Charles Laughton (1 July, 1899–15 December, 1962) was an Academy
Award-winning English stage and film actor. He became an
American citizen in 1950. While best known for his historical roles in films, he started
his career as a remarkable stage actor. During a time when many serious stage actors despised the motion picture medium, seeing
it only as a source of income, Laughton showed keen and serious interest in the pioneering possibilities of film, and later other
media, such as radio, recordings, and TV, proving that quality work could be made available to audiences other than
theatre-goers.
Early life and career
Charles Laughton circa 1929 photographed by Dorothy Wilding
Laughton was born in Scarborough, Yorkshire, England, the son of Robert Laughton by his spouse Elizabeth (née
Conlon). His mother was a devout Catholic and he attended the famed Jesuit school, Stonyhurst College, in Lancashire, England.[1] He served
during World War I (in which he was gassed) with
the Huntingdonshire
Cyclist Regiment and later with the Northamptonshire Regiment.
At first he went into the family business (hotels), while participating in amateur theatricals in Scarborough. Finally allowed
by his family to become a drama student at RADA in 1925, he made his first
professional stage appearance on April 28, 1926 at the Barnes
Theatre, as Osip in the comedy The Government Inspector, in which he also appeared at the London Gaiety Theatre in May. Despite not having the looks for a romantic lead, he impressed audiences
with his talent and played many classical roles. His debut in the USA took
place on September 24, 1931, at the Lyceum Theatre (New York), as William Marble in Payment Deferred. He returned to London
and was engaged in numerous Shakespeare roles. In 1936 he went to Paris and on May
9 appeared at the Comedie Francaise as Sganarelle in the second act of
Moliere's Le Medecin malgré lui, the first English actor to appear at that theatre, where
he acted the part in French and received an ovation. He continued his stage career intermittantly until the end of his life.
Laughton commenced his film career in England. He took small roles in two short silent comedies starring his wife
Elsa Lanchester, Daydreams and Blue Bottles (both 1928) and he made a
brief appearance as a disgruntled diner in another silent film Piccadilly with
Anna May Wong in 1929. He appeared with Elsa Lanchester again in a "film revue," featuring
assorted British variety acts, called Comets (1930) and made two other
early British talkies: Wolves with Dorothy Gish (1930) from a play set in a whaling
camp in the frozen north, and Down River (1931) in which he played a murderous, half-oriental drug-smuggler.
His first Hollywood film was The Old Dark House (1932) with
Boris Karloff but his best-remembered film role of that year was as Nero in Cecil B. DeMille's The Sign of the Cross. That same year, he turned out a number of memorable
performances, such as H. G. Wells's mad vivisectionist Dr. Moreau in Island
of Lost Souls, and the little clerk in the segment of If I Had a
Million directed by Ernst Lubitsch. In Hollywood, he also repeated his stage
role as a murderer in Payment Deferred and played a demented submarine commander
in The Devil and the Deep with Tallulah
Bankhead, Gary Cooper and Cary Grant.
His association with film director Alexander Korda began in 1933 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, the first British actor to do so. However, he continued to act occasionally in the theatre,
and his American production of Galileo by (and with) Bertolt Brecht is legendary.
Later career
Later films included White Woman (1933) in which he co-starred with Carole Lombard as a
cockney river trader in the Malaysian jungle; The Barretts of Wimpole
Street (1934) as Norma Shearer's malevolent father; Les
Misérables (1935) as Javert, the police inspector; 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) as the very English butler
transported to early 1900s America; and the title roles in 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 (1938) , based on a story by W. Somerset Maugham, St. Martin's Lane, a story
about London street entertainers, and Jamaica Inn, based on 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's film roles in the 1930s consisted almost entirely of the costume and historical drama parts for which he is best
remembered (ie: Nero, Henry VIII, Mr. Barrett, Captain Bligh, Rembrandt, Quasimodo, etc). In his modern-dress film roles in his
1940s movies his over-the-top acting style often led to variable results. He played an Italian vineyard owner in California in
They Knew What They Wanted (1940); a South Seas patriarch in
The Tuttles of Tahiti (1942); an impoverished pianist in Tales of Manhattan (1942); an American admiral in Stand by for
Action (1942); a butler in Forever and a Day (1943); a cowardly
school-master in occupied France in This Land is Mine (1943); an Australian
bar-owner in The Man from Down Under (1943); the title role in an up-dated version of
Oscar Wilde's The Canterville Ghost (1944); and a wife-murderer in
The Suspect (1944).
