Day-Lewis praised Laughton as one of his inspirations, saying, "He was unquestionably the greatest film actor from that time."

He had something quite unexpected.

He gave himself over to it as an actor.

You can't take your eyes off him as an actor.

Personal life

Laughton began a relationship with Elsa Lanchester in 1927, when he was a cast member in a stage performance. In 1929, the two were married in 1929, became US citizens in 1950, and they remained together until Laughton's death. Both actors appeared in many films together, including Rembrandt (1936), Tales of Manhattan (1942) and The Big Clock (1948). In The Private Life of Henry VIII, Lanchester portrayed Anne of Cleves, Henry VIII's fourth wife, opposite Laughton. Both actors received Academy Award nominations for their performances in Witness for the Prosecution (1957)—Laughton for Best Actor and Lanchester for Best Supporting Actress—but neither won.

Several of Laughton's contemporaries confirmed his bisexuality, and Hollywood historians generally agreed. Lanchester's actress Maudeen O'Hara, a friend and co-star of Laughton, denied the allegations that his sexuality was the reason why Laughton and Lanchester did not have children, saying that Laughton told her he wanted children but that it wasn't possible because of a botched abortion that Lanchester had experienced early in her career of burlesque. Lanchester acknowledged two abortions in her youth – one of the pregnancy reportedly by Laughton – but she did not mention infertility. According to Charles Higham's biographer, the reason she did not have children was because she did not want one.

At 14954 Corona Del Mar in Pacific Palisades, Laughton owned an estate on the bluffs above the Pacific Coast Highway. In 1944, the property was attributed to a landslide, which Bertolt Brecht referred to in his poem "Garden in Progress."

During the 1952 presidential race, Laughton was a Democrat and he favoured Adlai Stevenson's campaign.

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Early life and career

Laughton was born in Scarborough, North Riding of Yorkshire, England, on July 1, 1900, the son of Robert Laughton (1869–1924) and Eliza (née Conlon, 1869–1953), Yorkshire hotel keepers. His birthplace is marked by a blue plaque. His mother, a devout Roman Catholic of Irish descent, sent him to Scarborough College for a short time before transferring him to Stonyhurst College, the pre-eminent English Jesuit college. Laughton was born in World War I, serving first with the Huntingdonshire Cyclist Battalion's 2/1st Battalion and then with the 7th Battalion of the Northamptonshire Regiment.

He began working in the family hotel but also appeared in amateur dramatics in Scarborough. In 1925, he was allowed by his family to become a drama student at RADA, where actor Claude Rains was one of his tutors. On April 28, 1926, Laughton appeared in the comedy The Government Inspector, which also appeared in London's Gaiety Theatre in May. He captivated audiences with his talent and appeared in two Chekov plays, The Cherry Orchard and The Three Sisters. In the world premiere of Seán O'Casey's The Silver Tassie in 1928 in London, Laughton played the lead role as Harry Hegan. Mr Prohack, Arnold Bennett's Mr Prohack (Elsa Lanchester was also in the cast) and Mr Pickwick in Mr Pickwick's Mr Pickwick (1928–29) in London, he appeared as Samuel Pickwick in Mr Pickwick (1928–29).

In On the Spot and William Marble in Payment Deferred, Tony Perelli appeared alongside Anthony Perelli. He appeared on the Atlantic and made his United States debut at the Lyceum Theatre on September 24th, 1931. He appeared in four Shakespeare plays (as Macbeth, Henry VIII, Angelo in Measure and Prost) and also as Lopakhin in The Importance of Being Earnest and Love for Love, 1933-1934. He travelled to Paris in 1936 and performed in Sganarelle in the second act of Molière's Le Médecin malgré lui, the first English actor to appear in French and received an ovation.

Although still appearing on the London stage, Laughton began his film career in the United Kingdom. Elsa Lanchester, Daydreams, Blue Bottles, and The Tonic were also small comedies starring his wife Elsa Lanchester, who had only been written for her by H.G. Wells and were directed by Ivor Montagu. In another silent film Piccadilly with Anna May Wong in 1929, he appeared briefly as a scuffed diner. He appeared with Lanchester in a "film revue" starring various British variety acts, "The Ballad of Frankie and Johnnie," in which they performed a duet. He made two other early British talks: Wolves with Dorothy Gish (1930) from a play set in a whaling camp in the frozen north and Down River (1931), in which he served as a drug-smuggling captain onboard.

Boris Karloff's first Hollywood film, The Old Dark House (1932), a bluff Yorkshire businessman marooned during a storm with other visitors in a frightening remote Welsh manor, led to filming and filming. He appeared in Devil and the Deep with Tallulah Bankhead, Gary Cooper, and Cary Grant, and then followed this with his best-remembered film role as Nero in Cecil B. DeMille's The Sign of the Cross. During his first Hollywood trip, Laughton gave several memorable performances, including his appearance as a killer in Payment Deferred, starring H.G. In the short segment of If I Had A Million, directed by Ernst Lubitsch, Wells' mad vivisectionist Dr. Moreau in Island of Lost Souls and the meek raspberry-blowing clerk. In 1932, he appeared in six Hollywood films. Henry VIII's career began in 1933 with his The Private Life of Henry VIII (loosely based on King Henry VIII's life) for which Laughton received the Academy Award for Best Actor. He also appeared on stage, including a US production of The Life of Galileo starring Bertolt Brecht.

