Charles Laughton
Charles Laughton (1 July, 1899 - 15 December, 1962) was a British-born American stage and film actor.
Early life and career
Laughton was born in Scarborough, Yorkshire. 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 and was gassed, which may have had something to do with his untimely death from bone cancer at the age of 63.
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 would make his first professional stage appearance in 1926. 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 the 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. However, he continued to act in the theatre, and his American production of Galileo by (and with) Bertolt Brecht is legendary.
Later career
Later films included The Barretts of Wimpole Street (1934), "Les Miserables" (1935), Mutiny on the Bounty (1935), 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 Eric 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 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 directed by Alfred Hitchcock in Britain. The films produced were not successful enough, and the company was saved from bankrupcy when RKO Pictures offered Laughton the role of Quasimodo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame. 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.
He also received an Academy Award nomination for his role in 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), but Laughton was dying from cancer.
Charles Laughton had one job as a director, 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.
Private life
Despite his homosexuality, he had a long and resilient marriage to actress Elsa Lanchester. In her autobiography, Lanchester claimed that she married Laughton ignoring that he was homosexual. According to her own account, when she learned about it was shocked, but eventually opted to remain married to him. However, as a result of this, she decided not to have children with him, a decision which caused great grief to Laughton, as he longed to become a father, as many friends of Laughton, among them Maureen O'Hara or Stanley Cortez, have stated. Miss Lanchester -possibly to advocate her option- spread in her memoirs the notion that Charles hated kids, fortunately Heaven and Hell to Play with, the excellently researched book about the making of The Night Of the Hunter, and extant footage of the making of the film solidly rebut this statement, as they prove unequivocally Laughton's warmth and gentle direction of all the children working in the film. Also, records of his work with child actress Margaret O'Brien in 'The Canterville Ghost' are unanimous about the good relationship between both during the filming.
Elsa Lanchester appeared opposite him in several films, including Rembrandt (1936). In 1950, the couple became American citizens.
Laughton is interred in the Forest Lawn, Hollywood Hills Cemetery in Los Angeles, California.
External links
- 1899 births
- 1962 deaths
- American film actors
- American stage actors
- Best Actor Oscar
- Best Actor Oscar Nominee
- English Americans
- English film actors
- English stage actors
- Entertainers who died in their 60s
- Hollywood Walk of Fame
- Naturalized citizens of the United States
- People of Irish descent in Great Britain
- Old Stonyhurst
- Roman Catholic entertainers