More successful however were the two comedies he made with Deanna Durbin,
It Started with Eve (1941) and Because of Him
(1946). He also seemed to enjoy himself both as a blood-thirsty pirate in Captain
Kidd (1945) and as a malevolent judge in Alfred Hitchcock's The Paradine
Case (1948). Laughton was on top form again as a megalomaniac press tycoon in The Big Clock (1948). He had supporting roles as a Nazi in pre-war Paris in Arch of Triumph (1948); as a bishop in The Girl from
Manhattan (1948); as a seedy go-between in The Bribe (1949); and a kindly
widower in The Blue Veil (1951). (He played a bible-reading pastor in the
multi-story A Miracle Can Happen (1947) but his sequence was deleted and replaced with
another featuring Dorothy Lamour. In this form the film was re-titled On Our Merry Way).
(See "Trivia" below).
Laughton made his first colour film in Paris as Inspector Maigret in The Man on the Eiffel
Tower (1949) and hammed it up enormously alongside Boris Karloff as a mad French nobleman in Robert Louis Stevenson's
The Strange Door (1951). He was a tramp in O. Henry's Full House (1952) in which he had a one-minute scene with Marilyn Monroe. He became
a pirate again, buffoon-style this time, in Abbott and Costello Meet
Captain Kidd (1952); he played Herod Antipas in Salome (1953) and repeated his role as Henry VIII in Young
Bess (1953). He returned to England to star in Hobson's Choice (1954)
under David Lean's direction.
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). He was
the first actor to portray Agatha Christie's Belgian detective Hercule Poirot when he
starred in Alibi - a stage adaptation of The Murder of Roger
Ackroyd - in 1928.
He played a British admiral in Under Ten Flags (1960) and worked for the first and only
time with his chief acting rival, Laurence Olivier, in Spartacus (1960) as a wily Roman senator.
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.
The Night of the Hunter
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.
This movie is often cited among today's critics as one of the best movies of the 1950s; unfortunately it was a critical and
box-office flop when it was originally released. Laughton never had another chance to direct his own movies. He did not appear in
the film, but worked solely as a director.
Theatre
Laughton made his London stage debut in Gogol's The Government
Inspector (1926). He appeared in many West End plays over the next few years and his earliest successes on the stage
were in roles like Hercule Poirot in Alibi and William Marble in Payment
Deferred, in which he made his Lyceum Theatre (New York) debut in 1931. He
gave up the stage for a film career, but after the success of The Private
Life of Henry VIII he appeared at the Old Vic Theatre in 1933 for a season of classic
revivals. He appeared in roles like Macbeth, Lopakin in The Cherry Orchard, Prospero in The Tempest and had a major personal success as Angelo in
Measure for Measure, but felt his appearance in the title role of
Shakespeare's play Henry VIII was a
mistake because audiences compared it with his Academy Award-winning film. At the end of
1936, Laughton played Captain Hook and Elsa Lanchester played Peter Pan in J. M. Barrie's play at the London Palladium.
Laughton worked closely with Bertolt Brecht on Brecht's play Galileo, which Laughton directed and played
the title role at the play's English language premiere in Los Angeles in 1947
and later that year in New York.
Laughton had one of his most notable successes in the theatre by directing and playing the Devil in Don Juan in Hell beginning in 1950. The piece is actually the third act sequence from George Bernard
Shaw's play Man and Superman, frequently cut from productions to reduce
its playing time, consisting of a philosophical debate between Don Juan and the
Devil with contributions from Doña Ana and the statue of Ana's father. Laughton conceived the
piece as a staged reading and cast Charles Boyer, Cedric Hardwicke, and Agnes Moorehead (billed as "The First
Drama Quartette") in the other roles. It was Boyer instead of Laughton who won a special
Tony Award for the performance, possibly because Laughton was well-known for not caring about
awards and never attended awards ceremonies when he was nominated for or won one, including the Oscars.
He directed several plays on Broadway. His most notable box-office success as a
director came in 1954, with The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial, a
full-length stage dramatization by Herman Wouk of the court-martial scene in Wouk's novel
The Caine Mutiny. The play, starring Henry
Fonda as defense attorney Barney Greenwald, opened the same year as the film starring Humphrey Bogart as Captain Queeg and Jose Ferrer as Greenwald based
on the original novel, but did not affect that film's box-office performance. Laughton also directed a staged reading in
1953 of Stephen Vincent Benét's John Brown's
Body, a full-length poem about the American Civil War and its aftermath. The
production starred Tyrone Power, Raymond
Massey (re-creating his film characterizations of Abraham Lincoln and
John Brown), and Judith Anderson.