Film career

Laughton left film for films and returned to Hollywood, where he co-starred with Carole Lombard as a Cockney river trader in the Malayan jungle after his smashing success in The Private Life of Henry VIII. The Barretts of Wimpole Street (1934) as the Norma Shearer's malevolent father (although Shearer was only three years older than Shearer); Les Misérables (1935) as Captain William Bligh; and Ruggles of Red Gap (1935) as the distinctly English butler transported to early 1900s America; He was signed to play Micawber (1934), but he was forced to be dropped from the role and was replaced by W. C. Fields after a few days.

He came back to the United Kingdom and joined Korda in a role in Rembrandt (1936). He appeared in an ill-fated film adaptation of Robert Graves' classic book I, Claudius, in 1937, which was canceled during filming due to the injuries suffered by co-star Merle Oberon in a car accident. Claudius, Claudius, and Erich Pommer, a German film producer, formed Mayflower Pictures in the United Kingdom, based on a W. Somerset Maugham novel, which included Vivien Leigh and Rex Harrison; and Jamaica Inn, which featured Mark Leigh and Rex Harrison; and Hollywood's Sunset Beach (1938), directed by James O'Hara and Robert Newton about Cornish shipwreckers, based on Daphne du Maurier

The films were not commercially viable, and the company was saved from bankruptcy only after RKO Pictures offered Laughton the title role (Quasimodo) in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939), with Jamaica Inn co-star O'Hara. Laughton and Pommer had intended to produce more films, but the company's involvement in World War II, which caused the loss of several foreign markets, brought them to an end. Laughton's early success in The Private Life of Henry VIII established him as one of the finest interpreters of the costume and historical drama roles for which he is most remembered (Nero, Henry VIII, Inspector Javert, Familia, Rembrandt, Quasimodo, and others); he was also known for arrogant, unscrupulous characters.

In They Knew What They Wanted (1940), a South Seas patriarch in The Tuttles of Tahiti (1942), and an American admiral during World War II, 1914-1942). In Forever and a Day (1943), he played a Victorian butler and an Australian bar-owner in The Man from Down Under (1943). A number of new studies of Laughton's appearances in these films, including Simon Callow's 1987 biography, cite several. "Is there no one at RKO to tell Charles Laughton when he is behaving plain bad," James Agate wrote about Forever and a Day. On the other hand, Bosley Crowther of The New York Times announced that "forever and a Day" boasted "extraordinary results."

C. A. Lejeune, a writer, was "shocked" by Laughton's poor workmanship during that period: "One of the most painful screen phenomena of recent years," she wrote in The Observer, "has been Charles Laughton's decline and fall." "Laughton was a complete actor," David Shipman's book The Golden Years. His reach was broad.

In "This Land is Mine (1943), Jean Renoir's film in which he appeared most actively, Laughton played a cowardly schoolmaster in occupied France; in fact, Laughton talked about Alphonse Daudet's "The Last Lesson," which gave Renoir a crucial scene for the film to Renoir. In The Suspect (1944), directed by Robert Siodmak, Laughton played a henpecked husband who later murders his wife, who would become a good friend. In Tales of Manhattan (1942), he sympathetically played an impoverished composer-pianist and appeared in The Canterville Ghost, a play based on the Oscar Wilde tale from 1944.

With Eve (1941) and Because of Him (1946), Laughton appeared in two comedies with Deanna Durbin. In Captain Kidd (1945) and a malevolent judge in Alfred Hitchcock's The Paradine Case (1947), he depicted a bloodthirsty pirate and a malevolent judge. In The Big Clock (1948), Laughton was a megalomaniac press tycoon. He was playing a Nazi in Pre-War Paris (1948), as a nascent go-between in The Bribe (1949), as a kindly widower in The Blue Veil (1951). In the multi-story A Miracle Can Happen (1947), he played a Bible-reading pastor, but his role was eventually cut and replaced by another starring Dorothy Lamour, and in this version the film was retitled As On Our Merry Way. However, before the Laughton sequence was ruined, an original print of A Miracle Can Happen was sent abroad for dubbing, but it was presented in Spain as Una Encuesta Milagro.

Inspector Maigret appeared in The Man on the Eiffel Tower (1949), and Laughton's first colour film in Paris as Inspector Maigret (1949) and the Monthly Film Bulletin said he "appeared to act" alongside Boris Karloff as a brash French nobleman in a film version of Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Door in 1951. In O. Henry's Full House (1952), he was a tramp. In Abbott and Costello Meet Captain Kidd (1952), he became the pirate Captain Kidd once more, this time for comedic effect. In which he delivered the Gettysburg Address, Laughton appeared on the Colgate Comedy Hour (featuring Abbott and Costello). In 1953, he appeared in Salome as Herod Antipas, and he reprised his role as Henry VIII in Young Bess, a 1953 drama about Henry's children.

In Hobson's Choice (1954), directed by David Lean, he returned to England to appear in Hobson's Choice (1954). Laughton's contribution to Witness for the Prosecution (1957), earned him an Academy Award and a Golden Globe nomination. He appeared in Under Ten Flags (1960) as a British admiral and worked with Laurence Olivier in Spartacus (1960). Advise & Consent (1962), his final film, for which he received praise for his role as a Southern US Senator (for which accent he listened to recordings of Mississippi Senator John C. Stennis).

Laughton directed The Night of the Hunter, starring Robert Mitchum, Shelley Winters, and Lillian Gish, and his friend Paul Gregory in 1955. Critics have rated the film as one of the best of the 1950s, but the United States National Film Registry has chosen it for preservation in the Library of Congress. At the time of its initial launch, it was a huge and box-office loss, and Laughton never directed again. The documentary Charles Laughton Directs The Night of the Hunter by Robert Gitt (2002) contains preserved rushes and outtakes with Laughton's audible off-camera approach.

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