Laughton did not appear himself in either of these productions, but John Brown's
Body was recorded complete by Columbia Masterworks.
Laughton returned to the London stage in 1958 in Jane Arden's The Party which
also had Elsa Lanchester and Albert Finney in the cast. He made his final theatre appearances as Nick Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream and
King Lear at the Shakespeare Memorial
Theatre in 1959, although failing health resulted in both performances being disappointing,
according to some British critics. The fact that he tried an unorthodox approach to the character of Lear, and was resented by
some for having become an American citizen may have also something to do with the lukewarm critical reception, as well, although
this is only speculation. His performance as King Lear came in for particular lambasting by
critics, with many reviews saying that the portly actor looked more like Old King Cole
than Shakespeare's creation, and critic Kenneth Tynan
wrote that Laughton's Nick Bottom "...behaves in a manner that has nothing to do with
acting, although it perfectly hits off the demeanor of a rapscallion uncle dressed up to entertain the children at a
Christmas party". Unfortunately, although a British production of A Midsummer Night's Dream did air on television around this time, it was not the one with
Laughton, but rather a 1958 production with Paul Rogers as Bottom.
Although he did not appear in any later plays, he continued to tour the US with staged readings, including a very successful
appearance on the Stanford University campus in 1960.
Recordings
Laughton's voice first appeared on 78 rpm records with the release of five British Regal Zonophone 10 inch discs entitled
Voice of the Stars issued annually from 1934 to 1938. These featured short soundtrack snippets from the year's top films.
He is heard on all five records in, respectively, The Private Life of Henry VIII, The Barratts of Wimpole Street,
Mutiny on the Bounty, I, Claudius (curiously, since this film was unfinished and thus never released), and
Vessel of Wrath. In 1937 he recorded Lincoln's Gettysburg Address on a 10 inch
Columbia 78, having made such an impression with it in Ruggles of Red Gap.
He made several other spoken word recordings and one of his most famous was his one-man album of Charles Dickens's Mr. Pickwick's Christmas, a twenty-minute version of the Christmas chapter from Dickens's The Pickwick Papers. It
was first released by Decca in 1944 as a four record 78 rpm set, but was afterwards
transferred to LP. It frequently appeared on LP with a companion piece, Decca's 1941 adaptation of
Dickens's A Christmas Carol, starring Ronald
Colman as Scrooge. Both stories were released together on a Deutsche
Grammophon CD in time for Christmas 2005. In 1943,
Laughton recorded a reading of the Nativity story from St. Luke's Gospel, and this was
released in 1995 on CD on a Nimbus Records collection entitled Prima Voce: The Spirit of Christmas Past.
A Brunswick/American Decca LP entitled Readings from the Bible featured Laughton reading Garden of Eden, The Fiery
Furnace, Noah's Ark, and David and Goliath. It was released in 1958.
In an unusual move regarding a suspense thriller, Laughton was also heard narrating the story on the soundtrack album of the film that he directed, Night of the Hunter, accompanied by the film's
score. This album has also been released on CD.
Also, and deriving from the movie they made together, a complete radio show (18 June 1945) of 'The Canterville Ghost' was
broadcast which featured Laughton and Margaret O'Brien. It has been issued on a Pelican LP.
His wife Elsa Lanchester made three LPs in the 1950s entitled "Songs for a Shuttered Parlour," "Songs for a Smoke-Filled
Room," and "Cockney London." Laughton introduced the various numbers with spoken introductions on the first two and wrote the
sleeve notes for the third.
However, none of Laughton's other record albums have been made available on CD as yet. There are two especially notable ones
still waiting. The first is a complete, two LP, Columbia Masterworks recording of the 1950
Broadway staging of George Bernard Shaw's
Don Juan in Hell.
The other notable recording unavailable on CD is a two LP Capitol Records album that
was released in 1962, the year of Laughton's death, entitled The Story Teller. Taken from
the one-man stage shows that Laughton loved to appear in, it culls together dramatic readings from several sources. Three of the
excerpts are broadcast annually on a Minnesota Public Radio Thanksgiving program entitled Giving Thanks. The Story Teller won a
Grammy in 1962 for Best Spoken Word Recording.
Private life
He had a long and resilient marriage to actress Elsa Lanchester, although, in her
autobiography, Lanchester revealed that Laughton was homosexual. According to her own
account, she was shocked to learn about this, but eventually decided to remain married to him. However, she claims as a result of
this, she decided not to have children with him. The decision caused him great grief, as he longed to become a father, as many
friends of Laughton, among them Maureen O'Hara and Stanley Cortez, have stated. In her autobiographical book, Lanchester tells that one night, after they
had been married for two years, the police stopped Laughton at the door of his London flat; they had a young boy in custody who
had been loitering outside the house, presumably to get money after Laughton had approached him in Hyde Park. When her husband
confessed in tears, Miss Lanchester told him not to worry about it, that it didn't matter. That's why he cried . . . when I
told him it didn't matter.[2]
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
for Best Actor, and Lanchester for Best Supporting Actress. Neither won.
In 1950, the couple became American citizens.
Laughton is interred in the Forest Lawn, Hollywood Hills
Cemetery in Los Angeles, California.
Trivia
- Laughton's favourite given recreation was gardening.
- Charles Laughton is caricatured as the prefect (and the villain) in the comic Asterix and the Golden Sickle.[3]
- Tony Hancock, though now more famous as a comedy actor, often included an impression of
Laughton as Captain Bligh in his stage comedy routines in his early career and later in the 1960s.
- In 1934, after Laughton had achieved fame and an Oscar with The Private Life of Henry VIII, mangled versions of two of
his earlier British films were shown in America. In the 'film revue' Comets, he and Elsa Lanchester had performed The
Ballad of Frankie and Johnnie in duet. It was extracted and shown as a seven-minute 'talking short' in U.S. movie-houses.
Similarly, a cut-down version of Wolves, re-titled Wanted Men, was shown in America on the strength of Laughton's
performance therein. It seems doubtful if prints of any of these films have survived.
- Interestingly, it transpires that although (as stated above) the Laughton sequence in "A Miracle Can Happen" was deleted for
the US market and replaced with one starring Dorothy Lamour (with the film then re-titled "On Our Merry Way") prints of the
original movie had already been sent abroad for dubbing. Consequently, "A Miracle Can Happen", with the Laughton sequence intact,
can be found on a Spanish DVD under its translated title "Una Encuesta Llamada Milagro" with the dialogue available both in the
original English and dubbed into Spanish. Laughton by this time had begun a new career with his reading tours and this segment of
the movie gave him the chance to read the Saul and David story from the Bible.
Academy Awards nominations
He won the New York Film Critics Circle Awards for
Mutiny on the Bounty and Ruggles of
Red Gap.
References
- ^ RonaldBruceMeyer.com "July 1 Almanac." Retrieved
August 12, 2007.
- ^ The New York Times:
"The Bride of Frakenstein" Retrieved August 12, 2007
- ^ The Complete Guide to Asterix by Peter Kessler. ISBN
0-340-65346-9
- Parker, John, editor, Who's Whio in the Theatre, London, 1947, 10th revised edition, p.892-3.
- Callow, Simon, Charles Laughton. A Difficult Actor (1987, rev. 1988). Biography and analysis of his film and stage
work.
- Jones, Preston Neal, Heaven and Hell to Play With: The Filming of the Night of the Hunter. Book covering the genesis,
making and aftermath of the film, with many interviews with people involved in its making, which offer insights and bring down
some false myths.
- Tell Me a Story (1957) and The Fabulous country (1962). Two literary anthologies selected by Charles Laughton.
They contain pieces which were presented by him in his reading tours across America, with written introductions which give some
insight about Laughton's thoughts. This selection presents texts from the Bible, Charles Dickens, Thomas Wolfe, Ray Bradbury and
James Thurber to name just a few.
- Lyon, James K., Bertolt Brecht in America (1983). An extensively researched account of the German playwright's sojourn
in the USA after fleeing Nazi Germany. The book covers the collaboration, preparatory work and 1947 stagings of Galileo
with Charles Laughton.
- Lanchester, Elsa, Charles Laughton and I (1938), a biography of Laughton, and Elsa Lanchester Herself (1983),
an autobiography. In her very personal memoirs Lanchester offers a somewhat unbalanced portrait of her late husband.
- Singer, Kurt, The Charles Laughton Story (1954).
- Higham, Charles, Charles Laughton: An Intimate Biography (1976). Introduction by Elsa Lanchester.
- Brown, William, Charles Laughton: A Pictorial Treasury of his Films (1970).
- Diverse authors, articles in The Stonyhurst magazine: "Charles Laughton at Stonyhurst, by David Knight (Volume LIV, No. 501,
2005), "Charles Laughton. A Talent in Bloom (1899-1931)", by Gloria Porta (Volume LIV, No. 502, 2006),
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